What causes different skin colors?
Well, the fact of the matter is that geneticists don’t know anything about the genes that influence most characteristics of human interest. In fact, we don’t even know where and how many genes there are that influence skin color – which is certainly influenced by genes, we know that. We don’t know how many genes there are. We don’t know where they are. We don’t know anything about genes for schizophrenia or manic depression or dependency on drugs. Nothing. Zero. People keep making claims, and they take them back again. Now why it is that people in these different groups evolved different skin colors is an open question. Nobody knows that. People have tried to tell us stories about it – stories like, well if you live where there’s a lot of sun it’s a good thing to have black skin so you wouldn’t get skin cancer. But that really doesn’t work, because it is true, you’re more likely to get skin cancer if you get a lot of sun and you don’t have dark skin, but that skin cancer doesn’t come o
