Whites are mutant blacks - the evolution of skin color

This was excerpted from one of the most fascinating books I've ever read – Survival of the Sickest by Dr. Sharon Moalen...

Darker skin is an adaptation to protect against the loss of folic acid which is crucial for the health of the fetus during pregnancy. The darker your skin, the less ultraviolet light you absorb.

As humanity was evolving, we probably had pretty light skin underneath a coat of course dark hair. As we lost our hair (around 1.2M years ago), the increased exposure of our skin to ultraviolet rays from the strong African sun threatened our stores of folate we need to produce healthy babies. And that created an evolutionary preference for darker skin, full of light absorbing, folate protecting melanin.

As some population groups moved northward, where sunlight was less frequent and less strong, that dark skin – “designed” to block UVB absorption – worked too well. Now instead of protecting against the loss of folate, it was preventing the creation of Vitamin D. And so the need to maximize the use of available sunlight in order to create sufficient Vitamin D created new evolutionary pressure, this time for lighter skin. Recent scientific sleuthing reported in the prestigious journal Science goes so far as to say that white-skinned people are actually black-skinned mutants who lost the ability to produce significant amounts of eumalin (a version of melanin that produces dark skin).

Research has also determined that there was a near-constant correlation between skin color and sunlight exposure in populations that had remained in the same area for 500 years or more. Interestingly, their research also proposes that we carry sufficient genes within our gene pool to ensure that, within 1,000 years of a population’s migration from one climate to another, it’s descendants would have skin color dark enough to protect folate or light enough to maximize vitamin D production.

Author's website...
http://www.survivalofthesickestthebook.com /

Amazon.com...
http://www.amazon.com/Survival-Sickest-Medical-Maverick...

Article on evolutionary loss of body hair…
http://www.ethiopianreview.com/articles/24536

because they are actually black people!

people with "light skin underneath a coat of course dark hair." And on and on and on . . .

as we cuddled up sleepily on the couch "Why are some people brown?" I told him it was because of the sun. That a long long long time ago there was an original set of humans and that as they had more and more children and they spread across the globe their skin adapted to the different environments found where they settled. That people living in sunny areas had more pigmentation to protect them from the sun while those in colder climates had paler skin. HOnestly, I've been worried that might not be correct. Hope I didn't muck that up. Good to see the internet says it's so....

:)

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Very interesting. I see that this is the same guy (MIT professor Dan Ariely) who wrote Predictably Irrational. I thought some people might recognize that title.

Here's a new Amazon link that works: http://www.amazon.com/Survival-Sickest-Medical-Maverick-Discovers/dp/0060889659

ETA: Sorry, got that wrong. The author is Dr. Sharon Moalem. Ariely did a review on Amazon.

Couldn't it be like "evolved", or "specialized for higher latitudes", or something like that?