Imagine the surprise on Kylie Hodgson's face when the midwife during her caesarean section showed her two beautiful baby girls - of different races. Both Kylie and her husband have mixed-race parents, meaning that one girl inherited all-white genes and the other all-black genes, an occurrence with odds of approximately a million to one. Link [Daily Mail]
Imagine the surprise on Kylie Hodgson's face when the midwife during her caesarean section showed her two beautiful baby girls - of different races. Both Kylie and her husband have mixed-race parents, meaning that one girl inherited all-white genes and the other all-black genes, an occurrence with odds of approximately a million to one. Link [Daily Mail]
It's just skin pigmentation.
It still puzzles me, how something as trivial as melanin has caused human beings to hate each other so much.
--TwoDragons
Pwhew... close call, almost got caught on that one.
How else would you describe it?
Anyway... there have been quite a few cases like this one. They pop up in the tabloids every few years and people are awe-struck yet again since they don't remember that they have seen this kind of thing before. It's not common with this much of a difference in appearance, but it's perfectly reasonable. It's a gene lottery after all.
"Humans cannot be subdivided into races...There isn't a single characteristic, trait - or even one gene - that can be used to distinguish all members of one race from all members of another...
Modern humans - all of us - emerged in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Bands of humans began migrating out of Africa only about 70,000 years ago. As we spread across the globe, populations continually bumped into one another and mixed their mates and genes. As a species, we're simply too young and too intermixed to have evolved into separate races or subspecies.
So what about the obvious physical differences we see between people? A closer look helps us understand patterns of human variation:
...most traits - whether skin color, hair texture or blood group - are influenced by separate genes and thus inherited independently one from the other. Having one trait does not necessarily imply the existence of others. Racial profiling is as inaccurate on the genetic level as it is on the New Jersey Turnpike...
Certainly a few gene forms are more common in some populations than others, such as those controlling skin color...but are these markers of "race?" They reflect ancestry, but...that's not the same thing as race..."
*sigh*
Well, I thought it was cool.