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How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

sciencemag.org

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Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#71
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people can consume cheese and yogurt, but cannot consume raw milk. This is the distinction commonly meant by lactose tolerance (whether it holds up to a technical analysis or not).

I assume you meant raw pasteurized milk. I've seen anecdotal claims that drinking actual raw milk causes an increase in lactose tolerance, the hypothesis being that you lose some beneficial bacteria during the pasteurization process (not to mention various proteins are denatured).

[deleted]

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#72
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people can consume cheese and yogurt, but cannot consume raw milk. This is the distinction commonly meant by lactose tolerance (whether it holds up to a technical analysis or not).

I assume you meant raw pasteurized milk. I've seen anecdotal claims that drinking actual raw milk causes an increase in lactose tolerance, the hypothesis being that you lose some beneficial bacteria during the pasteurization process (not to mention various proteins are denatured).

Yeah, sorry, I forgot that “raw milk” was a thing.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because there is no evidence it happened infact most evidence refutes it and if anything says it happened the other way round http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/how-europeans-m...

So your source is from tabloid news? I look forward to a rebuttal from the Daily Mail.

What is the proof Aryan Invasion. Note the current research says that ANI (Ancestral North India) and ASI (Ancestral South India) both are ancient genetically divergent (same even older ancestry) that recently went through and admixture a 1400-4000 years ago.

That is in that admixture there is no recent central asian genetics other than the one that was already there in India prior, about 12,000 years ago.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3769933/

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#74

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…

>Which presumably correlates in part to the India having experienced a large number of migrations over a fairly long period of time. This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor…

> This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor tens of thousands of years ago.

But presumably an ancestor shared by lots of other peoples too - I would guess European, North African, Middle Eastern, perhaps as well.

> A more sane, and logical argument would be that at different points in time people have immigrated to India, and emigrated out of India. And not just India, through Eurasia people have traded genetics, linguistics, and culture with each other for at least 80,000 years.

Yes, and in interesting ways. But speaking a language and borrowing words from a language are two different things.

I don't see how any of this argues against the linguistic and sociocultural similarities between subsets of early Europeans and subsets of early Indians which point towards shared ancestry for these two subsets.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#75
post #9

So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant, or you die. With dark skin, you can't make enough D from sunlight. If you can't drink milk, you can't get it from diet. Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. Cool.

Naturally, milk only contains trace amounts of vitamin D. I don't think ancient humans were fortifying their milk.

Wouldn’t cheese be concentrating the vitamins in milk, sort of fortifying it in as much as it’s making it easier to consume the amounts of milk you need for vitamin d?

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which presumably correlates in part to the India having experienced a large number of migrations over a fairly long period of time. This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor…

> This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor tens of thousands of years ago. But presumably an ancestor shared by lots of other peoples too - I would guess European, North Afri…

>I don't see how any of this argues against the linguistic and sociocultural similarities between subsets of early Europeans and subsets of early Indians which point towards shared ancestry for these two subsets.

I'm not arguing against the similarities, but arguing against a central singular expansion of some group of peoples that just so coincidently called themselves "Aryan". That is there is no evidence for a singular people/civilization that originated the whole "indo-aryans". The only "Aryans" are the Vedic era nobility that has its roots in India/sanskrit.

That is the word "Aryan" is a gross example of extreme racism, prejudice, and cultural appropriate to further a racist model of human history.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

Not only that but we are talking about a timeframe in which any of our present divisions are totally not fathomable let alone in existence.

I take exception even with your examples. How long has there been an "Italy"? In one sense, since the current state emerged in 1861. In another, Italia would only have meant land south of the Rubicon, excluding northern Italy. In another still, it's probably some Etruscan word with some completely different meaning. (Just a guess, I have not looked it up.)

So when you go all the way back to when Europeans adapted for lighter skin and before... There is no "Italy". Maybe even there isn't any "Europe". I think the people answering my comment with "but it's always been us vs them" are really grasping for some cynicism to make themselves feel superior, because I would ask, who exactly is the us or the them they are talking about? Because no current group existed. It is constantly changing. That is the whole point.

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This meme will end up being the last causality in a long line of poorly written narratives extrapolated from either poor data, or poorly interpreted data. That is we completely ignore a lot of factors. For example both South Indians, and North Indians are from a same divergent ancestor tens of thousands of years ago. But presumably an ancestor shared by lots of other peoples too - I would guess European, North Afri…

>I don't see how any of this argues against the linguistic and sociocultural similarities between subsets of early Europeans and subsets of early Indians which point towards shared ancestry for these two subsets. I'm not arguing against the similarities, but arguing against a central singular expansion of some group of peoples that just so coincidently called themselves "Aryan". That is there is no evidence for a sin…

"Indo-Aryan" is a widely-used technical term for a particular branch of Indo-European (actually, a sub-branch of Indo-Iranian): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages. We could call it "Indic" if that is your preference.

[Racists usurping "Aryan" for a different meaning is not what I'm talking about here, in any shape or form.

Edit to add: Yes, extending 'Aryan' to cover any larger entity than Indo-Iranian is not justified, but "Aryan" is not limited to Indic speakers:--- the Iranians certainly used a form of "Aryan" as well: thus derives the name of "Iran" itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_(word) ]

]

Re: How Europeans evolved white skin (2015)

#80

So vitamin D is the driving factor: either you lose melanin, or become lactose tolerant, or you die. With dark skin, you can't make enough D from sunlight. If you can't drink milk, you can't get it from diet. Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. Cool.

> Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. A (perhaps pedantic) correction: it's more accurate to say that mutants who were pale-skinned milk drinkers were more successful at surviving and proliferating in Northern Europe, and so the population gained this mutation. Natural selection is not a driven process, it doesn't have an objectiv…

This seems like an over-application of the (valid) claim that evolution doesn’t have any specific objective. The sentence you quote doesn’t describe an objective. It only describes a necessity.
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