that this may be why, in humans, individuals with dark skin are less likely to suffer from serious skin diseases.
During the Vietnam War, when American soldiers were slogging through the hot, humid region of the Mekong Delta, white-skinned soldiers were three times more likely to develop tropical ulcers than their black-skinned comrades. So the enhanced capacity of black skin to protect against disease might be an additional reason why people in the tropics developed the capacity to produce more melanin. This might also help to explain why large amounts of melanin are found in areas such as the throat, the nasal passages, and the genitals—areas of the body that are rarely exposed to sunlight. So, rather than correlating with latitude or exposure to the sun, dark skin may be linked to temperature and humidity. But what about those theory-bending Inuit? They still seem to be the exception.
Putting all this information together, the colour of our skin probably results from a combination of various evolutionary responses to sunlight, vitamin D, folate, and the antimicrobial properties of melanin. Skin colour has nothing to do with intelligence, integrity, or temperament, but is determined by a handful of genes. So can racism (based on skin colour, at least) finally be relegated to the past as a shameful and erroneous belief that we, as a species, have finally grown out of? Perhaps eventually it will be taken out of our hands altogether. In 2006, The Age newspaper reported on the predictions of Dr Oliver Curry of the Darwin@LSE research centre at the London School of Economics, who said that by the year 3006, most humans, due to our increasing interconnectedness, will have a similar brown skin tone.
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