I don’t know. How hairy were the first members of the genus homo? At what point did things change from hairy proto humans who may have been light skinned (a lot like chimps) to the relatively hairless animal with dark skin?
I’m don’t like the statement that a default human is female. The mutation that produced pink humans, happened to a human. Until that mutation, humans were brown. But AFAIK, the mutation that turned an X into a Y happened way back in the evolutionary line. Again AFAIK, chromosomal sex determination works the same in all mammals. Therefore, the default mammal is female. There were no humans around when the Y mutation occured.
BTW
I don’t understand the big deal here. I thought for at least the past two decades, it had been accepted that for most of the time humans (members of the genus homo) have been on this planet, everybody had brown skin. I thought it was further accepted that humans who do not have brown skin were the result of a mutation.
I also remember being pissed that a mural of human evolution in Smithsonian Museum Of Natural History, showed earlier species as darkskinned but depicted Homo Sapiens as a white guy.
I won’t name any names (since that might provoke a board war) but it’s worth a few minutes on Google to find a racist website or two and find out what they’re saying about it. It’s good for a chuckle.
“If whites and blacks are the same species, then how comes black people need different heart medicine than white people?”
Some are actually treating the findings as vindication of their beliefs, showing that white people are genetically different from black people. Some are still trying to explain that chimps and humans are as closely related as horses and “donkies”, therefore this isn’t important because black people are a different species anyway.
Some are just abusing the shit out of their ability to use contemptuous smileys.
Wait, wait, wait…white people are genetically different from black people?!? Well, damn. I thought black people just, you know, got a lot of sun.
I mean, it was in the Washington Post article, too:
Why are people evidently shocked–shocked!–that they’ve found a gene for skin color? It would have been pretty amazing if skin color wasn’t genetic, now wouldn’t it? “Ha! Them African-Americans have just been wearing blackface makeup all along! I knew it!”
I could see if they’d found that differences in skin color were somehow the result of different concentrations of some neurotransmitter in the brain, but finding that skin color is governed by a gene that controls the production of melanin does not exactly strike me as something that will shake the Republic to its very color-blind foundations.
I suppose part of the problem is the worry about legitimizing the whole concept of “race”. Now, you and I have no problem with thinking"“Hey, Homo sapiens has a wide range of skin, hair and eye coloration, skin and hair texture and skeletal and soft-tissue morphology.” But you and I know there are yoyos out there who’ll go for the “therefore” that these patterns are caused by something called “race” with all the implications that carries along, specially since the construct of “race” was historically founded upon skin coloration as a primary basis for the classification.
OK. So far, this is consistent with my rudimentary understanding of alleles and the expression of genes. We get a single gene that can be modified by mutation to cause lower melnin production. (I don’t think that should be a surprise to anyone–we’ve known, for more than a couple of weeks, now, that skin color depends on melanin production and it is obvious that large groups of related peoples have different expressions of melanin production.) So now we have one gene that controls (up to ?) 33% of that production. I see that as an interesting fact for the treatment of melanoma, but it still seems to have little to do with much of anything else in the world. It does not seem, for example, that only one group has the gene. Rather, there seems to be a variant of a single gene that all humans possess that has undergone a founder effect in regards to its geogrphic distribution, (not unlike the founder effect of the flipped amino acid in the Y chromosome of North and South American pre-Columbian males).
I suppose that someone needs to do a geographic survey of the mutations, just to get that out of the way. (I wonder which variant is more often expressed in persons of “mixed” ancestry? I suspect that that is still irrelevant, given that 66% of skin color is still derived from other genes and that this gene does nothing to form facial features, height, hair color or texture, or any number of other phenomena.) I would also be curious to see whther this gene could be inserted into a reconstruction of the Rosenberg et al. study published in Science in December 2002,* or whether that study, concentrating on the grouping of gene combinations would be unaffected by this information.
Read literally, does this mean that Serbs, Slovenians, Croatians, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Ukrainians (are they north or east?), Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and others do not have the same mutation despite the fact that several of those groups are as pale faced as any black haired Irishman or blonde Brit?
I can hear my old NOI imam now: “Young brother, we don’t need no stinking white man’s article to prove the righteous teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Peace Be Unto Him) that we’ve been saying for years…! But since you bring it up, I do happen to have a copy of that article on me.” (Pulls twenty Xeroxed copies from his satchel.)
“Blond haired blue eyed Devils” are the result of an evil black genectist named Dr. Yacub who deliberately seperated the black germs from the brown germs and grafted the white germ to the brown germ after destroying the black germ. He then bred lighter skinned blacks with blacks with a propensity for getting the Michael Jackson disease to produce Devil people. As punishment for our hubris in allowing this experiment to get out of control, we’re living in “Jurassic Park.” We’re doing our time for six thousand years, and when the time is right, and Allah forgives us, the righteous, conscious, spiritual, peace-loving, Sun-blessed original black man of America are getting on the mothership and leaving this whole planet altogether so y’all can go on destroying y’selves with racist, capitalistic greed, homosexual lust and pork. Now if they can just keep the crazy-ass niggers behind, too, they can live in a paradise of bean pie desserts, cheeba and divine mathematics.
I can hear my old NOI imam now: “Young brother, we don’t need no stinking white man’s article to prove the righteous teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Peace Be Unto Him) that we’ve been saying for years…! But since you bring it up, I do happen to have a copy of that article on me.” (Pulls twenty Xeroxed copies from his satchel.)
“Blond haired blue eyed Devils” are the result of an evil black genectist named Dr. Yacub who deliberately seperated the black germs from the brown germs and grafted the white germ to the brown germ after destroying the black germ. He then bred lighter skinned blacks with blacks with a propensity for getting the Michael Jackson disease to produce Devil people. As punishment for our hubris in allowing this experiment to get out of control, we’re living in “Jurassic Park.” We’re doing our time for six thousand years, and when the time is right, and Allah forgives us, the righteous, conscious, spiritual, peace-loving, Sun-blessed black peoples of America are getting on the mothership and leaving this whole planet altogether so y’all can go on destroying y’selves with racist, capitalistic greed, homosexual lust and pork. Now if they can just keep the crazy-ass niggers behind, too, they can live in a paradise of bean pie desserts, cheeba and divine mathematics.
