Quote by babyLemonI think,
instead of disease, it's more because of adaptation. Take skin colour, for example. As people migrated out from
Africa to... say, Europe, the production of melanin will no longer be required, as they don't really have that much
sunlight there. Therefore, melanin produced will no longer be delivered up to the skin to become eumelanin. This, in
turn, will result in a much fairer skin. As melanin is not intensely needed anymore, your body will adjust to produce
fewer of it so that the resource can be used somewhere else.
Same thing with facial features. The fact that in Europe, the weather are much drier and colder requires the nose to be
narrower so that they can retain more moisture to keep the inside of the nose moist and un-chapped. This, in turn, force
the change of the shape of the nose.
As for Michael Jackson... Hmmm... well... first of all, I am not sure how credible the sources are. That is what he
claims, and he can claim all he wants. I guess, hmmm... when you look at it, vitiligo should make your skin patchy, and
on top of that, there's NO way that a black person could become THAT white. Well... that's all I am going to
say about michael jackson.
Please keep in mind that I am not a doctor, and that this is just my opinion about what happened.
The body isn't forced to change itself because of the environment, and the body doesn't adjust to the
environment in any way. Of course, what we see today has to do with the environment, I'm not saying that the
environment didn't have anything to do with it at all.
A cause to a much lighter skin colour in Europe compared to those in Africa is most likely because of a mutation in the
genes. In other words, an allele was created of the same gene. In the case of migration to Europe, dark skin colour
wasn't needed anymore and therefore a person with a mutation, which coded for lighter skin colour, could survive
(s/he did not adjust to the new environment, the mutation simply didn't kill the person). And in turn s/he could
pass it on to the next generation. If the same person got the mutation while still in Africa, then s/he would probably
not live long enough to reproduce and the mutation would at that moment die with the owner.
This can be compared to why there are so many species in the world. A wolf isn't in this world to keep the
rabbit-population down, and the rabbit isn't here to prevent the weeds from overgrowing. They're here because
they're able to survive. And if they're able to survive, something must've gone right, and because
they're able to survive, they're also able to reproduce, passing on the genes to their offspring.
To sum it all, the keyword is survival. ^^
