Kid Zone Articles
How You Got Your Skin Color
Jesus
loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and
yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.
This is one of my favorite songs to sing with kids. How did we get all
those skin colors? An evolutionary idea that the darker skin colors
came from man being exposed to lots of sun, and each generation got
darker and darker, has real problems. The Eskimo has fairly dark skin,
yet he keeps his body covered with furs most of the time. How could the
sun change his skin color? Could we get all the skin colors from just
two people, Adam and Eve?
If mankind began from just two people, then to get all the different
colors that we see in people today, Adam and Eve would have had to be
polka dotted! Or striped! Or checkered? Paisley? Camouflaged? No. To
get all the kinds of skin color that we see, Adam and Eve would only
had to have the right assortment of genes. (That is genes with a G ...
not the kind that your Mom and Dad buy from a store; those are jeans
with a J ... the kind you wear).
Genes are small parts of your cell that are the pattern for what you
look like. You get all your genes from your parents. You will have
light or dark skin depending on what kind of genes you parents have,
not from polka dots!
Red and yellow, black and white, and let's not forget brown; to get all
these skin colors it would seem that there must be red, yellow, brown,
black and white colorings or pigments in the skin. But in fact, there
is only one skin color: a brown pigment called melanin. We basically
all have the same skin color, just different amounts of melanin.
Albinos have no melanin, so they have very white skin (almost pink
because of the blood vessels that show through).
If you have only a little melanin, you have white skin. If you have
very black skin, it is because your skin makes a lot of melanin. Brown
skin comes from all the variations you can get between white and black.
If you are Chinese, your skin is slightly thicker which gives your skin
a yellowish shade. No matter the color, it all comes from melanin.
Melanin is produced by cells called melanocytes. It is produced to
protect the skin from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun. If you
have light skin (little melanin), a lot of sun can give you a sunburn.
Even dark skinned people can get a sunburn, making their skin even
darker. Take away the sun and their skin color returns to the original
shade.
How long would it take to get all the different skin colors we see in
people today? Thousands of years? Millions of years? No, it could
happen in just one generation! That's about 30 years! To understand how
this can happen, let's take a very basic course in genetics.
Genes in the DNA carry the instructions on how to make each and every
feature that makes your body. We get our genes from our parents: one
half comes from the father and the other half comes from the mother.
Melanin is the stuff that also gives your hair and eye color. For
simplicity, let's call the gene that carries the directions to make
melanin in your eyes B; it is asking your cells to make melanin. Genes
come in matching pairs. Another gene of the pair says nothing (silent)
about making melanin (let's call it b). If you get B from your father,
and b from your mother, you will have brown eyes. If your father has B
and your mother also has B, you will also have brown eyes. If you get b
from your father and b from your mother, there are no instructions for
melanin, so you will have blue or non-brown eyes. Get the idea?
Now to get a little more complicated. Skin color is determined by at least two sets of genes.
Lets call the genes that ask for melanin to be made by your cells A and
B, and the genes (silent) that ask the cells to make very little
melanin a and b. People with the darkest skin would have genes AABB and
those with very light skin would have genes aabb. Now let’s see what
combinations we could get from medium skinned parents (AaBb) using what
is called a punnet square pictured below.
The sex cells of each parent can carry only one half of any pair of
genes; in this case there are four possible combinations of genes that
can passed on to their children ( AB, Ab, aB, or ab). If the father
passes on ab, and the mother Ab, then the child would have Aabb, or
light skin. If the father passes on AB, and the mother passes on aB,
the child would be AaBB, or dark brown. Get the idea?
As you can see, all the skin colors in the world can come from just two
medium skinned parents in just one generation. So what color were Adam
and Eve, or Noah and his wife? Probably medium skinned. Most of the
people in the world today have medium skin.
Remember, the discussion given is a very simplified explanation of genetics, but it shows you how it works!
Now you try it! Using the square, what skin color will a child have: Light, Medium or Dark?
