Darwin Skin Color

Geographical isolation in the past has caused a variation in skin color; natural selection selected specific skin pigments depending on environmental factors. Early humans who moved to Europe were introduced to a place that had less sunlight than their former place of residence. Overtime, light skin (skin with lower levels of melanin) was selected for since there were not as many UV rays that the skin needed protection from. But, what was wrong with having dark skin in Europe? How is extra melanin a disadvantage in this case? One thing to remember is that even though the sun can provide UV rays, sunlight is also a great source of natural vitamin D (Jablonski; Kirchweger). Vitamin D helps bones absorb calcium and is particularly essential for developing embryos in pregnant women. The adaptation for lighter skin was important because the skin needed to absorb as much sunlight as it could in order to receive optimal amounts of vitamin D (Kirchweger). However, too much vitamin D can be fatal. So as high amounts of melanin protected the skin from excessive UV rays in Africa, they also protected it from excessive vitamin D (Kirchweger).

Chimpanzees have what is called melanin, which is a dark brown pigment that protects them from UV radiation. Melanin is a natural sunscreen, which filters out UV radiation. It is been proven that people with high concentration of melanin in their skin heading to come from tropical areas and it has protected them from skin cancer. After all of this research, Jablonski and Chaplin then ask, “what role melanin might play in human evolution?” (170).

16. Human populations living in areas of intense sunlight tend to be darker skinned because of the

5. In the film, Dr. Jablonski explains that melanin, located in the top layer of human skin, absorbs UV radiation, protecting cells from the damaging effects of UV. Genetics determines the type of melanin (i.e., brown/black eumelanin or red/brown pheomelanin) and the amount of melanin present in an individual’s cells. Based on this information, write a hypothesis for where in the world you would expect to find human populations with

Charles Darwin is becoming one of the most famous scientists of this century. He has a theory that we as humans have evolved from a single celled organism to what we are now after billions of years. He has been studying aps for many years and he says they are extremely similar to humans like in their behavior if treated unfairly they will get mad. They can even do some easy tasks like give a rock to a person and they get food. As said in his famous quote “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

More so that the smaller lizards were more probable to die off despite the the lack of natural selection, but because the larger stronger lizards in certain areas still had more access to food. the particular lizards with longer legs had the advantage because they were able to climb trees to escape storms that came and reach food better which in return wasn’t available to the rest down below. More great examples of this are humans, cheetahs, and peacocks. Evolution is in basic terms the matter of survival and reproduction. It is the process that on a regular basis shapes and molds all of life on our earth. Charles Darwin’s concepts comes down to three principles which include: There must be a difference in the individuals within the population, certain individuals must reproduce at a faster and higher rate than the others, and lastly characteristics that helped them survive must be passed on to there offspring. According to Darwin’s theories people are sexually selected. meaning all of sexual selection is all of natural selection. People preference of one sex affect the evolution of the other sex. for example the better you can dance the better fertile you are and vise versa. Dancing in many species means that the better you can dance the better you are off because the quality of dance is the symbol of being more reproductive. Many of his colleagues at the time were feeling dumb for not

"Privilege" implies the concrete benefits of access to resources and social rewards and the power to shape the norms and values of a society, which whites receive, unconsciously or

What this seemed to mean to Darwin was biological evolution. Organisms better suited to their environment gained some survival advantage and passed their genetically transmitted advantages to their offsprings. Darwin thought that this process was extremely slow and even. In fact, we became aware that it is neither slow nor even: there are examples of a good deal of change in a short period of time; and there are examples of very little change over a long period of time. Nor did Darwin understand the mechanism by which the transmission took place. This was to be figured out by Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan, DeVries and in our own time, Watson and Crick who deduced the spiral shape of the DNA molecule.

Source: Figure obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Graph retrieved 18 October 2009 from http://www.cpc. ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/uv_index/gif_files/uvi_world_f1.gif. This U.S. Government material is not subject to copyright protection within the United States.

The more darkly pigmented skin will be near the equator because there is more UV light there, and the pigment

According to Ansell (2013), race is not real but merely a social construct that has been used to justify the inequalities that are a characteristic of our society. In exemplifying this school of thought, he argues that the difference in people’s skin pigmentation has more to do with their geographical location rather than biological inheritance. In this case, people who live in cooler climates tend to have lighter skins than those who live in warmer climates attributed to the difference in melanin levels that contribute to skin pigmentation. On the basis of this, society has come up with races which are not real.

Darwin wanted to further his studies in plant and animal life, and he also became interested in the similarities of plant and animal species to those of the human species. He noticed that humans too also had to develop new characteristics that would help them adapt to their environments. This made him want to look further into where humans came from and also question the idea of creationism. He argued that men are animals because they have to adapt to their surroundings just as animals do. He suggested that the stronger animals have a better survival chance and they produce offspring that carry this trait. A whole new population of species can derive from these offspring and traits that have evolved from older generations and species. This became known as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

He did not know that DNA does not stay the same and that mutations change DNA. Evolution is discovered by the comparing of genes. Similarly, Darwin did not understand dark matter, a concept still hard to grasp today. Otherwise, one other major contributing point is switches in DNA. “Switches are very powerful parts of D.N.A., because they allow animals to use genes in one place and not another; at one time, and not another” (What Darwin Never Knew). Darwin was born in the 1800’s, whereas it was not until the 1950’s that Watson and Crick began to decipher DNA’s structure. Darwin’s claims still hold true, but DNA takes evolution one step forward. Darwin’s ideology and today’s knowledge of DNA work hand in hand to ensure the development and understanding of evolution.

Melanin has played a significant role in human evolution. In this paper I will discuss the importance of melanin in its role in the human biological system and how it relates to the natural selection of suitable human life according to geography and environment.

We often connect ourselves to the world through our appearances. One of the first characteristics we notice about another human is the color of their skin. It is unavoidable, as the largest organ of the body, it covers and highlights our individual features and forms a protective wall against the elements. There is no escape from the social repercussions our pigmentation causes no matter what range of the very broad spectrum of color we fall into. I have never thought so much about the genetic and social evolution of skin and its properties until I read Nina Jablonski’s Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color. This book encompasses, in great detail, how our skin has evolved, adapted and mutated throughout time and in what