Fish help unlock mystery of our skin color

[mannytheman]

Fish help unlock mystery of our skin color
One gene may play big role in making some fish golden, some people white

By Daniel B. Kane
Science
Updated: 2:00 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2005
Zebrafish zipping around an aquarium have led researchers to a gene that may play an important role in human skin color, an attribute that has served as a basis for

Comments

[problematika]

Cool... but I'm curious what the researchers would say about South Asians, too, e.g. South Indians or Sri Lankans who are pretty "black."

[sparker959]

I think this whole discussion about skin color is silly personally. I don't think skin color has been the "basis for social discrimination through the ages." It currently is and in the past other forms of social discrimination have been used.

[el_j]

There's no way I can be polite about this, but what you think and what is actually the case are two very very different things. What is your definition of "current"? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? You are very dismissive of the impact made by the single most obvious phenotypic difference between human ethnicities (aka races). Of course a whole number of forms of social discrimination are used at any time, but race as inferred from skin colour may be the most notable form-now, and dating back to the Age of Discovery, if I can define "current" as that. Anthropological and biological research that discredits racialist myths is far from silly. You would do well to appreciate the kinds of cruelties one group of people will commit on another group with colour as justification, now and in the past, before writing off the discussion like that.

[chiyo_chan_desu]

......wow.

I wonder how that relates to albinos, though....

....random thought.