Episode 38: Skulls and Skin (Seeing White, Part 8)

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Skin color is historically the locally adaptive trait most commonly considered by European cultures as a “racial trait” in humans. Skin color is an adaptation to the amount of ultraviolet (uv) radiation in the environment: dark skins are adaptive in high uv environments in order to protect from radiation damage that can kill and burn cells and damage DNA if not protected by melanin, and light skins are adaptive in low uv environments in order to make sufficient vitamin D, which requires uv (Hochberg & Templeton, 2010; Jablonski & Chaplin, 2010). The geographical distribution of skin color follows the environmental factor of uv intensity. Skin color differences do not reflect overall genetic divergence. For example, the native peoples with the darkest skins live in tropical Africa and Melanesia. The dark skins of Africans and Melanesians are adaptive to the high uv found in these areas. Because Africans and Melanesians live on opposite sides of the world, they are more highly genetically differentiated than many other human populations (Figure 2) despite their similar skin colors. Europeans, who are geographically intermediate between Africa and Melanesia, are likewise intermediate at the molecular genetic level between Africans and Melanesians, even though Europeans have light skins that are adapted to the low uv environment of Europe. Skin color differences in humans are not a reliable indicator of overall genetic differentiation or evolutionary history. Moreover, skin color varies continuously among humans in a clinal fashion rather than categorical ecotypes (Relethford, 2009). Hence, there is a compelling biological reason to exclude skin color as the racially-defining adaptive trait under the ecotype concept of race.

Alan R. Templeton, “Biological races in humans,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2013. 262–271. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.04.010.

Episode 38: Skulls and Skin (Seeing White, Part 8)

Episode 38: Skulls and Skin (Seeing White, Part 8)

Scene on Radio
2017-05-17

John Biewen, Host and Audio Program Director/Instructor
Center for Documentary Studies
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Skulls in the Samuel Morton Collection, University of Pennsylvania Museum. Photo by John Biewen

Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.

Resources for this episode:

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy Roberts
The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter

Listen to the podcast (00:45:56) here. Download the podcast here.

Tags: Dorothy E. Roberts, Dorothy Roberts, John Biewen, Nell Irvin Painter, Scene on Radio

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2017 at 22:01Z and is filed under Audio, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Episode 38: Skulls and Skin (Seeing White, Part 8)

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