Why Skin Color Matters: A Look at the Evolution and Meaning of our Most Visible Trait
Location
Pere Marquette Room, KC
Start Date
13-4-2011 6:00 PM
End Date
13-4-2011 7:00 PM
Abstract
Skin color is one of the most obvious ways in which people vary, and has been used in the past as a basis for classifying people into races. Our research has demonstrated that skin pigmentation is a biological adaptation that regulates the penetration of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) into the skin. Skin pigmentation is an evolutionary compromise between the conflicting demands of protection of the skin against UVR and of production of vitamin D by UVR. This compromise represents one of the best examples of evolution by natural selection acting on the human body. In the history of the genus Homo and of our species, Homo sapiens, skin pigmentation has been a highly labile trait. Similar skin tones have evolved independently numerous times in response to similar environmental conditions and, because of this, skin color is an entirely inappropriate trait for grouping people according to shared ancestry. This lecture will discuss the evolution of the human rainbow, and how our skin color influences our health and social well-being.
Why Skin Color Matters: A Look at the Evolution and Meaning of our Most Visible Trait
Pere Marquette Room, KC
Skin color is one of the most obvious ways in which people vary, and has been used in the past as a basis for classifying people into races. Our research has demonstrated that skin pigmentation is a biological adaptation that regulates the penetration of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) into the skin. Skin pigmentation is an evolutionary compromise between the conflicting demands of protection of the skin against UVR and of production of vitamin D by UVR. This compromise represents one of the best examples of evolution by natural selection acting on the human body. In the history of the genus Homo and of our species, Homo sapiens, skin pigmentation has been a highly labile trait. Similar skin tones have evolved independently numerous times in response to similar environmental conditions and, because of this, skin color is an entirely inappropriate trait for grouping people according to shared ancestry. This lecture will discuss the evolution of the human rainbow, and how our skin color influences our health and social well-being.
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About Nina Jablonski
Nina G. Jablonski is a biological anthropologist and paleobiologist who conducts research on the evolution of adaptations to the environment in humans and our close primate relatives. She is currently Head and Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. Jablonski’s research combines field paleontology with detailed study of fossils in the laboratory, and theoretical work aimed at understanding why some animals survive under changing environmental conditions and others don’t. She is fascinated by problems of evolution that do not have immediate answers in the fossil record. Pursuing studies of the “unseen” aspects of human evolution, most notably, the evolution of human skin and skin color, and the evolution of human communication have absorbed increasing amounts of her time in the last 15 years. Her fieldwork and laboratory studies in paleontology have involved long-term collaborations with scientists in east and south Asia, and in eastern Africa. She conducts at least one season of fieldwork every year, most regularly in southwestern China. Jablonski is a Joint Editor of the Cambridge Series in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology and an Associate Editor of Folia Primatologica. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the California Academy of Sciences, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Advisory Council for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation. In April 2005, she was awarded one of first twelve Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowships (“Guggenheims for race”) for her research on the evolution of human skin color. She was awarded the W.W. Howells Book Award of the American Anthropological Association for 2007 for her book, Skin: A Natural History (University of California Press, 2006). In 2009 she was elected to membership of the American Philosophical Society.