I’ve always believed that the notion of race was irrelevant. I was raised by liberal Christians who felt that everybody should be equal, and to this day I take a same-but-different stance. My opinion, honestly, is that there are a lot of adjectives to describe a person. Race is one of them. Gender another. I am apathetic to the sum total of those adjectives. If I was hiring a person for a job, I would base my opinion on those adjectives, looking for the combination that best suited the job in question. Race very rarely comes into this equation, unless the job was something that actually related directly to qualities possessed by a particular race. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one. without really stretching, like pretending I had to hire someone to perform experiments on for a study on sickle cell anemia, a disease that is statistically more common in people who’s ancestors lived in malaria-ridden tropical and sub-tropical climates. But that’s a weak example at best, as race wouldn’t be the issue, presence of sickle cell anemia would be.
But I digress. Clearly, the world is full of people who actually care very deeply about the shade of their flesh, the shape of their face, and all the other myriad traits associated with a given race. And so long as you aren’t a dick about it, I call it no harm no foul. But I do find it strange that people worry about this. Perhaps that’s because I’m a honky, and was raised in a honky part of a honky city.
I had always accepted the argument that skin tone changed so that as we strayed further from the equator, we would lighten and our skin could react differently to the sunlight. It’s a simple answer to a complex question, and one that would appear to make sense on the surface. The darker people’s skin by and large, the more likely they live in tropical and subtropical climates. And when you take someone with light skin and drop them in a tropical or subtropical climate, their skin pigments accordingly.
The problem is there’s no practical way to test this theory. Evolution is a process that takes a whole long time, and reproducing the effect would require a staggering amount of variables be controlled. If you move someone from Africa to Nunavut, they don’t immediately change color. The argument has always been that over the course of centuries, the selection process takes place and that in many lifetimes, a person’s descendants would be noticeably lighter. But that doesn’t make any sense.
Jerry Coyne has just published an article on his web site, Why Evolution Is True, entitled Why Does Skin Color Vary Among Human Populations. The article talks about a paper published that puts forward other possible explanations. The argument that Coyne talks about and that the paper tackles is simple. Changes to skin tone cannot alter our ability to procreate. The diseases associated with sunlight-to-skin issues do not strike children down before they are old enough to reproduce, passing their genes down to their next generation. Short of attraction, there is no way that skin tone’s changes can impact reproducibility.
Race continues to be irrelevant, but now we’re finding new ways of thinking about how and why these differences exist.
Jim
