Mermaid evolution

In further evidence that we're all part of a computer simulation being run by aliens, but the aliens have gotten tired of even trying to make things plausible and now are just fucking with us, we have: racists arguing that Ariel from The Little Mermaid should be white because real mermaids have light skin.

I know I say "I wish I was making this up" a lot, but merciful heavens above, I really wish I was making this one up.  Sadly, this is the truth.  When it was announced that African American actress Halle Bailey was going to be playing Ariel in the upcoming live-action version, racists throughout the United States took a break from sharpening the tips of their pointy white hats to have a complete meltdown.

In fact, I had a brief encounter with one of them on Twitter a couple of days ago.  She had posted this:

I'm sick of political correctness.  Making Ariel black is ridiculous.  The real Ariel was white and had red hair.

I responded:

Perhaps we should review the definition of real.

She responded with admirable articulateness:

Fuck you asshole.

I followed up with a gif that I have had increasing use for lately:

She responded:

FUCK YOU.

So I guess she told me.

Of course, she's not the only one who feels this way, which I found out when I ran into an article in Indy100 describing how the racists were using science to explain why Ariel should be white.

In case you don't believe me, how about this example of brilliant, peer-reviewed research on real mermaids:

My opinion on why mermaids are white is that they live so deep underwater that sunlight hardly reaches them, thus the lack of melanin.  It doesn't matter what ocean they're from cos they could've been migrating seasonally like fishes.  But maybe im thinking too much.

No, trust me, "thinking too much" is the last thing you'd ever be accused of.

Then there was this sterling piece of logic:

For those saying mermaids don't exist and Ariel being black is not impossible, you know what does exist?  Science. 

Mermaids are part fish.

Fishes live in the sea.

There is no sunlight under the sea.

Therefore, mermaids wouldn't evolve pigmented skin to protect against it!!!

Mermaid evolution.  And no sunlight under the sea.  So everything that lives in the sea is white.

Because science.

Then there was this:

Ariel can't even be black because of science behind it because of her and her ancestors living in water and so they are never exposed to strong sun rays.  the stupidity behind this... 

Which got this response, put better than I possibly could have:

bitch there is literally a singing crab in the movie & u worried about scientific accuracy.  stfu.

For sheer disconnect with reality, however, you can't beat this one:

My children were raised with Ariel.  She's an icon in the eyes of many children & adults of today.  To change her race is absurd.  That would be like someone making a movie about Opra [sic] Winfrey, and hiring a white girl to play Opra.  Opra is an icon.  We wouldn't want to change her.

Besides being an icon, Oprah Winfrey is, unlike Ariel the Mermaid, a real person.  For fuck's sake.

The news isn't all bad, though.  The most touching response to all the howling racists came from Twitter user Morgan Jarrett, @msmorganjarrett:

As a white-skinned redhead, I have very strong feelings about #TheLittleMermaid.  Ariel changed my ginger world.  The mean "jokes" ended.  I became envied for my hair.

And you know what?  I want little black girls to experience that same feeling with new Ariel.

 Beautiful.  Now there's how people should be responding.

So to all the racists who have your knickers in a twist: fine, don't go see the movie.  I don't think Disney's going to miss you.  Go back to your little white caves with your little white friends, confident that the entire universe should be arranged so as to comfort your prejudices.  File under "political correctness" any movement in the United States toward acknowledging the people in the world -- which, by the bye, make up well over 50% of the Earth's population -- who have darker skin than you do.

But know this.  Your numbers are dwindling.  Most of us are just fine with people who don't look like us, talk like us, or dress like us.

And that includes mermaids.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Adam and Eve and Chris Hemsworth

Coming hard on the heels of my post a week ago about how even the blondest, bluest-eyed of us descends from dark-skinned, brown-eyed Africans, we have a group of young-earth creationists who are going through mental gyrations to determine what skin color Adam and Eve had.

I have to admit that it always struck me as odd, even when I was a teenager and fairly naïve about pretty much everything, that Adam and Eve were always pictured as white-skinned Caucasians.  They lived in the Middle East, right?

Antonio Molinari, Adam and Eve (ca. 1700) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the same thing might well be said about a more recent religious figure from the same tradition:

Is it just me, or is Jesus's expression in this portrait saying, "Bitch, please"?

So anyway, maybe it's time for people to recognize that all of the people in the bible were most likely dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and that Jesus probably looked more like Saddam Hussein than he did like Chris Hemsworth.

But anyway.  Now we have a bunch of people twisting themselves into knots to solve the question about Adam and Eve's skin color.  Which is funny from a number of standpoints, the first and foremost of which is that they're wasting time trying to figure out what a couple of people who never existed looked like.

Let's start with Sierra Rayne, over at American Thinker, who says that this is actually an important question for the religious to resolve.  "Within the context of the current war on the Judeo-Christian faith," she writes, "the discussion is far from esoteric, necessitating a consistent interpretation within the community."  She solves the conundrum thusly:

(A)ll of the children from a couple will have skin colors lighter than the darkest parent's skin color.  Tracing this reasoning back to Adam and Eve, it would then suggest that either Adam or Eve had a skin color darker than the darkest human skin color that current exists anywhere on the planet.

I guess if you're starting out from the standpoint that gene mutations never occur, this might have some degree of reason behind it.  But as I point out repeatedly in my Critical Thinking classes, if you're constructing a logical argument, and one of your premises is false, you can prove damn near anything.

Then we have the piece over at Apologetics Press that makes the following bizarre statement:

Thus, starting with any two parents who were heterozygous (i.e., middle-brown in color), extreme racial colors (black and white, to name only two examples) could be produced in such a way that races would have permanently different colors.  Of course, it also is possible to produce a middle-brown race that will have a fixed middle-brown color.  If the original middle-brown parents produce offspring of either AAbb or aaBB, and these offspring marry only others their own color, avoiding intermarriage with those not of their own genetic makeup, their descendants will be a fixed middle-brown color.

And they back it up with a Punnett square, so it must be true:

 Of course, this conveniently ignores the fact that there are way more than two gene loci that control skin color, that genes can mutate, and (of course) human populations evolve through natural selection just like every other species on Earth.

But I suppose that if they want to argue over what Adam and Eve looked like, at least it's less time that they'll have to devote to insisting that the bible be used as a science textbook in public schools.  And after all, in a previous generation, the religious argued over how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, so such silliness is hardly unprecedented.

It'd be nice, however, if they'd realize another principle of critical thinking, namely that you're not supposed to assume your conclusion and then fish around for support for it after the fact.

All in the family

Racists have cast about for years for some sort of scientific basis for their horrible worldview.  Evidence that their race is the superior one in intelligence, physical strength, or vigor, or simply support for their contention that interracial marriages are bad in a biological sense.

Of course, the problem for people who turn to science is that science often provides answers whether you end up liking them or not.  And inquiries into a biological basis for race have shown that any real genetic variations between different ethnic groups are tenuous at best.  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, one of the leading specialists in human population genetics, says:

Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear.  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones. 

From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus… the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection.

Now, let me make it clear that this doesn't mean that there are no differences between racial groups.  It's just that those differences are primarily social and cultural, not biological, which neatly kicks the legs out from underneath some of the racists' primary arguments.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's been known for years that lumping together all dark-skinned Africans as "black" is ignoring the fact that there's more genetic variability on the African continent than there is in the entire rest of the world put together.  The Zulu and the !Kung people of southern Africa, for example, are more distantly related to each other than a typical white American is...

... to a person from Japan.

And just last month, Iain Mathieson of Harvard University punched another hole in racist genetics when he released his research team's findings that the genes for white skin are only about 8,000 years old.

According to Mathieson et al.:

(M)odern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes.  And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin:  They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today... 

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin.  The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

The reason the two light-skin genes took hold in northern latitudes is thought to be vitamin D synthesis -- while having dark skin is an advantage in equatorial regions, from the standpoint of protection from ultraviolet skin damage, dark skin inhibits endogenous vitamin D production in areas with low incident sunlight.  So once the mutations occurred, they spread rapidly, but only in regions at high latitude.  This explains why even distantly-related equatorial groups have dark skin (such as the Bantu and the Australian Aborigines), and even distantly-related high-latitude group have light skin (such as the Swedes and the Inuit).

And apparently the gene for blue eyes is of equally recent vintage.  The earliest genetic evidence for the gene HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes, is in southern Sweden from about 7,700 years ago.  The gene's provenance might date back to 10,000 years ago, but certainly not much before that.

So all of us descend from dark-skinned, brown-eyed people.  Sorry, white supremacists.

Of course, given that there is good evidence that around 70,000 years ago, an eruption of the Toba Volcano in Indonesia caused climate shifts that killed nearly all of our ancestors -- best estimates are that there were only 10,000 humans left on Earth after the bottleneck occurred -- we're all cousins anyway.  After that event, those 10,000-odd survivors can be put into two groups; the ones who left no descendants at all, and the ones who are the ancestors of everyone on Earth.

It'd be nice if we could count on people using science to inform their behavior, but we don't have a very good track record in that regard, do we?  I mean, think about it; we're still pushing the fossil fuel industry as the world warms up and the climate destabilizes around us.  So unfortunately, even when we have direct and incontrovertible evidence that what we're doing isn't reasonable, we usually continue doing it.

And I guess the argument that the genes for white skin are 8,000 years old is going to gain no traction whatsoever with the people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

But still, it'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Just as the first photographs of the Earth taken from the Moon changed a lot of folks' perspective on our place in the universe, it'd be wonderful if research like this could alter us from "those people... they're not like us" to "we're all one family, and we're all in this together."