Blonde=sexy. Many adult jokes reaffirm you and many men indeed believe in it. But how about brunette? It seems fine to me. What’s the purpose of God to make this kind of difference?

The word—race—is for this purpose. Human beings are classified based on geographic locations and physical appearance such as skin color, hair color, and nose shape. Race is also falsely linked to people’s inner mentality and outer behavior.

So who and how defined “race”?

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a student of listmania Carolus Linnaeus who classified all plants and animals human then knew, adopted his teacher’s geographic classification of human beings and developed the racial classification: Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American, and Malay, in his 1795 book.

Ironically, Blumenbach, a professor at Gottingen, was never a racist. In fact, to avoid grouping people based on mentality or behavior, he created his classification based on the beauty of physcial appearance and the origin of human beings. He even believed that human beings were from the same group of H. sapiens, although he thought people from mountain Caucasus was the most beautiful and the start of modern human beings.

Nevertheless, Blumenbach’s classification did rank human beings. With just one more step, the hierarchy of human beings was used literally and wrongly. Racism has hurt human beings tremendously.

Most people now accept the idea that human beings, like many other animals, orient physical appearance to adapt to environment. Flat nose is to fast dissipate heat, while long and protrude nose is to warm cold air; slant eyes (epicanthic folds) are due to sand and wind, black skin color is for UV protection, to name just a few.

Any of these characteristics can appear in all racial groups. In other words, each physical appearance is distributed continuously in any human population. However, why most northern European girls are blonde, while Brunette most likely appeared in Asia? It seems to me there is no obvious reason that hair color has anything to do with environment.

As I have mentioned in the previous skin color post, although south-east Asian people have similar amount of UV exposure as those in tropical Africa do, the skin color of those Asian people still look more like yellow than black. However, skin color develops quickly. For example, some Indonesian people have skin color as dark as tropical black African do, but other physical characteristics of these Indonesians are very similar to the rest of south East Asian people. Nobody will question their yellow Asian identity. This suggests that these black Asian people redeveloped dark skin color after they moved to Indonesian islands. Therefore, why didn’t other people who lived in hot places change their skin color? Moreover, why do Italian people still have light skin, despite they have been there for several thousands of years?

One answer to these puzzling questions is sexual selection. People mate with people like themselves. Visible appearance is what we use to judge people. As suggested in my previous post on beauty criteria, average, or majority, sets the standard of beauty (this is the standard used by human beings, but not in peacock in which extreme is considered beauty). If most women in a group have huge butt, men tend to copulate with women having huge butt because they think it beautiful. This indeed occurred in Khoisan people inSouth Africa. Furthermore, if the whole population is made of people with slant eyes, flat nose, straight hair, and shovel-like front teeth, these characteristics will be considered as normal and thus beautiful. These characteristics are more likely preserved in the population. If for whatever reasons this group conquered the land, the whole region will be that type.

There are more examples of physical characteristics which result from sexual selection. Tall, big, and masculine men are more attractive because they look more promising for survival and reproduction (more or less like the peacock way). Blue eye color, has been described as pure and beautiful in English literature. Blond hair has long been attributed to sexy. However, there are some physical characteristics which had neither survival nor sexual advantages. They are probably natural genetic drifting. Examples include fingerprint, color of nibble, birthmark, toenails, and so forth. The dominance of these characteristics may result from bottleneck phenomena.

However, one should keep in mind that modern human beings had many grand-scale migrations, either voluntarily or forced. For example, the movement of old German people other part of Europe led to many Germany like languages, and the migration of Slavic people made east Europe all Slavic descendents. In addition, wars and diseases can easily eliminate a country within handful years. For example, about 1500 year ago, there were a large number of “whites” living in the center of China with “yellows”. Those “whites” even established a big country. However, within a year or two, the new yellow emperor effectively killed all “whites” (also any people looked like “whites”), leaving China as one pure “yellow” country. Another genocide was the disappearance of most of American Indians.

In modern societies, the uniformity is more likely created by these types of population shifting. The environmental force is less important than sexual attractiveness in shaping our physical appearance.

Next post, the link from race to prejudice and stereotype.