Can Humanity Survive Global Warming Without Melanin?

A Tik Tok video where a young white female says she is seeking a black mate so her children will be able to survive climate change has people asking the question…is she right?

Twenty years ago, while at the university of Western Australia, anthropologist Nina Jablonski was asked to give a lecture on human skin.As an expert in evolution, she decided to discuss the evolution of skin color, but when she went through the literature on the subject she was dismayed. Some theories advanced before the 1970s tended to be racist, and others were less than convincing. White skin, for example, was reported to be more resistant to cold weather, although groups like the Inuit are both dark melanated and particularly resistant to cold.In fact color doesn’t matter when it comes to the cold weather. The native people of cold climates in many (not all) cases have been shaped by evolution to have more insulating body fat, shorter stature, flatter noses less vulnerable to frostbite, narrow eyes (as in Mongolians and related Asian descendents), and other adaptations to the cold.

In both Arctic regions and high elevations like the Andes, Himalayas, and Ethiopian plateau, they have darker skin because the air is thin up there, so the ultraviolet solar radiation is more intense, and melanization helps to protect them from skin cancer. The same is true of natives of the tropics, where solar radiation is excessively intense for human needs.

At lower elevations in northern latitudes such as Scandinavia, the sunlight is weak, the days and summers are brief, and the skin is lighter to transmit the necessary amount of UV radiation to energize or enable the synthesis of vitamin D and folate.The two arguably most important substances to insure a healthy birth and longevity of the newborn.2 million years ago, early humans moved from the African rainforest and onto the East African savanna. Once on the savanna, they not only had to cope with more exposure to the sun, but they also had to work harder to gather food. Mammalian brains are particularly vulnerable to overheating: A change of only five or six degrees can cause a heat stroke. So our African ancestors had to develop a better cooling system.

The answer was sweat, which dissipates heat through evaporation.The more they could sweat, the longer they could forage before the heat forced them back into the shade. The more they could forage, the better their chances of having healthy offspring and of passing on their sweat glands to future generations. A million years of natural selection later, each human has about 2 million sweat glands spread across his or her body. Hairless skin, however, is particularly vulnerable to damage from sunlight. Scientists long assumed that humans evolved melanin, the main determinant of skin color, to absorb or disperse ultraviolet light. But what is it about ultraviolet light that melanin protects against? Some researchers pointed to the threat of skin cancer. But cancer usually develops late in life, after a person has already reproduced. Others suggested that sunburned nipples would have hampered breast-feeding. But a slight tan is enough to protect mothers against that problem.

During her preparation for the lecture in Australia, Jablonski found a 1978 study that examined the effects of ultraviolet light on folate, a member of the vitamin B complex. An hour of intense sunlight, the study showed, is enough to cut folate levels in half if your skin is pheomelanin dominant or light. Jablonski made the next, crucial connection only a few weeks later. At a seminar on embryonic development, she learned that low folate levels are correlated with neural-tube defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly, in which infants are born without a full brain or spinal cord.Jablonski later came across three documented cases in which children's neural-tube defects were linked to their mothers' visits to tanning studios during early pregnancy. Moreover, she found that folate is crucial to sperm development -- so much so that a folate inhibitor was developed as a male contraceptive.The inhibitor was too dangerous to market because it was so effective that it knocked out all folate in the body.

As far back as the 1960s, the biochemist W. Farnsworth Loomis had suggested that skin color is determined by the body's need for vitamin D. The vitamin helps the body absorb calcium and deposit it in bones, an essential function, particularly in fast-growing embryos. (The need for vitamin D during pregnancy may explain why women around the globe tend to have lighter skin than men.) Unlike folate, vitamin D depends on ultraviolet light for its production in the body. Loomis believed that people who live in the north, where daylight is weakest, evolved fair skin to help absorb more ultraviolet light and that people in the tropics evolved dark skin to block the light, keeping the body from overdosing on vitamin D, which can be toxic at high concentrations.

By the time Jablonski did her research, Loomis's hypothesis had been partially disproved. "You can never overdose on natural amounts of vitamin D," Jablonski says. "There are only rare cases where people take too many cod-liver supplements."Thus it is more likely that the first humans were deeply melanated and very dark or nilotic people who upon leaving Africa for areas with little sunlight over time lost their protective pigmentation.

In 1978, NASA launched the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer. Jablonski and Chaplin took the spectrometer's global ultraviolet measurements and compared them with published data on skin color in indigenous populations from more than 50 countries. To their delight, there was an unmistakable correlation: The weaker the ultraviolet light, the fairer the skin. Jablonski went on to show that people living above 50 degrees latitude have the highest risk of vitamin D deficiency. "This was one of the last barriers in the history of human settlement," Jablonski says. "Only after humans learned fishing, and therefore had access to food rich in vitamin D, could they settle these regions."

Humans have spent most of their history moving around. To do that, they've had to adapt their tools, clothes, housing, and eating habits to each new climate and landscape. But Jablonski's work indicates that our adaptations go much further. People in the tropics have developed dark skin to block out the sun and protect their body's folate reserves. People far from the equator have developed fair skin to drink in the sun and produce adequate amounts of vitamin D during the long winter months.Jablonski hopes that her research will alert people to the importance of vitamin D and folate in their diet. It's already known, for example, that dark-skinned people who move to cloudy climes can develop conditions such as rickets from vitamin D deficiencies. More importantly, Jablonski hopes her work will begin to change the way people think about skin color. "We can take a topic that has caused so much disagreement, so much suffering, and so much misunderstanding," she says, "and completely disarm it." The importance of melanin cannot be understated because even though it is possible to use supplements to assure a pregnancy comes to full term Melanin is more than just a skin pigment. it is also a biopolymer molecule that can be found in strategic developmental parts of the human body both in vivo and in vitro (the adult and infant development), such as in the brain, midbrain, and brainstem which contain neuromelanin. This molecule manufactures the chemical melatonin necessary for the eyes to see by creating also the neural pathways and hormones involved in the brain, eyes, and inner ears.The ancient Greeks and Romans believed the Egyptians were so intellectually advanced because of their dark complexions.

Neuromelanin is also important for the proper maintenance of your physical and mental health. Experiments done in the US, Japan, and Europe are still shedding light on the understanding of Melanin. Because it can function as a neutralizer of harmful toxic substances, a nerve conduction facilitator and energy transformer, it becomes important to understand and highlight the importance of having melanin in the brain.Professor T. Owens Moore, tells us in his book Dark Matter Dark Secrets that Melanin is known to protect against dangerous free radicals by removing them through changing their compounds. In doing this Melanin (being a very stable molecule) has the capacity to accumulate and bind other toxic compounds and by doing so allow the neuromelanin pigment to protect the cells from potentially harmful substances; thereafter, slowly releasing the toxic agents in low, non-toxic concentrations. Think of the applications this would be helpful in: dementia, inflammatory brain conditions, Alzheimer, etc.

Dr. Moore also tells us that Melanin because it appears in living organisms at locations where energy conversion or charge transfer occurs (skin, retina, midbrain, and inner ear) is because it has been strategically placed in these locations to absorb and convert various forms of electromagnetic energy into energy states that can be used by the nervous system.

I would like to think that since pigmented cells are more capable of converting energy than non-pigmented cells that this is the explanation for why scientists are finding a magnetic field within humans that they are calling a “sixth sense”. However, the opposite side to this is that less pigment in the brain can lead to diseases such as Parkinson’s and when Melanin binds to certain drugs like methamphetamines creating free oxygen radicals, that can cause neuropathology of neurodegenerative disorders. Hence it is important that we ingest supplements and foods that can enhance the neuromelanin in the body to keep it from succumbing to free radicals and toxic pesticides, etc.Trying to lower the amount of melanin one has is tantamount to trying to become disabled.

In recent years Melanin has become one of the most valuable substances on the planet. Finally, Melanin can help facilitate the transfer of specific chemical molecules, and speed the nerve impulses in highly melanated brain regions, since it can act as an electron-transfer agent, causing the nerve cell to exhibit more activity by facilitating the electrical and chemical transmission of nerve impulses. Second, Melanin directly relates to the accumulation of electrolytes or charged ions in melanated brain regions. These charges relate to a higher voltage in the cell that causes a facilitative effect on the nerve impulse. Meaning this helps to heighten mental awareness, speeds up reaction time, and because it also greatly enhances the capacity of the brain to transmit nerve impulses, these properties can help increase/extend the survival of the human organism. Unfortunately, this is where the politics of racism has played more in our biological and medical circles to keep the importance of Melanin out of public awareness and only to the extent of its skin pigment properties. Melanin has been available to scientists for decades. Yet it is apparent as we deal globally with the effects of global climate change on our ability to survive as a species, humanity will demand more awareness of this science, since the lack of melanin can be an important factor to everyone’s existence.