If melanocytes do not produce melanin, it results in albinism, a condition characterised by the absence of colour pigment. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
If you don’t see evolution anywhere else, try looking at your navel – or perhaps your thumb, arm or knee. When it comes to evolution, it is important to pay attention to skin colour.
Is this supposed to be a joke? No, it’s the latest Darwinian teaching aid. A recent article in Physorg.com claimed that skin colour is a “handy tool for teaching evolution.”
“The mechanism of evolution can be completely understood from skin color”. This is how Nina Jablonski, professor and head of the Department of Anthropology at Penn State University, advised her colleagues to market Darwinian evolution. She was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Washington last week.
While Darwinists believe that natural selection (in addition to mutations) is the mechanism of evolution, it can only choose from existing genetic material.
Dark skin colour protects people from the sun’s UV radiation, and thus dark-skinned people usually live in the tropics and lighter-skinned ones near the poles.
This has to do with our natural adaptation to our living environment and not at all with evolution. The dispersion of languages at Babel (Genesis 11) explains the phenomenon much better. As the members of the people groups who headed towards the north married within their own group, they began to get light-skinned descendants.
A similar trend was also seen in the people groups who went towards the south. They soon lost the genes that code for dark skin colour.
Even light-skinned people tend to be darker in the summer than in winter. As we spend some time in the sunshine, melanocytes begin to produce melanin that makes our skin darker. All people (except albinos) have this same colour pigment in their skin.
The change is rarely permanent, however. Although descendants of British settlers have lived in Australia for several centuries, they have not become dark skinned under the southern sun.
Using skin colour to market Darwinian evolution is ironic, keeping in mind that in the 1920s at the time of the famous monkey trial at Dayton it was assumed that the white ”race” was superior to all others. In addition, Charles Darwin, for instance, thought that light-skinned people were more evolved than dark-skinned ones.
It is difficult for Darwinian evolution to explain how for instance dark parents could get a completely blond baby.
This is no mystery for the model based on Genesis since all people regardless of their skin colour are related. Most creationists think that Adam and Eve had middle brown skin colour, just like the majority of the world’s population still have.
Source:
Skin color: Handy tool for teaching evolution. Physorg. com (20 February).
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