Nature's Gifts: Why We Are The Way We Are

Wilmot James is fascinated by science: by the people who do
research, by their results and by the implications of their efforts

for creating a just society. In this book, he discusses ideas, people
and history and does it with elegance, skill and a deep human
sympathy.

– David Baltimore, California Institute of Technology
Wilmot James has produced a book which will appeal to

readers in South Africa and farther afield. The topics dealt with
include the genetics of skin colour; human genetic diseases; the
interaction between the humanities and science and the lives of
two South African intellectuals, Eddie Roux and Eugène Marais.
James writes with flair and style, and emerges as a fine populariser
of science – a science unashamedly rooted in, and of particular
relevance to, southern Africa.
– Trefor Jenkins, University of the Witwatersrand

From genes to geology, medicine to music, bacteria to beauty,
Wilmot James sheds light on a cornucopia of ideas. Skilfully
weaving the personal and the global, the scientific and the political,
his thinking is rooted in South Africa, but with a worldwide
vision. At the core is the triumph of science as enlightenment
and liberation, a potent force for the public good. You will relish
Nature’s Gifts.
– Helena Cronin, London School of Economics.
Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 1 2010/07/13 9:16 AM

Nature’s Gifts
Why we are the way we are
WILMOT JAMES

Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
Copyright © Wilmot James 2010
First published 2010
ISBN 978-1-86814-515-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Edited by Pat Tucker

Cover design by Hybridesign
Book design and layout by Hybrid Creative
Printed and bound by Ultra Litho (Pty) Ltd.

I dedicate this book to the X chromosome so abundant in my life:
my wife Delecia Forbes and daughters Gabriele and Isabella, and
of course, my mother, Shelma James.

Contents
Acknowledgements
viii
1. Of what use are genomes?

1
2. Reading Genes
21
3. Skin Colour
41
4. Blood
61
5. Senses and Sensibilities

81
6. Ways of Learning
101
7. Edward Roux – Communist and Botanist

121
8. Science in the Life of Eugène Marais

141
Notes
162
Bibliography
177
Index
188

Acknowledgements
Nature’s Gifts is based on a series of lectures I gave at the Human
Sciences Research Council (South Africa), Duke University,
California Institute of Technology, University of California at
Berkeley, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, University of Cape Town, University of
the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, University of London,
University of Texas at Brownsville, the Open University at Milton
Keynes and Monash University of Australia. It also draws on the
more than 100 columns I have written for the Cape Times on
science-related issues in the past four years.
I am very grateful to David Baltimore and the Faculty of
the California Institute of Technology’s Humanities and Social
Sciences Division for the invitation to spend the 2003-2004
academic year there as the Moore Visiting Professor, during
which time I started the initial research for this book. Thanks to
Steve Sturdy of the University of Edinburgh’s ESRC Genomics
Policy & Research Forum for a visiting fellowship undertaken
in 2007, during which time I refined some of the work on skin
colour pigmentation. While there it was my privilege to meet
Jonathan Rees, the first person to describe the melanocortin
receptor 1 or MCR1 gene.
Raj Ramesar, Professor and Head of the Division of Human
Genetics at the University of Cape Town, persuaded the university
to appoint me as an Honorary Professor in his division in 2005;
a novel move to have a sociologist based in genetics. It is my
privilege to have Raj as a colleague, someone who shares with
me great enthusiasm for what Edward O Wilson once called
‘consilience’, which is the navigation in search of answers through
the disciplines of science, social science and the humanities.
Raj and I introduced the Darwin Seminars at the University
of Cape Town and we have had four years of developing
Cape Town’s only public forum for presenting innovations in
evolutionary biology, put together so ably by Beryl Eichenberger.

At the University of Pretoria, where I am an Honorary Professor,
Janis Grobbelaar provided a platform for taking the meaning of
genes to sociologists. David Chidester, Trefor Jenkins, Himla
Soodyall, Janis Golding, Nhlanhla Dlamini, Udo Shucklenk,
Heather Sherwin and Roger Trythall, fellow directors at various
times at the Africa Genome Education Institute, were my
sounding boards and advisors.
Neville Alexander, David Baltimore, Koos Bekker, Jo Ann
Chataway, Ampie Coetzee, Cheryl Douglas, Janis Grobbelaar,
Michael Kahn, Trefor Jenkins, Jeffrey Lever, Nicoli Nattrass, Steve
Olsen, Raj Ramesar and Mamphela Ramphele commented on
aspects of the chapters.The publisher’s two anonymous reviewers
made extensive comments, prompting serious surgery to many
of the chapters, and the copy editor, Pat Tucker, recommended
major rewriting and a necessary gutting of some verbose parts
of the manuscript. It made for a much better book. Carryn Smit
helped with the laborious business of the notes. Himla Soodyall
provided the informative maps. Veronica Klipp is a writer’s dream
of a publisher – supportive and caring all along the way.
I am, of course, responsible for any errors.
The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation provided support for
the completion of the manuscript and Naspers’s Ton Vosloo and
Koos Bekker committed funds for the conference on skin colour
variation and biological science leadership in Africa upon which
parts of this book are based.
The ideas I explore in Nature’s Gifts come from a life shared
with my wife, Delecia Forbes, and daughters Gabriele and
Isabella. Biologists will not be surprised by what is contained
here. The curious lay public and those involved in the humanities
and social sciences might be.
Wilmot James
Cape Town
ix

EUROPE A*, D*
H, U, X Z A, C, D
UK T, U, V, W X
Y
Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 11
ASIA G
I, J, K M B
NORTH
N M B AMERICA
A, C, D
L2 L3, M F B
AFRICA M X?
L1
B A, C, D
AUSTRALIA
SOUTH
AMERICA
Human Migration Map Using Mitochondrial DNA
2010/07/13 9:17 AM
3
Skin Colour
Race classification
The release in 2010 of the documentary film Skin, the story
of Sandra Laing, the woman with ‘coloured’ features born to a
‘white’ Afrikaner couple in the 1960s, creates an opportunity
to examine more closely the interaction between genes and the
environment when it comes to pigmentation. These reflections
occur in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa.
I spent some time in the Cape Archives consulting material
on ‘group areas’, apartheid’s system of residential segregation. On
reading through some initial materials it became immediately
apparent that ‘group areas’ could not be understood in isolation
from sex and marriage across the ‘colour line’ and that I was
looking at an historical picture, at the centre of which stood a
government effort led by T E Dönges, apartheid’s first Minister
of the Interior, to apply a programme of population engineering
that built on and refined existing measures to segregate the
country’s population groups. What they tried to create was a
national ‘breeding programme’ for human beings.
In pursuit of this project, Dönges had to create laws to
classify the South African population. He did so by means of
the Population Registration Act of 1950, which divided the
population into four main groups along lines of appearance
and social recognition: Europeans (meaning whites), Asian,
‘coloureds’, and ‘natives’ (meaning blacks).
Nature'sGifts book.indd 41 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

Nature’s gifts
Of course, the designation ‘European’ for the descendants of

immigrants who came largely from the Netherlands, the United
Kingdom, Germany and France was a wistful reclaiming of an
identity lost over time; the use of Asian for the descendants of
indentured workers who came from certain parts of India, a small
part of the Asian sub-continent, was an admission of ignorance
or indifference to areas of origin; ‘coloured’ was a fictional
assembly of individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds living
in one place at a particular time and ‘native’ was later replaced
by ‘Bantu’, disposing an already troubled and misleading term to
the language of offence.
The method of dividing the population in terms of this
nomenclature was based on appearance and social recognition: a
person was white because he or she was ‘obviously’ white unless
proven otherwise by the lack of social recognition by friends or
neighbours. The challenge to Dönges and his cronies was what
to do with those who did not fit in anywhere in particular, or
with those who wanted to alter their classification once it had
been set down, or with the thousands of light-skinned coloured
individuals who very quickly moved into white neighbourhoods
and made white friends before the law was passed.
The task was left to the director of the apartheid government’s
census, Mr Jan Raats. He had to prepare a detailed system of
racial classification in time for the 1951 census, the urgency for
which was not simply the need for a population count but for
government departments to know to whom they ought to pay
state pensions and at what rate.1
Raats came up with the following definitions:
• Asiatic means a person whose parents are or were members

of a race or tribe whose national or ethnical home is Asia,
and shall include a person partly of Asiatic origin living as
an Asiatic family, but shall not include any Jew, Syrian or
Cape Malay.
• Bantu means a person both of whose parents are or were
members of an aboriginal tribe of Africa, and shall include
42

skin colour
a person of mixed race living as a member of the Bantu

community, tribe, kraal or location, but shall not include
any Bushman, Griqua, Hottentot or Koranna.
• Coloured means any person who is not a white person,
Asiatic, Bantu or Cape Malay as defined, and shall include
any Bushmen, Griqua, Hottentot or Koranna.
• A white person means a person both of whose parents are
or were members of a race whose national or ethnical home
is Europe, and shall include any Jew, Syrian or other person
who is in appearance obviously a white person unless and
until the contrary is proven.2
The Population Registration Act required the governor-

general to provide definitions for sub-divisions of coloured
and ‘native’ people.3 These sub-categories would, in time, lead
to the identification of Cape Malays for exclusive residence in
Schotsche Kloof, situated on prime property on Signal Hill. For
the ‘native’ people the consequences were less than beneficial.
In fact, they would prove to be particularly severe – in this sub-
categorisation lay the demographic basis for the ten ‘homelands’,
to which they would, in time, be relegated.
What to do, though, with the classification of marginal cases?
Most of these people – and there were many: close to 100 000
individuals – fell between the definition of whites and that of
coloureds. Raats complained that in his attempt to develop a
rasse-skeidslyn (a line of racial division), the marginal cases
proved to be a ‘geweldige en uiters moelike taak (a formidable and
immensely difficult task)’.
Raats cited the instance of Anthony Jooste, a coloured teacher
in Krugersdorp, whose mother’s death certificate indicated that
she was coloured, but whose father’s race was unknown. Jooste’s
marriage certificate described both him and his wife as coloured,
but her death certificate said she was white. Their three children
were classified as white and attended white schools. ‘They were
therefore accepted as white despite the fact that their descent
was coloured,’ Raats noted.4 To deal with instances such as this,
43

Nature’s gifts
he wanted to know the political terms by which the classification

device could be used to drive populations in given directions.
Raats and his colleagues decided that a rigid racial line
should be drawn around whites as the dominant group and that
‘blood-mixing’ with coloured people should not be allowed to
further verydel (corrupt) the already impure white race. However,
coloured people who looked like whites posed a problem. Many
of them, in anticipation of the passage of the racial laws, rapidly
disappeared into white life and met the legal criteria of both
appearance and social recognition.
Fearing that if members of this group were not allowed into
the ranks of the whites they might, given their high fertility rate,
become a competing white group, Raats stated that it would be
better to classify as white all marginal cases where the individuals
involved looked white. This argument was accepted by Dönges
and, in the 1950s, was used as the rule of thumb, swelling the ranks
of whites overnight. Indeed, if one factors in those who slipped
into the white community before apartheid along with those who
were made white by the stroke of Dönges’s pen, about 10 per cent
of the white population in the early 1950s consisted of ‘coloured’
individuals. Dönges and his state officials planned it that way.
They also agreed that Cape Malays, descendants of Javanese
slaves brought to the Cape by the Jakarta-based Dutch East
India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries, should be protected
as a sub-group of coloured people, partly at their request, and
partly because Dr I D du Plessis, the Commissioner of Coloured
Affairs, was their benefactor.5
Du Plessis had invested a great deal of time developing his
anthropological interests in the Cape Malays and writing about
them and went out of his way to put what he thought was their
case.6 Dönges had come to an understanding with Du Plessis
that Cape Malays would get special and favoured treatment,
which is why the wonderfully located Schotsche Kloof remained
relatively unscathed by group areas removals.
As for coloured people who were neither Malay nor of
sufficiently fair complexion, they were to be nurtured and
44

skin colour
protected so that a strong sense of ‘coloured’ national pride

could emerge. In time they would get their own university, the
University of the Western Cape (UWC) and, hopefully, their
own geographical homeland. The proposed city of Proteaville,
built around the nucleus of what is today referred to as Bellville
South, was considered to be a proto-capital of the coloured
homeland, which is why the council chambers of the dummy-
body Coloured Representative Council were built there and why
the proposed location of UWC was moved from Athlone, where
it was initially intended to be, to Bellville.
Raats came into his own when discussing the Indian
population. He found their cultural distinctiveness, apparent
aloofness and endogamous marriage practices threatening.
Indians, he observed, kept their ‘race pure’, but the men were
promiscuous with coloured and African women, taking no
responsibility for their mixed offspring, who were then absorbed
into either the coloured or African communities.
He recommended that the state deliberately break down their
cohesiveness by classifying the mixed offspring as Indian and not
as coloured or African, as was typically the case. Raats suggested
a process of what he called verkaffering (‘to make kaffir’):
Many bastards are born of parents one of whom is Indian,

and this bastard should go to the Indian community, be
treated as one and live in the same neighbourhood, even
though he might speak Zulu, Sotho or any other language.
These bastards will be the medium of disintegration by
which the solidarity of the Indian will be eroded, and will
turn the Indian into a coloured group with a view of life more
compatible with the conditions of our country.7
This grotesquely perverse man admired the extent to which

dysfunctional coloured communities served white interests.
Raats’s colleagues from the Departments of Justice, Native
Affairs and the Interior found this argument to be far-fetched,
and failed to respond to it.8 In reviewing his recommendations,
45

Nature’s gifts
they suggested that he be given greater investigative powers into

the descent lines of marginal cases (descent was not normally a
criterion for race in the legislation); that the various departments
of state become more consistent in the use of racial classi-
fication and that the 30 000 or so fair-skinned coloured people
be absorbed into the white group.9 Here, then, emerged a picture
of the racial future state officials premeditated – a society divided
along racial lines, with distinct cultural and colour characteristics.
To this end, racial classification defined the races towards
which the officials wanted to move society; sex and intermarriage
laws invoked criminal penalties against those individuals who
broke the emergent rules of colour and race; and group areas
put an end to ‘racial mixing’, as the state officials saw it, by
circumscribing the propinquity of sexually available populations
and minimising points of social and interpersonal contact.
The guiding principle of social apartheid was endogamous
reproduction, which, if it continued for some decades its
designers believed, would result in the emergence of racially
distinct populations. It was ‘racial hygiene’ and ‘population
engineering’ practised on a national scale.
Sandra Laing and genetic inheritance

Many lives were wrecked. The story of Sandra Laing, as told in
Skin, was only one of them but was, perhaps, the most searing
and emblematic.
Laing, born to an Afrikaans-speaking white couple from
the Free State, had a darker skin than her parents and siblings
and her facial features resembled those of members of the
coloured community. She, like many other white South Africans
of European descent, had genes from African and Asian
populations. The problem for her was that it showed and she
stood out like a sore thumb.
As a result, her racial classification was changed and she was
driven from her school. Ultimately, she eloped with a black man
and lived a hard life in black townships. Although her story is
still branded on the conscience of many, hers was not a unique
46

skin colour
tragedy. I knew of a young coloured man, my age at the time,

who fell in love with a white woman, but they were not allowed
to see one another. He committed suicide by throwing himself at
an oncoming train in the Cape suburb of Heathfield.
How did genetic inheritance work in the historical genealogy
of the larger Laing family? Were they part of the ‘passing for
white’ group or among those reclassified by Dönges, or did
matters go much further back? We know that many whites,
including Afrikaners, shared descent lines with other, darker-
skinned South Africans. Genetic material from an ancestor or
ancestors that coded for a darker skin, curlier hair and facial
features such as raised cheekbones came down the Laing
genealogy, some of it by-passing Sandra’s parents, but switched
on in her and her brother.
What is the current state of knowledge about genetic
inheritance that could shed some light on the process?
This is what we know today: differences in human skin
colour are a consequence of the distribution and biochemical
properties of a melanin group of brown, black, yellow and red
pigments found among animals. Melanin is a mixture of light-
absorbing biopolymers, with properties similar to those that
give colour to, for example, synthetically produced nylons or
paints. Pheomelanin contains yellow and red pigments and
eumelanin brown and black. The nature of melanin ‘frustrates
precise chemical description’, writes University of Edinburgh
dermatologist Jonathan Rees.10 Melanin biochemistry is complex
and remains poorly understood.
Early in the first trimester of foetal development, cells called
melanocytes migrate from the neural crest, so named because
it is perched on top of the neural tube, to its destination in the
skin. In her book Skin: A Natural History, Nina G Jablonski
writes of melanocytes as ‘immigrant cells’, which are those ‘that
migrate into the skin from elsewhere in the body during early
development and that retain some ability to move out of the skin
during life’.11 Cell migration patterns have increasingly been
captured by modern digital imaging technology and, given the
47

Nature’s gifts
speed of innovation in this sector, we will increasingly be able

to see in pictorial form processes of cell division and movement.
These immature cells appear to know when to migrate, where
to migrate to, how to recognise their destinies and, of course,
when to stop. To help understand these processes, biologists
have developed the concept of the ‘fate map’, which, as the word
suggests, is a diagram of what becomes of the individual cell
during embryogenesis, a word referring to the maturation of the
embryo among animals (and other organisms). Fate maps are, of
course, under full genetic control.
The destination of melanocytes is that part of the epidermis
just below the surface of the skin as it borders with the deeper skin
layer called the dermis. In mature form the melanocytes possess
dendrites, tiny octopus-like extensions wedged into the skin
layer, and there are thousands of these distributed throughout
our bodies. It is within these mature cells that organelles called
melanosomes produce melanin by way of a pathway that involves
a process called tyrosine metabolism.
Once the melanosomes reach maturity they move and give
colour to the keratinocytes, another cell type we have by the
million and which gives our skin its colour. We could, therefore,
say that the melanosomes are the factories of melanin made for
the benefit of populating the keratinocytes. It is significant in
terms of biological function that the keratinocytes use ultraviolet
B radiation to convert cholesterol into basic vitamin D, which
the liver and then the kidneys progressively convert into the
active form of vitamin D – for here resides the first clue to the
functional biology of skin pigmentation.
To talk about cells ‘knowing’ what to do, when to do it
and when to stop doing it, suggests that they are capable of
communicating with one another and that they are given
instructions by our genes. ‘It is widely understood,’ even among
non-specialists, writes Rees, ‘that human skin color and hair
color are largely under genetic control.’12
Genes are, of course, our instruction manuals. We know of
some (but not all) the genes responsible for encoding the cellular
48

skin colour
machinery that makes melanin. Finding the others is the job

of the scientists. It is of interest to the biomedical community,
and particularly the dermatologists among them, to understand
better genetically inherited disorders of the skin like albinism
and cancer. It is also of interest to the cosmetics and sun-tanning
industries in order for them to make better products, gain more
market share in what is a multi-billion-rand industry, and
perhaps to develop innovations that can biochemically stimulate
a lighter or darker skin.
There are some products on the market that absorb ultraviolet
rays and prevent the sun from darkening our skins, and others
that directly inhibit the production of melanin itself. Genetic
manipulation remains, for now, an abstract possibility.
We know that there are many genes responsible for skin
colour variation, but we do not know how many. Gregory Barsh
notes, for instance, that 100 genes are known to affect mouse
pigmentation.13 Our best guess is that we have anywhere between
5 and 15 candidate loci, with a number of genes at each. A
growing number of skin-colour genes have been discovered and
described, one of them the melanocortin receptor MC1R gene
found on chromosome 16, which is associated with regulating sun
sensitivity (first described by Rees, Tony Thody and Ian Jackson
as the gene for ‘red hair’, or, less flatteringly, the ‘carrot top’).14
Another is the gene that goes by the letter P and is found
on chromosome 15, where mutations or changes in the DNA
sequence have been linked to various forms of albinism; recently
Keith Cheng and his collaborators found a gene, SLC24A5,
which is the human counterpart of a gene found among zebra
fish. This ‘apparently accounts for a significant part of the
difference between African and European skin tones’, Michael
Balter wrote in the magazine Science, as ‘one variant of the gene
seems to have undergone strong natural selection for lighter skin
in Europeans’.15
Cheng presented his findings at the fourth annual meeting
of the Africa Genome Education Institute, noting that ‘lighter
variations of pigmentation in man and golden zebra fish are
49

Nature’s gifts
caused by similar alterations in melanosome morphogenesis’.16

Balter observes that although Cheng’s work does not solve
the question of why fair skin might have been favoured among
Europeans ‘it is consistent with a long-standing but unproven
hypothesis that light skin allows more absorption of sunshine
and so produces more Vitamin D, a trait that would be favored
at less sunny European latitudes’.17 More recently, a study of
2 986 Icelanders and 1 214 Dutch individuals by Patrick Sulem
and his colleagues found five genetic variants to be associated
with eye, hair and skin colour differences among Europeans,
the population that has the greatest phenotypic variety of the
sources of colour in the world.18
From the point of view of functional biology melanin is a
very effective sun-block agent, protecting against the harmful
effects of a certain band of ultraviolet radiation. Rees observed
that ‘[M]elanosomes … tend to produce caps over the nuclei,
shielding the nuclear material from ultra-violet radiation.’19
Advances in understanding the biochemistry of melanin confirm
today what people observed long ago: that individuals living
in equatorial areas tend to have darker skins because of much
higher levels of melanin than those who live closer to the poles.
The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus recorded in the 18th
century the correspondence between geography, sun exposure
and skin colour.20
Skin colour is a form of quantitative variation, something we
all have, but in varying amounts, like skeletal architecture and
bodily frame, for example. Such forms of variation are usually
very sensitive to the environment: nutrition in the case of height
and weight, ultraviolet radiation in the case of skin colour. This
is unlike qualitative forms of variation, a quality you either
have or do not have, like blood group type, for example, which
are environmentally insensitive. The result of what Richard
Lewontin calls ‘joint actions’ and ‘norms of reaction’ of life, the
evolution of skin colour variation involves a causal interplay
between biological actions, environmental factors and human
decisions, though in ways that are not always obvious.21
50

skin colour
Presenting the environmental aspects of the ‘joint actions’

of skin colour evolution, Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin
write that ‘[R]ecent epidemiological and physiological evidence
suggests to us that the worldwide pattern of human skin color is
the product of natural selection acting to regulate the effects of
the sun’s ultraviolet (UV ) radiation on key nutrients crucial to
reproductive success.’22
Scientists initially believed that pigmented skins developed
to protect against skin cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation, but,
as cancer tends to develop after reproductive age it is not the risk
of developing melanomas that drives the evolutionary process.
Therefore, ‘[A]n alternative theory suggests that dark skin
might have evolved primarily to protect against the breakdown
of folate (folic acid), a nutrient essential for fertility and for fetal
development.’23
Jablonski and Chaplin were not the first to make the link
between skin colour variation, the sun’s ultraviolet rays and
vitamin D processing. In their book, Man’s Evolution, published
in 1965, C Loring Brace and M F Ashley Montagu devoted a
full 20 pages to the shaping of human variation that included an
analysis of skin colour, laying the anthropological foundations
for today’s molecular explanations.24
Jablonski and Chaplin built their findings on two earlier
scientific studies: one showing that folate (part of the B vitamin
complex) in the human body breaks down rapidly in experimental
conditions during exposure to intense ultraviolet (UV ) radiation,
especially among lighter-skinned people. Up to half the folate in
blood plasma, tested under experimental conditions, can be lost
in under an hour. The second study to which they refer found
‘that too low folate levels can cause debilitating neural tube
defects (NTDs) in foetuses (the reason why women should take
folic acid before and during pregnancy)’.25 Spina bifida is one of
those neural tube defects.
Jablonski and Chaplin go on to talk about the role of folate in
the synthesis of DNA in cell division. Anything associated with
rapid cell proliferation such as spermatogenesis requires folate,
51

Nature’s gifts
they say. Their hypothesis is that dark skin evolved to ‘protect

the body’s folate stores from destruction’.26
Their conclusion is a combination of anthropology, human
biology and high-technology satellite data. Building on the earlier
mapping exercises of the Italian geographer Renato Basutti,
Jablonski and Chaplin took the global ultraviolet measurements
established for the first time by NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping
Spectrometer between 1978 and 1993 and compared these with
published materials on the global distribution of human skin
colour variation.
They were able to model the distribution of UV radiation on
the earth and relate the satellite data to the amount of ultraviolet
B radiation (UVB) necessary to produce vitamin D. They found
that the earth’s surface could be divided into three vitamin D
zones:
one comprising the tropics, one the sub-tropics and temperate

regions, and the last the circumpolar regions north and south
of about 45 degrees latitude. In the first, the dosage of UVB
throughout the year is high enough for humans to have ample
opportunity to synthesise vitamin D all year. In the second,
at least one month during the year has insufficient UVB
radiation, and in the third area there is not enough UVB on
average during the entire year to prompt vitamin D synthesis.
This distribution could explain why indigenous peoples in
the tropics generally have dark skin, whereas people in the
subtropics and temperate regions are lighter-skinned but
have the ability to tan, and those who live in regions near the
poles tend to be very light skinned and burn easily.27
It is true that Native Americans have a distribution of skin

colour that varies much less than that of others who populate the
continents across the spectrum of ultraviolet radiation zones as
described by Jablonski and Chaplin. Perhaps this is due to their
relatively recent arrival as migrants across what is now known as
the Bering Strait an estimated 13 500-20 000 years ago, when
52

skin colour
the American archaeological record suddenly springs to life.28

Other anomalous examples are the skin colour of the Inuit
populations of Alaska and Northern Canada, who have darker
skins than we would, perhaps, expect. Relatively late settlement
(about 5 000 years ago) and a vitamin D-rich, fish-based diet,
possibly explain this phenomenon.
Lewontin believed that we need to find more systematic
evidence in support of the relationship between vitamin D
and which peoples survived and which did not; who produced
offspring and who did not, that is to say, our survival and fertility
rates. Harshly put, perhaps, but without systematic data on what
he calls ‘survivorship and reproduction’, ‘adaptive reconstruction
of the causes of human differences remains essentially an amusing
pastime, testing our ingenuity as imaginative story-tellers’.29
So, what story can we tell with incomplete data about the
Laing family? There are African versions of the genes that code
for melanin synthesis and these presumably became a part of the
Laing genealogy. To find a precise answer would involve taking
DNA from a multi-generational sample (called a pedigree)
from the Laings and their related families. We do know that, in
general, genes regulating skin colour have ‘throwback’ features
in the inheritance process, and can go back to grandparents,
great-grandparents and further back to ancestors of whom we
often have no memory or photographic record. I was recently
surprised to see a photograph of my wife’s grandmother, who
is as dark as she is, although her mother is much lighter in skin
tone. Genes expressing a certain skin tone often bypass one or
even two generations in the shuffling process that is part of
bisexual heredity.
Colour
The most recent hominid-chimpanzee ancestor probably lived
about 8- to 10-million years ago. Today’s chimps have a pink
skin covered with hair. Perhaps what became the Homo line
also started off with a pink skin. We had the biological ability
to change colour inter-generationally through natural and sex
53

Nature’s gifts
selection (unlike the more sophisticated chameleon and some

amphibians, where skin is camouflage and changes by habitat).
We have to remember that we vary far more and in much
greater detail than the human eye can apprehend. It is entirely
possible that all the Homo lines possessed the adaptive capacity to
evolve skin colour pigments that varied by geophysical location
and ecological niches on the planet, at least to the extent that the
concentration of bodily hair required it. Skin is soft tissue and
does not fossilise, except under highly exceptional circumstances.
It seems as though the hominid line progressively lost bodily
hair as a result of the evolution of heat-dissipating sweat glands.
We do not know what colour their skins actually were. DNA
has been extracted from both our last surviving co-inhabitants,
Homo neanderthalensis (which died out between 24 000 and 30
000 years ago) and Homo floresiensis (which went extinct about
13 000 years ago), but it is uncertain whether one may determine
skin colour from the samples. In the past 100 000 years, modern
Homo sapiens started to migrate out of our African homeland,
probably first turning eastwards and expanding along the coasts
of Arabia and southern Asia towards China and Australia.
Nina Jablonski argues that the original African populations
of modern human beings had a dark skin because of the tropical
environment in which they evolved.30 Those who settled in western
Asia or Arabia may have been the source of the moderns who
started to ‘infiltrate Neanderthal strongholds in Europe, or they
may have derived directly from a second wave from North Africa’.31
Within Africa, some of our ancestors reached the Cape
about 180 000 years ago. The colour of their skin was probably
dark brown, much like that of the remaining San populations
living in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa today. Africa was
largely a continent of brown-skinned peoples until the great
black migration from the Niger-Congo area that started about
1 500 years ago.32
If our ancestors moved on average five miles a year, they were
able to populate the Indian and South East Asian coastlines and,
with primitive maritime technology, reach Australia’s Arnhem
54

skin colour
Land about 55 000 to 60 000 years ago. Their skin colour probably
became as dark as that of today’s living Australian Aboriginal
population.33 Middle Eurasian populations developed lighter-
coloured skins and northern Europeans even more lightly
pigmented ones.
Keith Cheng and his collaborators’ gene SLC24A5 is
associated with the pale skin and gold hair found among
northern European populations. Jonathan Rees’s MCR1 gene is
associated with the red hair and pale freckled skin seen today
in unusual incidence among the Scottish and the Irish. The
movements into the Americas probably started about 20 000
years ago, when a landmass called Beringia connected present-
day Siberia and Alaska.
There were other waves of migrations which resulted in a
permanent pattern of settlement of a people who developed
dark to light-brown skins with a reddish tint, the Far East
Asian populations from whom they descended having an already
established light skin with a yellowish tint. Biochemically, both
are a result of a more dominant pheomelanin activity in melanin
production.34
Some of our more distinctive outward features, determined as
they are by the tiniest fraction of DNA, suggest that groups of
human beings reproduced in relative isolation from one another
for some time; long enough for variations in certain features, like
skin colour, to become more homogeneous. Gene-flow across
populations would have been minimal in those times. Scientists
today believe that the isolation was not so great that it allowed
for races or sub-species to emerge. Also, there is no evidence
that the world’s different populations were a consequence of
crossbreeding with other Homo lines.
Whenever the period of relative isolation began, it ended
about 10 000 years ago, when the first innovations in agriculture
were introduced and populations started to grow. Modern
agriculture and medicine unleashed the explosion in human
populations in the 16th to 17th centuries, initiating a period of
growth and, as a result of today’s travel technologies, a modern
55

Nature’s gifts
period of unprecedented human mobility which erodes national

patterns of sexual selection and, in the age of globalisation, also
those between north and south.
Richard Lewontin wrote,
Countries of the Southern Hemisphere, are contributing

many more genes to the species as a whole than are northern
industrial countries. The consequence will be that the human
species will come, more and more, to have gene frequencies
that at present characterize Africans, South Americans, and
South Asians. As far as anyone knows, this trend will have no
interesting consequence, except that it will make the species
as a whole look less variable but darker in skin color.35
Colour by sight
The final part of the story is about the way we see or apprehend
colour and its role in what Charles Darwin, in The Descent of
Man, called sex selection.36 ‘We think of our eyes as wise seers,’
Diane Ackerman wrote in her Natural History of the Senses, ‘but
all the eye does is gather light.’37 The brain interprets the light-
wave patterns as colour. How much variation in skin colour do
our eyes see? A lot. But not as much, I am sure, as those of an
eagle or owl or cheetah, though there are 32 words in Brazilian
Portuguese for variations in skin colour that the human eye
apprehends in Brazil’s colour-blind democracy!
In fact, we see much more homogeneity than there actually is.
It is possible that, in reality, the variation between human beings
spread across the globe in pre-modern times was much finer and
more nuanced than we may think. We were thinly spread and
had little contact with individuals who were strikingly different
to our eyes. Still, most of our ancestors probably thought their
skin colour was the only one. Travel narratives indicate that
towards the end of the 19th century there were many peoples
who had not yet encountered human beings with a strikingly
different colour from their own. When contact occurred it must
have been a surprise, perhaps even a shock.
56

skin colour
In most species that reproduce bisexually the males and

females have different reproductive strategies due to a difference
in relative investment in producing offspring. The well-known
Bateman principle relevant to this topic is that women have a
variety of social and psychological strategies for sniffing out the
right mates over, typically, a longer or shorter courtship period
and, of course, they may be unsuccessful.
Some studies suggest that, for men, the skin-colour tones of
women can be read as indicating their reproductive health status
and that the common assumption that human beings will use any
marker that is socially available as a basis for discrimination is
mistaken. Skin colour triggers a memory of reproductive success
in particular environmental niches and, culturally, is associated
with mate selection and the aesthetic repertoires of desire and
beauty. To put it simply, a fair-skinned woman became desirable
to men under circumstances – in the ice ages for example –
where such a skin allowed for a life long enough for the women
to bear many children. A fair-skinned woman would have no
such advantage in the tropics, but a dark-skinned woman would,
which is why records indicate that light-skinned women were
seen as unattractive in tropical regions.
Light-brown-skinned women can navigate many more worlds,
which is perhaps why they are seen as the most desirable of all.
Certainly, the sun-tanning and skin-lightening cosmetics industry
depends mightily on the evolutionary history of skin colour
aesthetics and our sense of what is beautiful and what is not.
Karl Grammar and his co-authors provide a useful review of
the field, writing that
beautiful and irresistible features have evolved numerous

times in plants and animals due to sexual selection, and such
preferences and beauty standards provide evidence for the
claim that human beauty and obsession with bodily beauty
are mirrored in analogous traits and tendencies throughout
the plant and animal kingdom.38
57

Nature’s gifts
They continue:
Human beauty standards reflect our evolutionary distant and

recent past and emphasise the role of health assessment in
mate choice as reflected by analyses of the attractiveness of
visual characters of the face and the body, but also of vocal
and olfactory signals.
Skin colour and tone are, therefore, cues to past periods of

reproductive health and fitness.
We are also a violent species and the rape of women,
particularly during and in the aftermath of war, has contributed
to modifying the skin tones of populations. In slave societies,
too, like those of the southern United States and South Africa,
the male promiscuity of the dominant group found its outlet,
and violently so, among the darker-skinned women of the slave
communities.
The problem with redheads

Less than one per cent of the human population has red hair, but
Scotland boasts a 13 per cent incidence. Red hair is regulated
by the recessive MCR1 gene which is carried by 40 per cent
of the Scots and 35 per cent of the Irish. Redheads are also
to be found in Wales, the USA, in Northern and Western
European countries, and in Russia. There are redheads among
the Berber and Kabylie populations of Northern Algeria and
Morocco and in Northern India and Pakistan. Red hair is also
common among the Pushtuns of Iran. As hair and skin colour
work in tandem, Rees established that MCR1 is associated with
a lightly-pigmented skin, sometimes freckled, and with red hair.
The gene produces more pheomelanin chemicals, of the yellow
and red variety.
Scientists are interested in the connections between red hair,
lightly-pigmented skin, pigment-bereft albinism and cancers.
The health issues are serious because redheads burn very easily
as their skins cannot tan. There is also evidence that individuals
58

skin colour
with red hair respond differently to anaesthetics. It seems that

redheads experience certain categories of pain, particularly
thermally induced pain, more powerfully. Their particular
version of the MCR1 gene (called an allele) releases more of the
hormone that stimulates histonal cells as well as stimulating a
brain receptor linked to pain sensitivity.
MCR1, dated as an old gene – 100 000 years – is found in
many species (wolves, for example), located in the same genome
place. Studies suggest that it was kept in the human gene pool
because it is a by-product of a lighter skin that gave its owners an
advantage in environments where sunlight was scarce. Scientific
studies have shown that having a lighter skin prevents rickets
in cold climates and allows for better heat retention. Redheads
find it difficult to live in tropical climates. They should stay away
from the sun and are vulnerable to skin cancer.
There is evidence that red hair is kept out of African gene
pools precisely because it not only confers no advantage but is
positively harmful. It is linked, too, to some secondary diseases.
Kwashiorkor can, for example, turn dark hair red or blond and
one of the many varieties of albinism found among members
of the population of Africa and New Guinea results in red hair
and skin. Like so much else, human characteristics can be both
a blessing and a curse.
Red hair has been associated, mythologically, with hot-
headedness and, in mediaeval times, with evil spirits. Today
it is often a point of insult (being called a ‘carrot top’ is no
compliment) and discrimination. Discrimination against
redheads is listed in the United Kingdom as an example of the
infringement of civil liberties and a jurisprudence has developed
based on some case histories. In this day and age it seems
perverse. Still, if the red-hair story were as perverse as apartheid
there would emerge an organised and society-wide system of
allowing redheads only to marry redheads and have them all
live together in neighbourhoods set aside by law especially for
them. If a redhead was caught having sex with an individual
with throwback non-redhead genes, public embarrassment and
59

Nature’s gifts
criminal penalties would follow. Over the course of time a nation

of redheads would emerge. Sound crazy? That was apartheid
in South Africa; an effort to create an organised society-wide
system of population inbreeding, and it succeeded … up to a
point.
60

Human Tree Of Descent
H V
U5 C
U7 U6 B
U8 R F
Q
E
Z
K 3 Y
U1 D
T
U3 U2 X A
U9 G
U4
W M1 M2
I
N M
L3k
L3a L3x
L3b L3e
L3f L3i
L3c
L3 L3h
L4
L3d L3j L2d
L2e L2c
L6
L2b
L1c4
L1c6
L1c3 L2 L2a
L0a2
L5 L0a3
L0a1
L0k L0a4
L1c2
L1c1 L1 L0b
L1b
L0 L0f
L0d1
L0d3 L0d2
AFRICA
ASIA AND THE AMERICAS The letters and numbers represent particular
lines of descent grouped into categories
EURASIA
called haplotypes.
EUROPE

Nature's Gifts: Why We Are The Way We Are

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Nature's Gifts: Why We Are The Way We Are

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Wilmot James is fascinated by science: by the people who do

research, by their results and by the implications of their efforts

Wilmot James has produced a book which will appeal to

– Trefor Jenkins, University of the Witwatersrand

– Helena Cronin, London School of Economics.

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 1 2010/07/13 9:16 AM

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 3 2010/07/13 9:16 AM

Wits University Press

Copyright © Wilmot James 2010

First published 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

Edited by Pat Tucker

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 4 2010/07/13 9:16 AM

my wife Delecia Forbes and daughters Gabriele and Isabella, and

of course, my mother, Shelma James.

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 5 2010/07/13 9:16 AM

1. Of what use are genomes?

5. Senses and Sensibilities

7. Edward Roux – Communist and Botanist

8. Science in the Life of Eugène Marais

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 7 2010/07/13 9:16 AM

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 8 2010/07/13 9:17 AM

Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 9 2010/07/13 9:17 AM

Human Migration Map Using Mitochondrial DNA

Nature'sGifts book.indd 41 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

Of course, the designation ‘European’ for the descendants of

• Asiatic means a person whose parents are or were members

Nature'sGifts book.indd 42 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

a person of mixed race living as a member of the Bantu

The Population Registration Act required the governor-

Nature'sGifts book.indd 43 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

he wanted to know the political terms by which the classification

Nature'sGifts book.indd 44 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

protected so that a strong sense of ‘coloured’ national pride

Many bastards are born of parents one of whom is Indian,

This grotesquely perverse man admired the extent to which

Nature'sGifts book.indd 45 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

they suggested that he be given greater investigative powers into

Sandra Laing and genetic inheritance

Nature'sGifts book.indd 46 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

tragedy. I knew of a young coloured man, my age at the time,

Nature'sGifts book.indd 47 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

speed of innovation in this sector, we will increasingly be able

Nature'sGifts book.indd 48 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

machinery that makes melanin. Finding the others is the job

Nature'sGifts book.indd 49 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

caused by similar alterations in melanosome morphogenesis’.16

Nature'sGifts book.indd 50 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

Presenting the environmental aspects of the ‘joint actions’

Nature'sGifts book.indd 51 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

they say. Their hypothesis is that dark skin evolved to ‘protect

one comprising the tropics, one the sub-tropics and temperate

It is true that Native Americans have a distribution of skin

Nature'sGifts book.indd 52 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

the American archaeological record suddenly springs to life.28

Nature'sGifts book.indd 53 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

selection (unlike the more sophisticated chameleon and some

Nature'sGifts book.indd 54 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

Nature'sGifts book.indd 55 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

period of unprecedented human mobility which erodes national

Countries of the Southern Hemisphere, are contributing

Nature'sGifts book.indd 56 2010/07/13 3:10 PM

In most species that reproduce bisexually the males and