And that skin pigmentation itself was a product of evolution.

This had tremendous consequences for the evolution of human skin pigmentation.

I want to tell you about red pigmentation the basis of plant life.

Now what is wonderful about the evolution of human skin pigmentation, and the phenomenon of pigmentation, is that it is the demonstration, the evidence, of evolution by natural selection, right on your body.

This has tremendous implications for our understanding of the evolution of human skin pigmentation.

And yet he rejected the idea that human skin pigmentation was related to the climate.

So lets all wish for his great health, and his awareness of his own skin pigmentation.

But we need to think about how he compares, in terms of his pigmentation, to other people on Earth.

He, as one of many urban admixed populations, is very emblematic of a mixed parentage, of a mixed pigmentation.

And he resembles, very closely, people with moderate levels of pigmentation who live in southern Africa, or Southeast Asia.

So we have, in skin pigmentation, one of these wonderful products of evolution that still has consequences for us today.

What's significant to the story of human skin pigmentation is just how much of the Northern Hemisphere is in these cool gray zones.

Because what happened, in order to ensure health and well being, these lineages of people dispersing into the Northern Hemisphere lost their pigmentation.

Darwin, I think, would have appreciated this, even though he eschewed the importance of climate on the evolution of pigmentation during his own life.

And what Darwin could not appreciate, or didn't perhaps want to appreciate at the time, is that there was a fundamental relationship between the intensity of ultraviolet radiation and skin pigmentation.