Perhaps you would be more comfortable if I said, “White people have no significant first line of defense against sunburn and skin cancer.” I am not talking about albinos. I know that white people have some trace of melanin in their skin. I know that some white people tan up rather well in the summer. However, I am talking about white people like myself. Ten minutes in the Sun and we get sunburn. Thirty years later we are on the lookout for malignant melanomas.
I’ve heard that theory before. In fact, I addressed it in my previous post. But I do not know of any evidence that supports it. It seems to be a mere assumption, which is hardly the basis of science.
Sis. Gregorette, I think that it is well accepted that skin color is an adaption to spare the skin from sun damage. Also that humans originated in Africa, so it would be expected that they originally had darker skin than Europeans I read that some one did study and found that there was evidence that those in Northern Europe did go through a change to darker skin.
I also understand that Africans do “tan” and can burn, just like everyone else. Sorry that you burn easily… .
Neanderthals started to move out of Africa about 300,00 years ago, so I don’t know that we can assume they had dark skin. It is possible they moved out of Africa because of rejection by others, but that is just speculation. Something made them move out of Africa!
I am sure that you can appreciate that this is too unspecific to be accepted as scientific evidence.
So where am I going with all of this? I think that white skin is a maladaptive aberration introduced by interbreeding with Neanderthals. [content removed by moderator]
There is the hypothesis that early hominins were hairy and fair-skinned (as chimpanzees are today) and more melanin/dark skin was the adaptation as they became less hairy in equatorial places.
But then with the migration to Northern hemisphere areas, less melanin became more prevalent again, for the vitamin D advantage. It’s not like populations control their evolution saying, “I’d rather have protection against sunburn than vitamin D absorption, please.” And skin cancer later in life does not affect your fitness for reproduction, Vitamin D deficiency does. For people groups like the Inuits that have diets high in vitamin D-rich fatty fish, higher melanin wasn’t a disadvantage. So that is some predictive evidence that the vitamin D hypothesis is explanatory.
It also just reads really weird. It’s ignoring all the data about “diseases of affluence” and how diet and lifestyle, and not just genes, plays into this issue of carncer and heart disease.
I don’t know that Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans were all that sensitive about the term “interbreeding”, but that is what all animals including humans do.
But you were talking about humans today. Humans today are sensitive about using the term breeding to describe having a family. Especially considering the tragic history of eugenics where African slaves were indeed forced to breed for desirable traits, and Nazi Germany where they had their secret super race breeding camps, and the many governments around the world that have done sterilization without consent on minority populations to keep them from “breeding.” You can’t talk about it that way without invoking racist undertones.
Yes, humans do breed and if they did not, human beings would die out. We might invent other terms if that makes everybody feel more comfortable. Let’s say human beings “mate”. Saying something like human beings inter-marry might sound more dignified, but unless they reproduce it’s significance for the continuation of human beings is meaningless.
In your quote of my words you have edited out the clause, “at the societal level”. I did not add that clause to be verbose. In Western society human beings mate because they “fall in love” at the individual level, but at the societal level another force comes into play. This force is typically racist and takes many forms, from outright verbal condemnation to subtle non-verbal cues. I’m an old man now, but as a young man in a very multicultural society I “dated” (that will date me!) many women from different races and ethnic backgrounds. My parents knew that the Christian Faith rejected racism, at least in our denomination, but at one stage my mother said to me in exasperation, “Why don’t you find a girl from your own kind?” There are those kind of tensions which I believe have to be consciously rejected, and that’s what I mean by encouragement at the societal level.
So I don’t mean that every white man and woman should be told to go out and find a mate with brown skin, and every black man and woman should be told to find a mate with white skin. That would take social engineering too far! However, I believe a concerted effort should be made when inter-racial mating seems likely to be very welcoming and encouraging. Some parts of Western society are more individualistic than others, but we should not lose sight of the idea of doing things for the common good.
Well, that may be the case in your society, but I don’t think you should universalize such notions. However, if it would make you feel better, let’s use the terming “mating”.
But can you see that as a woman I resent the idea that my marriageability is dependent on the genes I offer to posterity and not what I bring to the relationship as a person? We aren’t animals, we’re humans.
I thought one of the facts of evolution was that we came from animals. Our whole history is supposedly the history of animals. At what point did our atoms, molecules, genes change from animal to something else.
Please show me in the scripture where that change happened; where man who was formed from millions of years of animal evolution, was changed in a moment and was no longer and animal.
Not to speak of the effect poverty has on disease. There are many different forms of cancer with many factors involved. However, the relationship between exposure to sunshine and skin cancers, including melanomas, is rather well-established. It’s not really weird at all.
Perhaps what appears weird is my argument that white skin is inferior.
What I thought was odd was the way you mentioned marriage and sex should be focused on developing biracial kids and then tie it into another users relationship.
Yes, but that doesn’t make use of some terms more acceptable. Just because it’s a true fact that we are indeed made of atoms doesn’t make it okay to go around referring to people as “things”. And yes, technically we are animals too … but we’re so much more.
Just because people reproduce doesn’t mean that every vulgar term that has culturally developed around the practice suddenly becomes okay to use in polite or civilized company - especially terms that invoke the highly racist history of eugenics that Christy already brought up.
One of the facts of evolution is that we did come from animals and are still in a biological sense members of the animal kingdom.
One of the facts of Christianity is that we bear God’s image and have moral responsibility. When I said “We aren’t animals” I was speaking of our sociology, relationships, and how we form families and interact as humans with minds and wills. I was not denying our biology.
As you well know, Scripture does not speak about evolution since the theory came about in the nineteenth century and was not part of the biblical world. It does, however, have plenty to say about humanity.
What is weird is that you envision this as some kind of anti-racist statement. Racism is really about societal structures, not melanin content or cancer pre-dispositions.
I had a Jewish friend tell me a parable, well not really a parable but an inspired tale about where mankind came from. Here is a shortened form of it.
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
Now according to my Jewish friends inspired story, it always seemed pretty straight forward to me that mankind was never an animal. Hey, but what do I know, my uncle was a monkey:)