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The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. Evolution and Human LifeIt is equally obvious what good a dark skin does in sunny areas: it protects against sunburn and skin cancer. Whites who spend lots of time outdoors in the sun tend to get skin cancer, and they get it on exposed parts of their body like their head and hands. Does that not all make sense? Yes, but… it is really not so simple at all. To begin with, skin cancer and sunburn cause little debilitation and few deaths. As agents of natural selection, they have an utterly trivial impact compared to infectious diseases of childhood. Hence many other theories have been proposed to explain the supposed pole-to-equator gradient in skin colour. One favourite competing theory notes that the sun's ultraviolet rays promote vitamin D formation in a layer of our skin beneath the main pigmented layer. Thus, people in sunny tropical areas might have evolved dark skin to protect them against the risk of kidney disease caused by too much vitamin D, while people in Scandinavia with its long dark winters evolved pale skins to protect them against the risk of rickets caused by too little vitamin D ...» |
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