Just a thought: Assuming that
- dark skin is a function of melanin content,
- either
- microevolution (here, resulting the separation of a species into various cross-fertile subgroups) includes a “use it or lose it” clause or
- when “birds of a feather flock together” the flocks tend to score more consistently in the Mendelian genetic lottery,
and
- the human race originated somewhere between Tanzania and Iran, spreading out to populate the rest of the planet,
then one can speculate that
- the reason “white” people (pink, actually) have their particular skin color is that
- their ancestors settled in a region that was less battered by the sun, so that the protection afforded by melanin pigmentation was either less necessary or not necessary at all, or
- people of similar skin tone simply sought each other out during the global diaspora.
Which means that
- physically, the one immediately discernible distinction between “white” people and “black” people is not that “black” people lack something. It’s the “whites” who are deficient.
- Certainly in that respect, “white supremacy” has it all bass-ackward. So does anything that hints that lighter-skinned “black” people are to be preferred over darker-skinned. As a pink person, I am deficient in something that my darker-skinned brothers and sisters possess more richly. And they are closer to the original design of humanity than I am.
And finally,
- All those paintings of scenes in and around the Garden of Eden need to be drastically revised in the interest of accuracy. Our first parents should be depicted not in tones of ivory or cream, but of the deepest ebony and obsidian.
I, for one, can hardly wait.
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I was taught that people in northern latitudes developed paler skin in order to maximize vitamin D production. This made paler people in those latitudes healthier. In lower latitudes sunburn and possibly skin cancer made people with the same traits far less healthy. Evolution at work.
Understandable and plausible. But whence came this doctrine? Was it an observation, or is it merely a hypothesis to explain present-day observations? To me it appears, at present, to be the latter. I’d like to see the evidence for it.