I’m going to explain, scientifically, why we’re all idiots.

The facts about your skin color, and who you’re attracted to. Spoiler: It’s just science.

Nearly every day on the news we see the fallout emerging from various incident, and sometimes tragedies, that are unfortunately becoming common in recent months. We also see surges of opinion that these events are influenced by discrimination of race and sexuality. I don’t deny that these events are tragic or wrong, nor do I deny that there is discrimination between people of various races and preferences…. But the whole idea of these things is idiocy: that we have to fear people who hate others just because of their appearance or behavior. For the sake of erasing ignorance and hopefully spreading tolerance and understanding, I’m going to explain the only reasons you aren’t identical to every other person you see every day. We’ll do this in two parts…

First off, skin color is socially meaningless. You know what skin color is useful for? Determining someone’s geographic origin. That is all. Look at your arm right now, you’ll see a skin of some varying shade, and maybe some hair (Some of you are probably a little sweaty, it being summer and all.) Let’s science that stuff. Skin is your body’s shield, and part of its job is to protect you from solar radiation. Solar radiation, specifically UV, can strip folic acid from your body, which is especially bad for women as folic acid is important for healthy fetal development. Pigments called melanin are present in your skin to shield your from UV radiation, the darker you are, the more UV shielding you have. Our skin also helps us absorb vitamin D from the sun, but it gets scarcer the farther you are from the equator, as does UV radiation. The farther north you are, the paler you need to be to get you daily dose of vitamins from the sun. This also explains why spending weeks at a time gaming in your basement leaves you a little pale. Science can even explain arm hair. Hair keeps you warm, while pores on your skin keep you cool. They can’t exist in the exact same spot. More hair = you’re from somewhere cold, Less hair= you’re from somewhere hot. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason we have different “races”, it’s just the weather package genetics and environment picked for your body. Thanks to the Smithsonian for my knowledge of body hair and sweat glands.

Okay kids, now we’re going to talk about sex, or more accurately, who you think is sexy. Some very smart gentlemen named William, Urban, and Sergey believe they know how your sexual preferences are determined, and it’s all a matter of shielding again: this time while we’re in the womb. Actually, it happens in the stem cells that eventually form us, based on sex-specific epigenetic modifications (“epi-marks”). I’m not a geneticist or biologist, but I’ll try to translate their research, found here.

Apparently they basically regulate fetal testosterone exposure, protecting females from too much testosterone, and making sure males receive enough. These epi-marks are usually ‘erased’ once we’re done with them, but sometimes hang around, and can “influence a gonad-discordant developent in opposite sex offspring, mosaically feminizing XY offspring and masculinizing XX offspring”. The determination of who makes you hot under the collar hinges entirely on these shielding epi-marks.

Basically, if you discriminate against someone because of their color or sexual preferences, you’re discriminating against the natural biological and evolutionary processes that made them, made you, and made me. You’re hating on people because of science, which is stupid. Science is the one uniting factor that binds us together, everyone, everything, everywhere (Some of you nerds out there may refer to it as The Force). It’s a shame that some people use it to build fake barriers between us. I believe Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this, I’ll close with his words;

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.