Melanin is a real climatological adaptation. So are burqas.

So humans lost the fur to outcompete other animals through superior evaporative cooling. No big deal because we're all in Africa.

Then we moved north and did not get enough sunlight anymore for metabolic processes. Easy solution, we just turn white.

Now we are both freezing and getting sunburnt at the same time. Evolution sucks, we should have kept the fur.

	▲	jijijijij a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Now we are both freezing and getting sunburnt at the same time. Also, things are changing way faster than adaptation could possibly happen in evolutionary time scales. > Evolution sucks, we should have kept the fur. Some say, we shouldn't have left the trees, even.

trallnag 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	tptacek 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This paper and line of research is famously garbage. It's based both on Richard Lynn's fraudulent numbers (I have a hobby-horse on HN, and it is pointing out that no country-by-country study of "national IQ" has ever been performed --- in this one case, we'll leave "how then did Lynn come to claim that data existed?" as a question for the reader, but it's got some fun answers) and on a handwavy claimed correlation between GDP and IQ (the Koreans would like a word). Nonetheless, once a clever-sounding claim like this hits the message board ecosystem, you never hear the end of it, and it's a favorite argument among a certain cohort of motivated Internet commenter.
	▲	gruez 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		>http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2005.04.002 >correlational study Without trying to adjust for confounders, this study makes as much sense as "heat is bad for GDP".
	▲	djmips 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That doesn't pass the sniff test. Ramanujan had loads of melanin. And I could go on.