Darwin meets NASA

2 responses to “Darwin meets NASA”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Jan 24, 2010 at 11:07 pm

   

   Quotes from Nina Jablonski’s TED Talk:

   “If only Darwin lived today. If only Darwin had NASA.

   And what Darwin could not appreciate, or didn’t perhaps want to appreciate at the time, is that there was a fundamental relationship between the intensity of ultraviolet radiation and skin pigmentation. And that skin pigmentation itself was a product of evolution. And so when we look at a map of skin color, and predicted skin color, as we know it today, what we see is a beautiful gradient from the darkest skin pigmentations toward the equator, and the lightest ones toward the poles.

   What’s very very important here is that the earliest humans evolved in high UV environments, in equatorial Africa.

   But then we moved. And humans dispersed, not once, but twice. Major moves, outside of our equatorial homeland, from Africa, into other parts of the old world, and most recently, into the New World.

   Here we begin to see the evolution of the beautiful sepia rainbow that now characterizes all of humanity. Lightly pigmented skin evolved not just once, not just twice, but probably three times.

   Often we’re unaware of the fact that we’re living in environments in which our skin is inherently poorly adapted. Some of us with lightly pigmented skin live in high UV areas. Some of us with darkly pigmented skin live in low UV areas. These have tremendous consequences for our health.

   Take your skin color, and celebrate it. You have the evolution of the history of our species, part of it, written in your skin.”

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2. 

   Josh Thompson

   Jan 26, 2010 at 8:52 pm

   This is a nice presentation, but what would be much more informative is to make a scatter plot of the value from one plot versus the value from the other plot, for an array of points around the world. Then you could see the functional relationship.

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