What DNA Says About Aryan Invasion Theory -2

[G.Subramaniam]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2...kin-color/





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The hot blooded evolve faster? (proteins that is) »

SLC24A5 – more than just skin color?



Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking closely at all the skin color related genes in humans which have been studied over the past few years. A little over two years ago the evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi wrote:

We don’t know what the differences are between white skin and black skin, European skin versus African skin. What I mean is we don’t know what the genetic basis of that is. This is actually amazing. I mean, here’s a trait, trivial as it may be, about which wars have been fought, which is one of the great fault lines in society, around which people construct their identities as nothing else. And yet we haven’t the foggiest idea what the genetic basis of this is. It’s amazing. Why is that?

Armand wrote that in the spring of 2005. In December of that year a paper was published in Science, SLC24A5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans. The authors concluded that:

Based on the average pigmentation difference between European-Americans and African-Americans of about 30 melanin units, our results suggest that SLC24A5 explains between 25 and 38% of the European-African difference in skin melanin index.



SLC24A5 is manifested in disjoint polymorphisms in Africans and Europeans. At one location on this gene where almost all Europeans have an adenine, almost all Africans have a guanine