One of the great mysteries in recent human evolution is why did skin colour become lighter as humans migrated North. While it’s obvious why people in warmer climates need dark skin (protects them from the sun), scientists have long been puzzled by why light skin was selected for in cold climates. The tentative hypothesis (that light skin is better at generating vitamin D) has never seemed entirely satisfying, but scientists have gone with it because it was the best hypothesis they had.
HBDers have long believed that light skinned people are more intelligent, but less aggressive and sexually active than dark skinned people. This has long been assumed to be the case because cold climates independently select for both light skin (vitamin D production) and intelligence (survival skills). But what if there were a direct link between intelligence and skin colour itself?
Commenter “Lion of the Judah-sphere” has pointed me to a heated debate between science expert Razib and other HBDers about whether skin colour might be intrinsically related to intelligence, sexuality and aggression. If so, it might suggest that the real reason humans evolved lighter skin as they moved North, was not just because they needed more vitamin D, but because they needed more intelligence, less aggression, and more sexual restraint, and these traits are controlled by the some of the same genetic variants that affect skin colour.
Reviewing the animal literature, scholar J.P. Rushton found that dark skinned lions are more aggressive and sexually active than light skinned lions. Replicating such findings in over 40 species of wild vertebrates, Rushton reported that darker pigmented individuals were not only more aggressive and sexually active, but had larger body mass, greater stress resistance, and more physical activity. So robust is the relationship between colouring and behavioral dominance that it’s even been found in four species of fish, four species of reptiles, one amphibian, and 36 species of birds.
Studies of albinos find that they don’t do any better than normal people on official IQ tests, but they do perform better on tests of reading, spelling, and arithmetic skills, which are correlated with general intelligence (especially reading and arithmetic which are among the most g loaded skills ever studied). One possibility is that albinos are indeed more intelligent, but official IQ tests, with their emphasis on visual-spatial motor abilities, are biased against albinos who typically suffer from very bad vision. The bad vision itself may be additional evidence of the high genetic intelligence of albinos, since myopia is widely believed to be caused by the same genetic variants that cause high IQ, and the popular stereotype of the high IQ nerd who wears glasses appears to be based on genetic reality.
Holy shit ! Nature is even more racist that I thought 😀
Pumpkin why are you less prolific than the others blogger of the hbdsphere ?
Your articles are good but they all looks like and have not a real great scientific quality…
They are lot of banalities and not a lot of precision
You seem more schizophrenic(associated with laziness, dilettante, emotionality in the comments, for exemple when you have threat mugabe when he insult hbdchick) than autistic(hardworking, precision) 🙂
dont take it as an offence for sure, I dont say your blog is shit, it’s still a quiet good blog 🙂
Sorry for the english, I come from Japan 🙂
Hope you will listen to my advices 🙂
Why do your comments lack scientific quality. ..or any other kind of quality?
Why are other HBD commenters better than you ?
Why do you use sock puppets?
Why do you claim to be Japanese when you’re obviously French?
Calm down guys ! 😉
We have an interesting article to talk about
Pumpkin do you have a link to the rushton studies on lions ?
You are obviously taking a simple critic deeply emotionnaly…..
I repete my question (because you are answering by others question) :
– Why are you less prolific than the others blogger of the hbdsphere ?
I’m not prolific because I’m way too busy with work & wedding plans to post every day & because at my level of fame, the audience will wait.
wedding plans?
only prole retards plan for their wedding.
and pp is marrying another woman.
did she tell you that?
wedding ceremonies of any kind are PROLE.
no dress.
no ceremony.
no cake.
just whatever it takes to be formally “wed” or you’re a PROLE MORON.
another reason why albinos may perform better on reading maybe is because they spend a lot of time indoors to avoid the sun and are probably less physically active than the normal population.
I don’t believe any of this. Darker skin doesn’t mean anything to me. If darker skin is indicative everything you say, why is it that the Chinese guys of MIT are shorter, skinnier, less likely to chase girls, and less likely to be sexually active than the White lacrosse players of Podunk State U?
Many Chinese are lighter skinned than whites
some whites.
the lightest skinned people are Irish and Scottish.
In general east asians are darker than nothern european.
Some east asians look lighter than europeans because they usually cover themself of the sun as europeans did before the twentieth century. But now europeans usually like to be tanned.
The lightest east asian population are koreans who have european’s genes and a slightly lower IQ than east chinese. This is also true for japanese(aïnu genes) and mongols.
East asians have in general a greater capacity to get tanned.
Could you guys say what is my type of skin color? here a pic, liked it because is pretty acurate, few flash in the camera which makes my skin look artificially lighter in some pics, you could also guess my race…
http://postimg.org/image/cxs4ja4s3/
Am I white or not????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
One less reader.
Koreans having caucasoid genes more so than Chinese is not even remotely true, given China’s legacy with Muslims and even Euros.
I was talking about EAST chinese.
Read me again.
More evidence nature is racist: Flowers are darker at lower latitudes and “steal” more water.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flowers-are-darker-at-lower-latitudes/
Don’t worry about the haters Pumpkin. Your posts are so interesting that Mugabe feels the need to comment 100 times a day even though he claims to hate you. You must be doing something right.
P.S. You don’t need to be super scientific in your posts. You’re more like a commentator, which is fine; that’s your strength. Although I do recommend that you dial back on the number of comments from Mugabe and his various personas; he’s batshit I believe.
I’m not bothered by the criticism, unless it comes from another celebrity. When it comes from one of my peers, then it stings.
…one a amphibian…
should be one amphibian.
pp’s again being a comedian.
the lightest skinned peoples are NOT NE Asians.
they’re the Irish and the Scots.
and then there’s skin color sans sunlight (mine is typical NW Euro) vs ability to tan.
my brother and dad just burn.
my mom and i turn black.
THAT IS A GENETIC TRAIT!
Pumpkin Person, I just had a sudden realization (but one I think is very important). Okay, actually this realization isn’t so sudden, because I’ve thought about it before: if you changed the font size on this website, you would totally overhaul the perception and experience for the commenters on this blog. Larger font sizes are associated with lower reading comprehension, senility (think Reader’s Digest Large Print), and a lower content to screen ratio. If you made this change, people would respect you more and the reading experience would much improved. Thank you for your consideration.
So you’re saying I should make the font smaller so that my blog’s not subconsciously associated with poor reading comprehension and senility? And then people would subconsciously respect me more?
Yes exactly. The first thing I noticed when I started reading your blog a few months ago was the font size, and how big it was compared to fonts on other blogs (and trust me, I read a shit-ton of blogs, both in and outside of the HBD-sphere. I spend more time reading blogs than actually doing work.) Smaller fonts make the reader concentrate harder and they make the blog look less like a children’s book, or something written for people with bad eyesight.
Larger fonts are considered prole. Blogs with large fonts like yours indicate proleness, yet verbose blogs with small fonts and copious amount of material from external sources are also prole, such as that of Jayman’s.
There are african tribes who are more pacific than or as ‘europeans’ and east asians. ( i don’t know the name of this tribe but it’s in extinction danger and they looking to have fair skin compared with bantu). The correlaction between skin color and agressive seems a combination of real pleitropic tendencies with NATURAL or unconscious selection. In darker skinned populations, higher proportion of “alphas” inhibit a lot the reproduction of cooperative ones. I think a isolated dark skinned pop and without the alpha plague, can envolved to cooperative type society. In a natural environment, alphas dark skinned dominate socially like in primate societies.
Other possibility is about the interaction between skin ( human and non-human) and sun Light!! Black shirt heat more… Lol.
your forgetting the melatonin pathway which among other things influences skin color and aggression .the precursor of melatonin is serotonin. .Low serotonin may be associated with aggressive behavior. the greater the amount of melanin (dark skin) the likely lower amount of serotonin.
What about intelligence ?
Peter Frost points out that light skin is attractive in every race and is ultimately more attractive in general than dark skin.
Only for women.
For men, skin color seems to be almost irrelevant for attractiveness.
Geeks tend to spend a lot of time staring at computer screens or books. I always thought that was the reason for their myopia.
Myopia is genetic
Skimos don’t had myopia when they live into the ”wild”. Myopia, seems, is not genetic as color eyes.
As melanocortins bind to five MCRs located in many
tissues and involved in a wide range of physiological and
behavioural functions, they can account for the widespread
association between melanin-based coloration and other
phenotypic traits in wild vertebrates (Table 2). On the
basis of the available experimental genetic and pharma-
cological studies (Table 1), we derived predictions on how
melanin-based coloration might covary with five categories
of traits including sexual behaviour, aggressiveness and
exocrine gland activity, HPA stress response, immune
function and energy homeostasis. These predictions hold
only when variation in melanin-based coloration is
mediated by variation in the level of the agonists at
MC1R and the levels of melanocortins are coordinated
across tissues (Box 1). By contrast, there should be no
consistent association between melanin-based coloration
and other phenotypic traits when variation in coloration is
due to mutations at effectors of melanogenesis such as
MC1R, which is the case in half of the studied species
(Supplementary Table S3). In this respect, it is important
to note that variation in melanin-based coloration between
human populations is primarily due to mutations at, for
example, MC1R, TYR, MATP and SLC24A5 [29,30] and
that human populations are therefore not expected to
consistently exhibit the associations between melanin-
based coloration and the physiological and behavioural
traits reported in our study.
Trends Ecol Evol. 2008 Sep;23(9):502-10. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2008.06.001. Epub 2008 Jul 19.
Pleiotropy in the melanocortin system, coloration and behavioural syndromes.
Ducrest AL1, Keller L, Roulin A.
PP if you have any understanding of vitamin D (a steroid hormone, not an actual vitamin) then you’d see that light skin evolved since you can better synthesize vitamin D with lighter skin.
Source: me. Specific training in these areas.
One more thing.
Notice how less aggressive peoples live in more northerly climes like you brought up. That’s why the two are correlated. Less sun means lighter skin, less sun means colder weather which means you need to be less aggressive and more cooperative. That’s why the two are related.