How Europeans evolved white skin (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#41

Post by defen » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

zeotroph wrote: post #31

defen wrote: post #21

Milk does not naturally contain very much vitamin D, so that's a silly reason to expect lactase persistence to have evolved. A much simpler explanation is that it massively increases the calories available to pastoralist populations. SLC24A5 is an interesting gene - I don't think Vitamin D is the full story. It's an SNP that is alone responsible for 25-40% of skin tone difference between Europeans and West Africans,…

> vitamin D That is the driving force for lighter skin (unless your diet is mostly fish, such as the Inuit). Skin gets darker again when migration towards sunnier climates happens: while UV light is essential for the synthesis of D3, it also destroys folic acid / vitamin B9 [1], which is essential when the neural tube of a fetus is being formed. And since this mutation is so very visible, maybe here sexual selection…

I'm not saying vitamin D isn't involved; I'm just wondering whether it's the whole story. Is this single nucleotide change in SLC24A5 really the only way to decrease melanin production without having other harmful side effects? Naively I would expect lots of ways to have a loss-of-function mutation; why is this one so common? Sexual selection could be a factor, but that is not politically correct to say.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#42

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

primaryobjects wrote: post #13

selimthegrim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Indians and people of Indian descent (myself included) are in fact lactose intolerant, hence the prevalence of cheese and yogurt products.

Cheese and yogurt both have lactose.

Some types of cheese and yogurt have greatly reduced amounts of lactose compared to plain milk. Many people who can't tolerate plain milk can still tolerate some types of cheese and yogurt.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#43

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

drb91 wrote: post #27

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is tricky to untangle, because it's easy to intentionally or unintentionally conflate genetics/race, culture, and language, but at least culturally/linguistically the people of North India are related to the majority of the peoples of Europe. So Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Assamese, Nepali etc. are all Indo-European languages, as are Latin, Greek, Russian, Danish, Icelandi…

Just to be clear, the Indo European migration is presumed to be a trade/culture migration—there’s not a lot (any?) evidence that this resulted in much increased genetic transfer. Furthermore, I was under the impression milk consumption generally spread from the middle east with rudimentary cheese production with rennet, reducing the lactase to an easier to digest level. This might have been after the europeans starte…

We know of quite a number of large scale migrations into India, I don't know why we should doubt that the Indo-European entry into India contributed significant genetic material. I know there are some fairly recent studies on the actual genetic DNA material linking Indians with Europeans, but I'll have to dig these up (the language side is my area; not the genetic side).

The place of milk in especially early north Indian culture (but continuing into today, esp. say in the Punjab) is not like ice cream parlours in China or whatever. It is quite clear that a large percentage of caloric intake would have been from milk products, and seemingly not primarily cheese, but milk/cream and butter/ghee. The prominence of milk products in India for the last few thousand years is not at all in doubt (and, again, not in the sense of eating the occasional ice cream and farting).

No-one is saying that Indo-Aryan was the first language in India, so I don't know where you're bringing that in from. The Dravidian speakers emigrated into India either around the same time or before the Indo-Aryans, and the Munda speakers seem to have been there earlier than either, and it is quite clear that there was at least one other language family well established in India before the Munda speakers entered (quite possible multiple language families) as attested by the large percentage of words of completely unknown origin in languages like Hindi for agriculture/crops, as well as the languages of the Andaman islands.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#44

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #36

drb91 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, the Indo European migration is presumed to be a trade/culture migration—there’s not a lot (any?) evidence that this resulted in much increased genetic transfer. Furthermore, I was under the impression milk consumption generally spread from the middle east with rudimentary cheese production with rennet, reducing the lactase to an easier to digest level. This might have been after the europeans starte…

> Just to be clear, the Indo European migration is presumed to be a trade/culture migration Not the case. You're making the "pots, not people" case, which ancient DNA evidence has thoroughly debunked. Changes in material culture usually do indicate large-scale population movements. Yamnaya remains from the Caucuses, for example, are genetically almost identical to the ones buried in the Corded Ware culture that sprea…

Though, at the same time, some of the overly racialised interpretations of the 19th-century have been shown to be rather off track. There was a picture painted of pale-skinned Sanskrit speakers sweeping into India on chariots and dominating and slaughtering dark-skinned Dravidians (and others). That does not seem well supported. The Indo-Aryan speakers certainly were warlike, but the battles narrated in the Rgveda involved Indo-Aryans on both sides, allied with non-Indo-Aryan speakers on both sides; as well as people with overtly non-Indo-Aryan names sponsoring rituals in the Rgveda. (None of this goes against your primary point. And certainly we know of plenty of militaristic invasions of India in more recent times, including the Mughals.)

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#45

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #29

roywiggins wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, but it's worth saying that contemporary racism is qualitatively quite different from, say, Greek ideas about their own superiority or tribal conflicts generally. It's very nearly a caste system- you can be born next door, speak the same language, eat the same food, think the same way, and you will be treated differently based on racial judgements. That's quite different from "we Hill People hate the…

"It's very nearly a caste system- you can be born next door, speak the same language, eat the same food, think the same way, and you will be treated differently based on racial judgements." Caste systems are nearly as much an anthropological universal (at least for civilizations) as the suspicion of outsiders that the OP mentions. Across the world you can find examples of two neighbours brought up in virtually identi…

One difference from a caste system- foreigners are assigned the same racial categories as locals, whereas if I visited a society with a caste system, I simply wouldn't have a caste, at least not by default. Black Africans in America are considered the same race as black Americans, regardless of sharing absolutely no recent ancestry whatsoever, and white Africans are the same race as white Americans, again without sharing any meaningful recent ancestry. A white Hispanic person will be treated as white (see: Ted Cruz) but a black one will be treated as black, even if they're literally siblings.

Racial categories mean that a white American can feel more common ground with a white Russian than his black American neighbor. American white nationalist fellow-feeling toward Russian nationalists suggests to me that it's not really about suspicion of outsiders. Racial categories cut across borders, ancestry, language, and culture.

Feeling confident that one can judge what category someone is in on sight without seeing their clothes, hearing them speak, learning their name, or knowing their ancestry is maybe not quite unique to modern racial ideas, but it certainly makes it stand out.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#46

Post by asveikau » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #20

asveikau wrote: post #5

People are so hopelessly confused about race. I recently made the mistake of reading Facebook comments on a widely shared public post of an article not unlike this one. And... So many comments attempting to graft our contemporary divisions and yes, racism, onto a story like this. It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like…

You might want to read some introductory anthropology textbooks. For as long as there have been humans it has been us against them. Them/the others/the strangers/the not us are dangerous and cannot be trusted. There are specific rituals that an other must go through to become a part of the community - the means by which one of the others can become one of us. What separates us from them? It might be skin color, it mi…

The people replying this to me don't get what I was saying. It's not worth it to apply a 21st century us or them when the particular us-es and thems in reference have not yet evolved. I would further say that if you look that far back and rather than add perspective you can only see current tensions frozen in time you are petty.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#47

Post by forapurpose » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #20

asveikau wrote: post #5

People are so hopelessly confused about race. I recently made the mistake of reading Facebook comments on a widely shared public post of an article not unlike this one. And... So many comments attempting to graft our contemporary divisions and yes, racism, onto a story like this. It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like…

You might want to read some introductory anthropology textbooks. For as long as there have been humans it has been us against them. Them/the others/the strangers/the not us are dangerous and cannot be trusted. There are specific rituals that an other must go through to become a part of the community - the means by which one of the others can become one of us. What separates us from them? It might be skin color, it mi…

> For as long as there have been humans it has been us against them. Them/the others/the strangers/the not us are dangerous and cannot be trusted.

It's important to add that the definition of 'other' changes. In the U.S., Protestants and Catholics, Italians and Irish used to riot against each other. 'No Irish Need Apply' was appended to job postings. Jews faced significant discrimination.

Sometime around the 1930s, it shifted so that all Protestants became 'white'. Since then, all white-skinned people, including Jews, Mormons, Catholics, became 'white', generally one ethnic group. Nobody seemed to care that Mitt Romney was Mormon; none seem to care or even notice that the US Supreme Court has no Protestants (unless Gorsuch is one).

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#48

Post by forapurpose » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

avtar wrote: post #11

asveikau wrote: post #5

People are so hopelessly confused about race. I recently made the mistake of reading Facebook comments on a widely shared public post of an article not unlike this one. And... So many comments attempting to graft our contemporary divisions and yes, racism, onto a story like this. It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like…

Race, religion, nationalism, social status, me vs. you.. we’ve been at this for ages. Has there really been a point in time where the human collective consciousness hasn’t involved a sense of duality? One supposed exchange from over 2,500 years ago: https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/buddha-talks-brahmin-suprema...

> Has there really been a point in time where the human collective consciousness hasn’t involved a sense of duality?

Of course not, but that's a binary distinction - there 0 'duality' or there is >0 duality. There is a big difference in civil rights, integration, etc. between now and 200 years ago.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#49

Post by amelius » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

Why did we evolve to rely on vitamin D in the first place? It's a hormonal substance, and doesn't carry any energy by itself, so why do we need it so badly?

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#50

Post by vixen99 » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #20

asveikau wrote: post #5

People are so hopelessly confused about race. I recently made the mistake of reading Facebook comments on a widely shared public post of an article not unlike this one. And... So many comments attempting to graft our contemporary divisions and yes, racism, onto a story like this. It's pretty simple to think that so many years ago, the distinctions were simply not there, to the extent where you would have seemed like…

You might want to read some introductory anthropology textbooks. For as long as there have been humans it has been us against them. Them/the others/the strangers/the not us are dangerous and cannot be trusted. There are specific rituals that an other must go through to become a part of the community - the means by which one of the others can become one of us. What separates us from them? It might be skin color, it mi…

If someone's wrong, saying so and why, is preferable to patronizing them.