Darwinbots Forum
General => Off Topic => RANT => Topic started by: PurpleYouko on June 15, 2006, 10:38:19 AM
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I just had a lovely little gem of campus mail today.
It is a routine form which all staff at the university have to fill out every couple of years to record any changes in things like street address, marital status etc.
On one column it shows the current information and in the other column it leaves a space to write in any changes. At the top of the right column it says something like "Please enter any changes so that we can update our records"
Sounds pretty innocuous and normal right?
Possibly not though once you see what kind of records they have on the page.
Section 3 deals with "Ethnicity"
The left column lists me as "White".
The right column has a nice list of options which can be circled to show any changes and a box for comments (labelled "explanation").
For a brief moment I was extremely tempted to circle "Asian" and write in the box "I thought I would spend a couple of years as a Chinese person to see if I like it"
Maybe next year I will become a Hispanic for a while if Chinese doesn't work out for me.
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Explanation: "Turns out I was Asian. Who knew?"
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I usually choose African (not Black) if they have it. 'Whiteness' is a farily recent adaptation in Homo sapians as are the other visual characterisitcs that most people use to define the other terms. My ancestors spent the vast majority of the last 2.5 million years that our Genus has been in existance in Africa (as did yours) and so that choice seems to me to be the most meaningful.
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I'm just pissed that they didn't have an option for "Martian"
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Well, don't worry. We certainly think of you that way.
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'Whiteness' is a farily recent adaptation in Homo sapians...
Is it really? I whould have thought that black and white people evolved at the same time, from a hairy ancestor. Hehe.
I whould have imagined that people who stayed in Africa turned black over time to be better protected from the sun.
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Light skin color is a high-lattitude adpatation which allows more light to enter the skin, helping vitimin D production amoung other things. The consensus view is that it did not evolve until relatively recently and only after Homo sapiens left Africa, which did not happen until about 100k years ago.
The consensus on hairyness is that it can come and go, and may have done so many times over the course of our evolution (which is what you would expect as a pretty useful adpatation to changing climate conditions) but that a good deal of our most recent hair loss predates (by a lot) our ancestors exit out of Africa. Therefor, the consensus is that all our ancestors were dark skinned until recently when they left Africa (for those of us descended from populations which did in fact leave Africa) and light skin only evolved recently as a result of sleection pressure in high-lattitude populations (Northern Europe, Scandanavia).