Why are people so different? Why do Asians have the slanty eyes and the yellow skin, and the Africans with the dark dark skin and long fingers? What EXACTLY causes this change in a persons appearence from region to region?
DaneH, do you in any way resemble your parents by any chance? (Just my WAG)
Damnit sailor, you beat me by less than a minute. I’m ure that’s not what he’s asking, but that is what I was answering.
I guess I’ll answer it anyway. Dane, all races of human are derived from various strains of alien indigenous to distant places like Milwaukee. Forget about that evolution nonsense. All ‘new’ races are made in green ‘pods’ by Chronos and sailor, themselves controlled by radio signals from area 51.
Do you mean Chronos and sailor do “IT”.
Shudder!!!
Peace,
mangeorge
Yes. They manufacture illegal aliens. I imagine, from watching the original “Attack of the body snatchers”, it is a pretty gruesome business.
I think it was “Invasion of the body snatchers.” That was a great movie, wasn’t it? Even the remake was good. If those pods had the time, all these racial distinctions like skin color would be moot and we would live in a homogenous world. All of our wonderful diversity would be gone and we wouldn’t have to ask questions like the one raised in the OP.
Ummm a quick attempt to actually answer the question. Two main factors, conditions in various parts of the world are different leading to different traits being selected for. Regions separate. They may start with the same genepool, but as various mutations pop up, the others don’t have access to them, and other traits may die out. Say you have two groups, and you divide them up. If they’re small, maybe blue eyes just disappears from one group, but another group finds them really sexy and all their blue-eyed people have lots of kids, then that group will later be known for blue eyes. For most of human history transportation wasn’t very good and most people didn’t bother to travel anyway, so groups developed mostly separately. As intermarriages between various groups becomes more common you see more people with a mixture of traits from various groups.
Yeah, all of you are morons. Except for surel. And I hate you.
Guys, over here in GQ, we try to actually answer the damn question FIRST, then go for the jokes. You are giving us a bad name.
I guess this would make a good enough opening for a question I was thinking of posting: why do Africans have Caucasian-colored palms and soles? At first I thought it had something to do with the sun and Africa, but their armpits and nether-regions aren’t differently colored, so that eliminates that theory. Any idea why, or is it just another evolutionary trait that no one will ever know?
Just how much checking have your done? And to what degree of certainty? How about potato races?
DaneH, try your question again in five days but check the search function under “races” first.
Jois
I think the OP is legitimate. (OP may also be minor, and if you think every such OP is racist, then soon no one will be asking any questions.)
Why did the first two posters have to make fun of it? It’s like Hawkeye in MASH. One or two funny(?) comebacks is OK, but when every comeback is a stupid joke which may or may not be funny it gets old quickly.
I’d like to see someone answer the OP in 2 paragraphs. As an amateur student of anthropology I can’t.
There’s the standard response about humans living in hotter weather being darker, but that raises more questions can be answered: There’s 2 different types of evolution. Does this mean Californians will become dark in 10,000 years? This doesn’t answer why Eskimos haven’t become “Causcasian” yet, they’ve been North for at least 5000 years and they haven’t started changing yet. But one thing for sure, increased mobility of the human species may be screwing this evolutionary thingy up.
I haven’t yet come across a theory about the distinct races that satisfy me.
Melanin in the skin protects against the Sun’s rays. Because the soles and palms are not exposed to the Sun they do not need melanin. But you’ve raised a question I never thought of until today. Why are their armpits black? Surely, that’s not exposed to the Sun and doesn’t require melanin.
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Why do Asians have the slanty eyes and the yellow skin
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Actually, I think I read that Asians eyes are more horizontal than those of Europeans.
Also, I think I’ll post my question about the palm coloration of Africans as its own thread, seeing as no one seems to be reading this thread.
I don’t think increased transportation screws up evolution, if anything it enhances it. By enlarging the gene pool you give good genes a better chance to spread. When a new helpful mutation pops up it may die out just through bad luck. It needs to become common first. Even if it spreads to a small group, that group could be wiped out in some disaster. But if it spreads then helpful mutations have a better chance of living, and they will slowly (very slowly) replace less their less helpful competition. Another important factor is that several traits can be either helpful or harmful depending on the environment (most genes fall into this category), interminglings gives a mutation a better chance of hitting a group that actually finds it helpful. The larger the gene pool, the more mixed, the safer humans are, because if our environment changes, some new disease pops up, or whatever, we have a better chance of some humans having traits that are adaptive to that change. If those traits don’t exist, then we all lose out. If they popped up and died out before spreading, well that just sucks.
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Africans are not necessarily darker skinned than caucasians. Several groups of peopel native to Africa are no darker skinned than the average Greek or Spaniard. Plus, Indians (those from India) are Caucasians, and many of them are quite dark skinned.
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One cannot think of traits such as these as being “caused,” especially since this language implies that there is some “ideal” human, and that the differences arise after change from this “ideal” image. Some traits are “selected” for by survival pressure, but others are randome mutations that sort of “come along for the ride.” Darker people aren’t darker because the sun is stronger any more than a giraffe has a long neck because it reaches for leaves in trees. Darker skinned people MAY be darker because their darker skinned ancestors survived better in a particular environment. OR, darker ancestors may have randomly split off for any number of reasons, and for reasons of isolation, the trait becomes dominant for an area.
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Beware the desire to rationalize. We say things like “evolutionary pressure” from “sunny areas” cause people living in very sunny areas to be darker. But it ignores the fact that there are just as many cases where it DOESN’T work. Sure, the Swedes and Finns are rather pale, but the Eskimos and Inuits aren’t. Arabic peoples are lighter skinned than say Zulu peoples of Southern Africa, and yet Arabia has MUCH more sunshine than those areas, which have rather temperate climate. So, where it is convenient for us to say “so-and-so people got the way they did because of this reason” we just as often ignore people living in similar conditions where those traits did not develop. A hundred years ago, people commonly explained the skin fold over they eyes of asian peoples as developing due to combat sand in the Gobi desert; people living in deserts in other areas didn’t “develop” these. Why? Because evolution doesn’t work “that way.”