Will Humans Eventually All Look Like Brazilians? - Dallas Cowboys Forum

joseephuss · 09-20-2012

http://www.livescience.com/23277-wil...razilians.html

Will Humans Eventually All Look Like Brazilians?

It really happened: Six generations of inbreeding spanning the years 1800 to 1960 caused an isolated population of humans living in the hills of Kentucky to become blue-skinned.

The startlingly blue people, all descendants of a French immigrant named Martin Fugate and still living near his original settlement on the banks of Troublesome Creek when hematologists studied them in the 1960s, turned out to have a rare blood condition called methemoglobinemia. A recessive gene was pairing with itself to change the molecular composition of their blood, making it brown as opposed to red, which tinted their skin blue.

The hematologists' attempt to trace the history of the mutant gene revealed a gnarly Fugate family tree, contorted by many an intermarriage between first cousins, aunts and nephews, and the like over the generations. Dennis Stacy, whose great-great-grandfather on both his mother's and father's sides was the same person — Henley Fugate — offered a simple explanation for the rampant interbreeding: In the old days in eastern Kentucky, Stacy said, "There was no roads."

It sounds sordid at worst and lazy at best, but in fact, the Fugates' tale is a miniature version of the story of human coupling since time immemorial. Local populations interbreed, causing a sharing of genes, a resulting in-group physical resemblance and, eventually, identification as a distinct race or ethnic group.

According to Stephen Stearns, a Yale professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, before the invention of the bicycle, the average distance between the birthplaces of spouses in England was 1 mile (1.6 kilometers). During the latter half of the 19th century, bikes upped the distance men went courting to 30 miles (48 km), on average. Scholars have identified similar patterns in other European countries. Widespread use of bicycles stimulated the grading and paving of roads, lending credence to the Fugate clan's excuse and making way for the introduction of automobiles. Love's horizons have kept expanding ever since.

"The distance between the birthplaces of parents has continued to increase since the invention of the bicycle, making it now easy, if not standard, for parents to have been born on different continents," Stearns told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

Stearns says globalization, immigration, cultural diffusion and the ease of modern travel will gradually homogenize the human population, averaging out more and more people's traits. Because recessive traits depend on two copies of the same gene pairing up in order to get expressed, these traits will express themselves more rarely, and dominant traits will become the norm. In short, blue skin is out. Brown skin is in.

Already in the United States, another recessive trait, blue eyes, has grown far less common. A 2002 study by the epidemiologists Mark Grant and Diane Lauderdale found that only 1 in 6 non-Hispanic white Americans has blue eyes, down from more than half of the U.S. white population being blue-eyed just 100 years ago. [One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes]

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A population forged from the long-term mixing of Africans, Native Americans and Europeans serves as an archetype for the future of humanity, Stearns said: A few centuries from now, we're all going to look like Brazilians.

CanadianCowboysFan · 09-20-2012

I'm all for it.

Thatkidbob · 09-20-2012

I can't wait.

Bad news for the tanning industry though.

dexternjack · 09-20-2012

Quote:

Originally Posted by CanadianCowboysFan

I'm all for it.

I approve this message

Cowboys&LakersFan · 09-20-2012

Quote:

Originally Posted by CanadianCowboysFan

I'm all for it.

I don't appreciate you posting pics of my girlfriend without my consent.

CanadianCowboysFan · 09-20-2012

Alessandra says hello.

JonJon · 09-20-2012

Count me in.

NorthTexan95 · 09-20-2012

I think this article has a much more realistic view of this than others that I've read. I've heard people predict that everyone on the planet will eventually have the same hair, skin, and eye colors and that's just not so.

However, once we are able to easily modify genes of babies in the womb things could really change. Then there's always the issue of when we start to colonize other planets that those populations will change in a completely different way than the population on Earth.