THE REASON AFRICANS ARE BLACK AND EUROPEANS ARE WHITE!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: lycaeum.org
July 25, 2008

The traditional view as to why groups of peoples have different skin color for sometime has been that different climates produce different environmental pressures that lead to the selection of different skin colors. As it turns out there are other factors that have resulted in more pronounce effects. Namely these are social and sexual selection.

If one considers the fact that the African races are generally significantly older than the European races and that this means that the individuals that make up the population of Africans are less related to each other than are Europeans this sets the stage for differing evolutionary trajectories for the two groups. Specifically, since each African is less related to the other members of his or her gene pool, genes that represent an investment in the self as opposed to an investment in the group will have a greater advantage.

What traits represent an investment in the self and what traits represent an investment in the group? A greater amount of skin pigmentation is something that can be easily demonstrated as an investment in the self that cannot be easily shared. Take for instance the case of two people set a drift on a log or open boat in the Mediterranean. The person with more skin pigmentation is less likely to die of exposure to the sun but there is no way that he or she can share this ability with the other less pigmented person in the boat. Now take for example the trait of intelligence. If stuck on the same boat one person is intelligent enough to devise a way to catch fish the fruits of this can be easily shared with the other person. While there are exception in general physical traits are generally more of an investment in the self while traits related to intelligence are more of an investment in the group.

Having traveled to India and having seen the many people who spend all day working in the open equatorial sun with minimal clothing on it occurred to me to do a survey to find out if any of them had ever gotten a sunburn. As I had suspected none of them ever had. Further skin cancer does not appear to be a big problem on the subcontinent. This led me to the realization that African type skin pigmentation is overkill that has become prevalent in the African population due to sexual selection which has come to dominate the evolutionary process due to the relative lack of genetic relatedness.

Of course in the European population you find people who have so little skin pigmentation as to be less than robustly functional. The reason that European are so lightly pigmented is probably in large part due to social selection that takes the form of a bias towards lighter skin. Why would such a bias come into being and be perpetuated? When the Europeans first branched off from the larger population of human beings that would eventually become modern Africans the original group of European was relatively small. Thus as this population grew larger its members were still relatively closely related to each other which is exactly the kind of genetic environment that would favor genes that represented investments in the group. Overtime with a less sunny climate and less of an advantage to investing in the self the European gene pool could have become both significantly lighter and more group invested. At that point having a bias towards lighter skin could have paid off because acting on this bias worked most of the time.

The significant differences in the relatedness of genetic populations has probably not only manifested itself in terms of skin color but also in terms of other physical characteristics like the size of hair, lips, penises and breasts. Similarly intelligence may not be the only behavioral characteristic that has been effected by this discrepancy in genetic environment. If altruism does have a genetic basis, and I believe it does to a certain extent, then this trait would certainly have been differentially effected.

Before anyone accuses me of racism let me say that it seems that the blond phenotype could very well be a case of a less altruistic and more self invested gene pool arising within a larger more altruistic gene pool. Essentially, to a certain extent, blonds could very well be wolves in sheep's clothing. This could potentially explain the incredibly high rate of schizophrenia in Scandinavia.

[SahanGalbeed]

A little too long a read , but white zimbabweans are TRUE Africans !!