THE basic message that skin colour is an understood biological adaptation is, to most audiences, a huge relief. However, the recent racism storm in SA and ongoing ethnic-driven hatred elsewhere in the world highlight how far we still have to go.Immense psychological and societal damage is still being caused by a system of human classifications begun by a small number of European philosophers in the mid-18th century. Education is an important step towards healing the open wounds still in existence, and a key part of this journey will be instilling a deeper understanding of how society has been indoctrinated into accepting institutionalised race distinctions.Skin pigmentation (or ‘colour’) evolved as an adaptation to levels of ultraviolet radiation and is caused by only a handful of genes in our genome — the complete map of our DNA. So, members of the human species are all but indistinctly similar genetically, but the reason for differences in skin pigmentation genes was due to natura...

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