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IRELAND NOT SUNNY ENOUGH FOR BURQAS
(And you thought Irish Mist was just a liqueur?)Muslims who have moved to Ireland are being warned that burqas don't allow in enough sunlight for their bodies to produce the proper amount of Vitamin D. LINK
What's the deeper story?
Humans have evolved to survive and prosper in different environments.
When the few people who were to eventually become the white indigenous peoples of Europe left Africa about 20,000 to 50,000 years ago and moved north, nature did what it always does. It rewarded, via natural selection, those individuals with certain favorable mutations that allowed them to adapt to the new conditions and eliminated those without the mutations.
One of these mutations was white skin--which many scientists now believe was primarily caused by a tiny mutation in gene slc24a5, located on the long leg of chromosome 15 at position 21.1.
White skin allows in much more sunlight than darker skin and white skin can produce as much as 99% more Vitamin D than darker skin in some cases.
Without a proper level of Vitamin D, people develop rickets (and other medical problems), bones break more easily and people die younger.
Those early arrivals in Europe without the white skin mutation died younger. As a result, they had less time to produce offspring, so they had fewer children who received their form of the gene while those who lived longer (the ones with the white skin mutation) had more children who received their mutated gene form. In time, those with the favorable mutation became the dominant form in Europe. Again, this is what natural selection means.
The white skin mutation spread and became dominant in Europe 5,300 to 12,000 years ago.
This gene (slc24a5) has primary alleles that differ in only one nucleotide, changing the 111th amino acid from alanine to threonine. You may recall that genes are locations on our strands of DNA that are clustered into chromosomes and that DNA is made up of four nucleotides that are usually abbreviated as A,T,C,G, so the white skin mutation is caused by the change in just one letter of DNA.
In white European descended peoples the threonine form is found in from 98.7% to 100% of the population while in Africans, East Asians and American Indians from 93% to 100% of the populations have the alanine form.
What about tans?
White skin can allow in too much sunlight in sunny areas, so nature has provided a means of preventing this by causing white skin to darken into a tan as a natural sun block.
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Thanks for reading the CM PRESS.
