I am presuming, if we all 'came out of Africa', that white people have white skin as an evolutionary result of moving in to less sunny, cooler climates...so why do white people also have sharper facila features; what's the point in that?
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The facial features of Caucasians are likely not so much an adaptive trait as they are either a linked trait, or due to genetic drift and the founder's effect.\n\nIf the population of Homo sapiens that initially settled in Europe had a larger than normal proportion of people with 'fine' facial features, these proportions may have been preserved through subsequent generations.  Much the same thing can be seen in isolated areas (such as many islands) where the inbred cat population has a higher than normal incidence of polydactyly (six or more toes).  It's not an adaptive trait, but in the absence of selective pressure/competition and no influx of more dominant genes, the trait survives.\n\nIf the trait was linked to traits that were adaptive (i.e. pale skin that serves to increase Vitamin D production), then the fine facial features would be selected for through natural selection.  Not directly, but because the fair skinned people also happen to have fine facial features.\n\nSo there may not be a 'point' to European facial features, they are simply a legacy of the history of the genes of that region.
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neither africa nor asia are racially homogenous.  look at the vast differences between indians, arabs, and chinese in asia and pygmys, berbers, and black africans in africa.  there is huge variation.\n\nrace is not genetically significant.  people from the same race often show more genetic differences amongst themselves than they do with other races.  its just that we see skin and hair color predominantly and make the false assumption that these must be important indicators of genetics.  i don't know what caused differing hair and eye colors to evolve, but i am certain that these are very superficial traits which actually would have virtually nothing to do with whether the people are racially or genetically homogenous.
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I think what you meant by your statement about how "white ppl can be so blind" is not that you are calling all white people racist, but rather, you are wondering why white people seem to have a harder time seeing the consequences of racism or identifying their own racism.\n\nI think everyone is racist to some degree.  From my experience, there are two groups who admit it: \n\nThe first are those that are KKK-like extremists.  They admit to it, encourage it, and try to covert people to their belief system.\n\nThe second are people who try to not be racist, but were socialized or conditioned to see differences and attribute generalizations to people possessing those differences.\n\nI find the latter group - people who acknowledge their racism, are embarrassed by it and are trying to overcome it -- to generally be less racist than those who say "I am not racist."  Everyone who I have ever met that said "I am not a racist", I have found to be just that!\n\nTo those that say they are not racist, who do they want to find in a life partner?  Do you have requirements when it comes to specific race, gender, socio economic level, religion, body type, national origin or cultural heritage?  Don't lie.  eveyone does.  Well, that can be construed as racist, homophobic, classist, ethnophobic, etc.  We are all guilty. Admit it.\n\nYes, racism is in almost every skin color - but it's not necessarily racism based on skin color... it is bigtory based on any difference.  It Ruwanda it wasn't white people committing genocide, it was between the Tutsis and the Hutus.  In Germany, it was Aryan people against mostly other Caucasians.  In Germany it is now against the Turks.  In the catholic church it is against the homosexuals - not a race, but a difference in sexual orientation.  In the gay community there is bigotry against Transgendered people.  \n\nBasically, the real issue is not whether Latinos are racist against white people (which for some reason comes up all the time here at Yahoo Answers), but whether people in power and/or with authority are bigoted against a group with less power and/or authority.\n\nThink about it: What has a greater effect?  We have 2 imaginary men: The Senator from North Carolina and a Dishwasher from the local Olive Garden (I am making this up as an example... I don't know anything about the Senator from North Carolina, and I really hate the Olive Garden).  Both think that women don't belong in the workforce.  So, obviously in this scenario, both are sexist.  But, who really cares if the dishwasher is sexist?  What impact does that have on society?  That is not going to impact me, or anyone else for that matter outside of his family.  On the otherhand, if someone who has authority, who can make decisions that impact my life, that can create laws, that has more authority than I do, hates me for my gender, race, creed, weight, or sexual orientation, that is where it become an issue.  \n\nSo, to answer your question, because Caucasians are in a position of power in the United States, they do not directly feel the effects of racism.  They do hear it when it's blatant: when the KKK burns a cross on a lawn or when the Mayor of New Orleans uses the term Chocolate to describe his city, but they don't notice that standardized test questions are targeted toward the white middle class experience.  Math questions about the speed of two roller coaster cars don't make as much sense to someone who has never seen an amusement park.  A rat to a wealthy child might be a pet or a test subject - an animal that can be touched.  A rat to a poor child is more likely viewed as a bearer of disease, a pest.  When test writers don't take these differences into account when writing questions, it is subtle racism and classism that favors those who are of their status. My favorite example is Coco, the gorilla that knew sign language, got an answer wrong on an IQ test because she poi
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cute question, shows good off the wall thinking, keep asking more, some people will think your just being a smart ass but I like the question.  \nP.S.\nIs someone from Egypt that now lives in America and African-American after all Egypt is wholly a part of Africa yet many are more Caucasian in appearance?
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Black people are generally taller, with longer legs, a leaner body frame, and larger nostrils for breathing in more air.  These are environmental adaptations from eons of living in Africa.  A lot of those features are still there today.  These features allow them to run faster than Whites.  Is this true for all? NO. Just a generalization of supported scientific facts.\n\nAs forthe three point shots, well, that's just opinion.
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White (also White people, White race or Whites) is a term used for a certain ethnic group or racial classification of people. Though literally implying light-skinned, "White" has been used in different ways at different times and places. Like other common words for the human ethnicities, its precise definition is somewhat unclear.\n\nA common connotation to the various definitions of "White" is that the term refers to people descended from European and adjacent areas, such as North Africa and the Middle East. Regions and countries that are today predominantly light skinned include all the countries of Europe, the Middle East, North America, parts of South America, Siberia, Australia and New Zealand.\n\nThe most recent United States Census (2000) defined the 'White' race as follows: "The term White refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa." It includes people who indicated their race or races as "White" or wrote in entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese, or Polish."\n\nThe term has always had various definitions and interpretations at different times and places. Across the globe, and especially throughout the Western Hemisphere, a person's inclusion or exclusion from the the "White" group has been affected by past or present colloquial, scientific and legal understandings, including definitions based for such purposes as censuses, anti-miscegenation laws, affirmative action, racial quotas. All these, and the groups they involve, are explored throughout the article.\n\nThe need for operational definitions\n\nLike aesthetic terms such as beauty and balance, religious terms such as sin and grace, and political terms such as liberal and conservative, the terms White and Black reflect something important in the minds of those who use them, even if they cannot be defined objectively so that their application can be independently tested. The claim that any specific individual is Black or White cannot be falsified, so the concept can have no scientific value unless some operational definition of how one determines that a person is White is given. In scientific studies, more precise definitions than "White" or "Black" are usually provided. For example, in the large collaborative study of the HapMap which includes Whites and Blacks among four populations being examined, the terms used are "whites of Western and Northern European descent residing in Utah", and "Yoruba people, residing in Ibadan, Nigeria".\n\nThere is no single, universally-accepted, biological trait that allows a yes/no determination of whether a person is White or not. The operational definitions used in scientific work are not "absolute" either, but rather vary in specificity according to the purposes of the study or of the hypotheses being tested, and are chosen partly as a matter of convenience and cost. The operations, for example, could range from how the subject answers questions about himself on a survey, to the response of a light meter held against the skin with a cut-off meter-reading specified, to which of several ancestry-informative markers are present in the genes of the individual. These may, of course, be used alone or in combination.\n\nA problem with the appearance definition alone is that, as routinely demonstrated in college-level cultural-anthropology classes, "racial" appearance is partly in the eye of the beholder. The same individual seen as White by a Cuban can be seen as Black by an American. Furthermore, such perceptions change over time. Appearance alone is not easy to quantify or judge with complete precision, and can, of course, be deceiving.\n\nA problem with the self-identity definition alone is that there are often advantages and privileges among racial categories, so people will sometimes choose one or another
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mostly asians have white skin like koreans,japanese,vietnamese(from what i noticed) but some asians has brown,tan,light yellow skin.so yah.
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You made a very good point. We are all varying degrees of the same color, but for the sake of colonization, they had to make distinctions to clarify that "we are better than them, because..." Go do some research on how the whole classification of the races came about. You'll be enlightened by what you find.\n\nRace is just a handy way of justifying/maintaining the power of one group over another, of knowing who to hate. Take what's going on in this country right now, for instance. Attacks on muslims have been primarily, if not totally, on the proverbial "Arab-looking" guys, dark skin, etc. But there are muslims in europe who are regular ol' white guys. Did anyone randomly attack regular looking ol' white guys in the aftermath of 9-11? Nope.\n\nI believe that human beings have an innate need to feel superior to someone else. Some of us are able to surpress that feeling and even understand that we have it. Others have it coursing through their veins. If a radioactive meteor were to smash into the earth tomorrow and turn everyone blue, people with big ears would start trying to dominate people with small ears.
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>>>>Not to be racist, but it's as if only white people are >>>>allowed to have an identity.\n\nThat's simply not true. \n\nHow many people do you know of who could explain the cultural differences between a Libyan and a Turk? To most Americans they are simply Arabs, white or not. Similarly how many people do you know of who could distinguish between a Boer and a white Kenyan based purely on cultural difference? Both are simply Africans. How many people do you think understand the difference between a Georgian and a Muscovite? How about a Berber and a Taureg? A Kurd and a Sikh? A Lapp and an Norwegian?\n\nYet those are all white people. Quite clearly this cultural ignorance has nothing whatsoever to with skin colur or race.\n\n\n>>>>>Nobody confuses an Irishman with an Italian just \n>>>>>because they are "European".\n\nThat is because America has huge numbers of Italian and Irish immigrants. Try the average American on groups from European areas that haven't emigrated to the US in large numbers. How many people wouldn't confuse a Dane and Norwegian as both being Scandinavian? Or a Frenchman and a Belgian? Or a Spaniard and a Portugese?\n\nFor perhaps the perfect example, even after 20 years of being a major public figure my experience tells me that well over 25% of Americans still don't understand that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not and never has been German. \n\nThe simple fact is that there are far to many cultures and ethnicities in the world to have even a cursory knowledge of them all, even those of us that are interested. We need to lump cultures somehow to get any sort of handle on what is out there. Sometimes that lumping is ridiculously broad, as with your examples of "Africans" and "Asians" but we still need to do that. And African is no more ludicrous as a grouping than “Russian”, and Russians are largely white.\n\nAs we become more and more interested in regions and people we narrow down those divsions. So most Americans can separate out Sicilians and Italians generally. Many now can also separate out Hmong and Vietnamese generally, which is a very fine scale split. \n\nBut the parts of the world we have no reasons to be interested in tend be populated in our minds by "Africans" and "Russians", even though those groupings are more or less meaningless.\n\nBut rest assured it has nothing to do with race. Americans are just as almost as ignorant or European cultural differences as Africans.\n\nBut just to make you fell a bit better, my experience has been that most Africans don't draw any real distinction between Americans and Canadians either. The USA and Canada are usually treated the same way Americans treat Austria and Germany. Everyone more or less knows they're separate countries, but the differences in language, culture and so forth are so small that they feel they can be ignored.\n\nLike I said, nothing to do with race.
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Homogeneous just means the same, or uniform throughout.  It doesn't necessarily apply to race.  You can certainly have a genetically homogeneous population, but that is a much higher level of sameness than a racially homogeneous population.  Within any racial group there is a huge amount of genetic variability.  \n\nOK, Kurdiatcha's response to my analysis is entirely correct. I will point out, though, that I never said it was anything other than speculation.  At any rate, I hadn't slept in about 3 days, and in that context my analysis made perfect sense to me.  Sorry!\n\nNew theory: I think the perseption that there is more physical diversity in Europe than Africa or Asia could be partially explained by the fact that Europe is geographically smaller.  So it's just that all the different groups are more crammed together and it ends up looking more diverse.\n_________\n\n>>>It was one of the better responses I’ve seen on Yahoo\n>>>answers. It just happened to be incorrect.\nSo I never use the expression "lol," but it seems rather appropriate here.  That was well said.  Thanks : )\n\nYou're probably right on my other theory too.  I should just stop speculating on this entirely.  I do want to point out, though, that the guy who posted the question and said Europeans look more different than Asians is Asian (at least he said so in another question), so I don't think you're entirely correct that people are always more tuned in to difference within their own racial group.  I wouldn't have bothered to speculate on the issue at all (after you shoot down my first theory, that is) except I thought it could possibly hold some tinsy bit of truth because of that.
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I've heard a few theories on this.  Most things I've seen agree that the original humans were black--once we lost our fur, the intense sunlight of Africa selected strongly for dark skin.\n\nThe two theories I've heard for why Europeans lightened are either that dark skin leads to vitamin D deficiency in a lower-light environment, or simply that once the selective pressure for dark skin was gone, genetic drift moved humans back to the ancestral mammal condition of unpigmented skin. (Most mammals are pink under their fur).\n\nI beleive that populations of Asian descent living in the far north migrated there recently enough that there hasn't been time to adapt their skin color.
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>>>> Why do chinese people have chinky eyes?\n\nAcceptable common terms are slanted, slit or (preferably) Mongoloid. Chinky is just plain offensive.\n\nAnyway Chinese people have slit eyes because the skin beneath the eyelid fold  folds upwards over the eye to some degree, producing a partial third eyelid know as an epicanthic fold.\n\nWhy do Chinese people have an epicanthic fold? Because humans evolved with an epicanthic fold. That particular feature isn't restricted to the Chinese, it is found amongst all East Asians and Native Americans and perhaps most surprisingly is also normal in the Khoi-San peoples of Africa. It is assumed that the first humans had the same basic eye shape found today in Chinese and San. Other human populations have since mutated in such a way that the epicanthic fold has been lost while Asians and San retain the ancestral condition.\n\n>>>>Why are there white people and black people?\n\nThere aren't. There are only two major skin types in this world: brown and not-brown.\n\nThe ancestral skin colour is assumed to be the brown colouration seen mostly amongst the Khoi-San and some South-East Asian populations but also fairly common amongst North-Western Europeans.\n\nThe brown skin type maintains the colour producing units of the skin in discrete clusters. The non-brown skin types have those colour producing units spread throughout the skin evenly.\n\nBlack and white skin are both largely the same, and both are of the non-brown type. the only difference is how much melanin the skin produces. There is no point at which you can say that a skin type stops being brown and becomes white as there is with the difference between brown and non-brown skin colours.\n\n\nThe reason some people have darker skin is because the skin has produced more melanin. People at the equator tend to have darker skin than people living further north or south, but it's a very poor relationship.\n\n\nThose people telling you that black skin relates to life in warm climates obviously aren't thinking. Brazilian Indians live in warm climates but they don't have black skin, and Tasmanian Aborigines live in cold climates and they do have black skin.  Skin colour has very little to do with climate and a lot to do with ancestry.
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First of all, racism is based on emotion, hatred, and all those other Anthropomorphic behaviours.\n\nIt is believed that the first humanoid creatures on the planet evolved in Africa, then through subsequent migrations to different regions of the globe, they changed in response to their environment.\n\nNo where is it written that things evolve into higher life forms.... that is theory that tries to explain things like the movement onto land from sea, etc. Things dont just change into something else, they are modified to better suit their environment, look at insects for example. Most insects had to develop wings in order to reach their food, this is because tree were appearing, and the fact thta tree were appearing is based in inter and intra specific competition for sunlight....in other words things change to benefit themselves. They dont becom an entirely different thing. We are essentially apes, just our brains are larger, this is related to diet, and to behaviour, we stand up right more often simply becasue we evolved to carry objects, we have less hair because natural selection ade us that way, we cant grip branches with our feet, becasue we preferred to run and walk than to climb. Things like the aids virus is constantly changing and "evolving", it doesn't become an elephant overnight, but its physiology changes just enough regularly to make it very difficult to combat It does this in resonse to host physiology, and all other sorts of environmental conditions.\nThe differences in the human population are related more to the time when their behaviours changed from nomadic hunters to sedentary farmers. If you look at Blacks, they are generally faster, taller, can jump higher, have a longer reach and are in better ohysical condition.....not becasue they were meant to play basketball, but because Africa was slower to develop other means of surviving than lets say Europe, who turned to medicine and discovery way before Africans did. Many tribes that still exist today still carry on very old means of hunting and gathering, and due to this they are much more suited for it, some caucasian person would simply not be able to cut it without modern technology....\nso as I said earlier, it is all related to environment, and the changes thta are necessary for survival that dictate what we look like and how we behave.
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There are some great maps out there correlating skin tone with a modeled optimum at each geographic point.  That optimum is based on balancing the need to avoid burning and skin cancer against the need to obtain UV light for creation of vitamin D.  \n\nOther adaptations relate to features of the environment.  Northern Europeans, Inuit, and Eskimo people have a distribution of fat on their bodies that is optimized for heat retention.  The body shape of a Masai, for example, would be less than optimal near the North Pole.\n\nThere is a hypothesis that many traits are associated with sexual selection or may pertain to the tradeoff between sexual selection and aspects of the environment.  The distribution of fat tissue, particularly in women, in different races has been proposed as correlated with cultural differences in male preference as well as with adaptaion to the local environment.\n\nFinally, there is the feature of accident.  The epicanthal fold of many East Asians might have been beneficial to many Caucasians, but perhaps by chance the feature simply wasn't present in founding populations in Europe.  Characteristics in founding population and gained or lost by chance certainly play a big role in differences in humans from different geographic areas.  Not everythig is adaptive.\n\nBear in mind that this is not based on fixed differences among populations or races of humans, but instead on gene frequency in different populations.  For example, Swedes are lighter in skin color than the Ndebele not because each population has distinct genes, but because those genes differ in frequency.  Among all the loci that contribute to skin color, Swedish populations have very few alleles that code for dark skin.  Each individual Swede will therefore have only a few dark loci where dark alleles are present whereas most loci will have light alleles.  The Ndebele populations and individuals would act in reverse.
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I don't understand it.  Why would people think anyone is different because of the color of their skin?  If you're white and you get a tan, does that change your personality?  No!  So why would being a different skin color mean anything?  Unfortunately I think there will always be racists...makes me sad.
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Yes....and white includes too many cultures...but we are all lumped into one...because we have a lighter skin tone than other races.
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All guys c_ocks are a bit darker shade than the rest or their skin.  That way when we go suntanning, we don't have to burn our peepee, it's already tanned.