What explains race? (Earth, genesis, bible, marriage, Christian)

[Ozzie]

What explains race? Why should there be distinct phenotypic skin colour differences in humans? Is it just that we prefer to sleep with and so reproduce with our own kind or is this due to sunlight exposure adaptively selecting indigenous populations closer to the equator to be darker. Lastly, why do Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals more closely resemble Africans in skin colour than Asians?

[Seyorni]

Race is a pretty fluid and subjective idea. Nowadays it's more a political idea then a specific phenotype. What is a "person of color" anyway? Why is someone whose ancestors hailed from south of the Pyrenees a "hispanic," whereas one from south of the Alps is a plain, Italian caucasian?

Actual skin color seems to have little to do with race in the classical sense. Asians aren't really yellow, they're the same hue as me (a white/caucasian). "Red" Indians often have the same complexion as myself as well.
Interesting anthropological trivia: The caucasian 'race' comprises both the lightest (nordic) and darkest (Dravidian) hued individuals.

[michel]

strangely enough, I have never thought to ask the question; nor does there seem to be much on the web about it (for such an obvious question) But, (predictably) this site:-
http://christiananswers.net/q-aig/race-skincolor.html has
As was discussed in Where did the human races come from?, we learned that all humans on earth today are descended from Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives, and before that from Adam and Eve (Genesis 1-11). But today we have many different groups, often called "races," with what seem to be greatly differing features. The most obvious of these is skin color. Many see this as a reason to doubt the Bible's record of history. They believe that the various groups could have arisen only by evolving separately over tens of thousands of years. However, as we shall see, this does not follow from the biological evidence.

Skin Color

We know that skin color is governed by more than one pair of genes. For simplicity, let's assume there are only two, 1 located at positions A and B on the chromosomes. One form of the gene, "M," "says" to make lots of melanin; another form of the gene, 2 "m," says to only make a little melanin. At position A we could have a pair such as MAMA, MAmA, or mAmA 3 which would instruct the skin cells to make a lot, some, or little melanin. Similarly, at position B we could have the gene pairs MBMB, MBmB, or mBmB instructing cells to make a lot, some or little melanin. Thus very dark people could have MAMAMBMB, for example (see figure 1).

Since both the sperm and eggs of such people could only be MAMB, (remember, only one of each A or B pair goes to each sperm or egg) they could only produce children with exactly the same combination of genes as themselves. So the children will all be very dark. Likewise, very light people, with mAmAmBmB, could produce children only like themselves (see figure 2, below).

Let's look at what combinations would result from parents who are the type of brown-skinned person called a mulatto, or MAmAMBmB (the offspring of an MAMAMBMB and mAmAmBmB union, for example; see figure 3, below).

We can do this with a diagram called a "Punnet square" (see figure 4 below).


The left side (of the above table) shows the four different gene combinations possible in the sperm from the father and the top gives the combinations possible in the eggs from the mother (remember that a parent can only pass on one of each pair of genes to each sperm or egg). We locate a particular sperm gene combination and follow the row across to the column below a particular egg gene combination (like finding a location on a street map). The intersection gives the generic makeup of the offspring from that particular sperm and egg union.

For example, an MAmB sperm and an mAMB egg would produce a child with MAmAMBmB, just the same as the parents. The other possibilities mean that five levels of melanin (shades of color) can result in the different offspring of such a mulatto marriage, as roughly indicated by the level of shading in the diagram. If three gene pairs were involved, seven levels of melanin would be possible.
Thus a range of "colors," from very light to very dark, can result in a single sgeneration, beginning with this particular type of mid-brown parents.
If people with MAMAMBMB , who are "pure" black (in the sense of having no genes for lightness at all), were to intermarry and migrate to a place where their offspring could not marry other people of lighter color, all their descendants would be black -- a pure "black line" would result.
If "white" people (mAmAmBmB) were to marry only other whites and migrate to a place where their offspring could not marry darker people, a pure (in the same sense) "white line" would result -- they would have lost the genes needed to produce a large amount of melanin and be black.

see the link for more