In its autumn, 2005, edition, Focus magazine published a short response to a question from a reader titled “Was white skin an evolutionary plus?”
In its autumn, 2005, edition, Focus magazine published a short response to a question from a reader titled “Was white skin an evolutionary plus?”
First and foremost, the claim that white skin emerged during an evolutionary process is a totally dogmatic one. The fossil history of humanity provides no support for such a claim, since skin is a soft tissue and there is no way of knowing what color skins human beings had hundreds of thousands of years ago.
On the other hand, the evolutionary claim in the response in question consists of a deception constructed on a facile word game, proposed with no scientific justification behind it. No information is given in the claim as to how white skin allegedly evolved; the advantage provided by this skin color is merely described, and the myth of this feature emerging through supposed evolution is recounted. The deception here is one frequently resorted to by evolutionist biologists. Henry Gee, himself an evolutionist, cites the example of spectacles and sets out the error in such accounts by saying:
... our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles. Yet evolutionary biologists do much the same thing when they interpret any structure in terms of adaptation to current utility while failing to acknowledge that current utility needs tell us nothing about how a structure evolved, or indeed how the evolutionary history of a structure might itself have influenced the shape and properties of that structure.(Henry Gee, In Search Of Deep Time: Beyond The Fossil Record To A New History Of Life, The Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., 1999, p. 103)
Readers need to be aware of these facts and to be on their guard against similar word games and evolutionary deceptions set out in certain magazines under a scientific guise.
