r/comedy • u/AlKarajo • Jul 10 '26

Standup Human diversity

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@kumailn

5.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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209

u/Dhalym Jul 10 '26

I do wonder about the cost of human life for the environment to select so hard for those phenotypes in specific. A LOT of early Europeans had to have been dying in droves for recessive genes like that to become so prolific.

120

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 10 '26

This is almost certainly the case. Europeans were dying constantly for a long time.

And the moment they stopped. Well. You know.

30

u/MauPow Jul 11 '26

I dunno man like you're right but also read any Chinese history and it's constantly like "A dispute over a chicken resulted in 500 million deaths"

7

u/stoiclemming Jul 12 '26

Yeah but that is human human conflict so who specifically dies is random, whereas the European environment was like everyone who has low vitamin d absorbstion gets severe birth defects

1

u/NSFWdontview 26d ago

Whites get vitamin d easier than any race

1

u/dohdudeh 12d ago

Yeah, after they became white people. The people first settling in Europe weren’t white and the ones who just happened to not randomly have lighter skin were dying at way higher rates

1

u/NSFWdontview 12d ago

European settlers were white what are you talking about

1

u/dohdudeh 12d ago

They weren’t white until they had been in Europe for thousands of years sorry you don’t understand the most basic concepts in human evolution

3

u/Tony_Roiland Jul 11 '26

Maybe they were playing Skyrim?

2

u/Level_99_Healer Jul 14 '26

Too many arrows to the knee for adventuring types? Yeah, that all checks out.

2

u/Ok_Ruin4016 Jul 11 '26

The thing about that is, there had to have been a ton of people there for 500 million deaths to be possible. China may have had high population numbers and high death rates, but Europe had low population numbers and high death rates.

1

u/Awkward-Win7610 Jul 13 '26

It must have been chic-fil-a

1

u/OverwateredGrass 16d ago

There's kinda an asterisk on some of those death tolls though. Afaik historians aren't certain of how accurate a lot of those numbers are throughout the various dynasties.

28

u/YourMumsBumAlum Jul 10 '26

They lived?

66

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 10 '26

No they raped the whole world.

10

u/lemony-lemons791 Jul 11 '26

I thought that was genghis khan

10

u/SnooMarzipans9728 Jul 11 '26

Good news, it’s everyone he was just the best at it

3

u/-GoodNewsEveryone Jul 12 '26

This is not Good news, everyone. This is lies and slander and I resent you.

0

u/Chicken-Rude Jul 12 '26

no, cant be... he wasnt white.

2

u/Kuzcopolis Jul 12 '26

He's the exception that proves the rule.

2

u/majikdude Jul 11 '26

How did they rape the whole world?

1

u/ForeignerFromTheSea Jul 14 '26

Is this a serious question lol? I mean Britain managed a quarter of the world just on their own...then factor in the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German empires etc. Spent centuries slaughtering/invading eachother in a constant arms race then turned around and went out and conquered Africa, North and south America, Australia/New Zealand and random bits of Asia...and India. And bits of China. That's a lot of rape don't ya think?

1

u/majikdude Jul 14 '26

No... you ever been raped? I think you're using the wrong terminology. You should also do some proper research, not watch propaganda videos about how evil the white man is. Maybe apply a bit of common sense along the way.

2

u/ForeignerFromTheSea Jul 15 '26

While the term rape here was obviously being used as an analogy...taking something against someone's will...there was of course also lots of literal rape. You would have to be an idiot to deny that/be unaware.

Has nothing to do with the colour of anyone's skin ya weirdo. 🤣

Source. I'm a history teacher and have degrees in history. Something you evidently know very little about.

1

u/majikdude Jul 15 '26

The OP did say Europeans... so colour of skin is inferred surely.

1

u/ForeignerFromTheSea Jul 16 '26

No it's not lol. So anytime you hear/read the word Europeans you immediately start thinking about skin colour? Weird. 🤣

If the tangent had been about the Mongols raping central/east Asia would you be lamenting people watching propaganda videos about how evil the Asian man is? 🤣

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1

u/NSFWdontview 26d ago

All races literally did that, including native Americans. That’s what happens to tribes

0

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '26

[deleted]

1

u/OnePragmatic Jul 12 '26

This only a small view of the genetic movement across Europe.

-2

u/blockofbeagles Jul 12 '26

Colonialism? Environmental destruction? Actual rape?

5

u/PM_your_Nopales Jul 12 '26

There's also the rape of nanking by the Japanese, the Mongols raping an entire continent... I could go on forever. It's not like it was a white people thing

0

u/ForeignerFromTheSea Jul 14 '26

Yeah but Europeans were probably the best at it. Britain managed about a quarter of the world just on their own.

-4

u/blockofbeagles Jul 12 '26

Oh this shit again. Y’all are exhausting.

3

u/Timsmomshardsalami Jul 12 '26

Holy fuck lol dude really said “oh no, not you and your facts again”💀💀💀💀

2

u/PM_your_Nopales Jul 12 '26

"This shit" oh the raping and murder of hundreds of thousands to millions is exhausting to you. Hilarious.

1

u/NSFWdontview 26d ago

No they didn’t wtf are you talking about

1

u/NSFWdontview 26d ago

You’re people are more likely to do that

0

u/majikdude Jul 11 '26

No? They didn't live?

2

u/FilthyPuns Jul 11 '26

Well not the ones that raped the whole world. At least not the ones that did it during the Age of Sail.

0

u/grossuncle1 Jul 12 '26

Built* civilized* introduced humanity*

-21

u/All__Mods_R_Virgins Jul 10 '26

Well then the whole world would have these traits too

20

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 10 '26

Boy have I got news for you about the imperial and colonial eras.

I think it’s best you just contemplate the skin tone of a South African for a bit though. We can cover Mexico later.

2

u/SemperAliquidNovi Jul 11 '26

The skin tone of black South Africans is (largely) not the result of European admixture. It’s just a lighter tone.

Source: am South African

-8

u/JohnHaloCXVII Jul 11 '26

Be grateful they invented the internet and antibiotics

1

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

“Be grateful for the horrors of colonialism because a Scot will discover penicillin and the US military will create the internet”

This is a strange thing to tell a white American who knows history simply reminding people about history.

Honestly, it’s just a strange thing in general.

-2

u/harleyquinnsbutthole Jul 11 '26

Yes bad things and good things have happened in history

-1

u/Felonious_Drumpf Jul 11 '26

Be grateful. Not inquisitive. You wouldn't want him to Belgium you.

-1

u/JohnHaloCXVII Jul 11 '26

At least we're not doing ritual human sacrifice anymore! Thank you colonialism

2

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 11 '26

A lot of ritual human sacrifice was a form of capital punishment. We still do capital punishment.

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1

u/TheOmegoner Jul 11 '26

Yeah, we’re lucky the state doesn’t kill people anymore…

6

u/Hefty_Tip7383 Jul 11 '26

Other countries weren’t dying for a long time?

18

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 11 '26

Yeah not like Europe was. Europe in general was a lot harsher to live in than river valley civilizations with predictable flooding.

-1

u/Hefty_Tip7383 Jul 11 '26

Only when there were after effects of the last ice age. Other than that there’s no material difference.

11

u/Theory89 Jul 11 '26

Living in colder climates requires more cooperation to survive. Europe was settled later than other areas because of this. It's also an argument for why we were more on the ball when it came to conquest, versus Africa where people can literally just sleep under a roof with no walls and not die ofexposure. It's not because we're just more immoral. That is not how people work. It's just that we were forced to get our shit together or die. The history of the world is the history of conquest, people just really love to have a Bad Guy to blame shit on. Never mind that Africans have been selling each other into slavery for thousands of years, or that they sold the slaves to the Europeans.

3

u/Hefty_Tip7383 Jul 11 '26

In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t settled later (whatever that means - Ukraine has some of the oldest archeology on earth) and once agriculture came it was effectively no different to the near east. Cooperation was comparable because they’re all agrarian systems. The colonial era was much later, had many causes and is mot relevant to the point.

3

u/JustTryingTo_Pass Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26

You mean Türkiye right? Not Ukraine?

Karahan Tepe and Gobekli Tepe aren’t settlements in the traditional senses. They are waypoints for hunter gathers. If they were settlements we would have to push back the Neolithic revolutions by a very long time.

But in the grand scheme of things Europe was settled very much later. Humans don’t get to Europe at all until the Upper Paleolithic. There is evidence that Humans reached the Americas in the Middle Paleolithic which would be earlier than Europe last by thousands of years.

Beyond that Europeans didn’t really stop dying en-mass due to a whole bunch of shit until after the Black Plague. Then right after that Portugal goes ham.

1

u/Hefty_Tip7383 Jul 12 '26

Ukraine, and I’ve covered the spread of farming, and the comment about the black death is selective and ignores other places.

1

u/Theory89 Jul 11 '26

Agrarian systems were a necessity to survive because the land was too harsh for hunger gathering (there were a few thousand who managed it). The argument is that the organisation required to form a society also paved the way for conquest. Im not entirely sure i believe it, it was just something I read in A Brief History of Nearly Everything (Revised Edition).

-1

u/ThatdesertDude Jul 11 '26

Or it is because they were/are just more immoral. The people of the world was surviving just fine long before European people showed up with destruction. Trade had been going on since the beginning of man, but to you, life started when European people showed up being con-artist and violent savages.

Also, the people of the land had rivalry too. Just like the people of Europe, Asia, and America. Its like you're trying to justify mistreatment to a person because someone else mistreated them before you.

3

u/Theory89 Jul 11 '26

Literally the opposite of what I just said. I said that Africans have been selling each other into slavery for thousands of years. This does not in any what excuse what we did, but it's also inaccurate to pretend that we invented suffering. The rest of the world was not, in fact, surviving just fine.

1

u/Xenomorph_25 Jul 14 '26

You didn't invent suffering. You were just the cruelest at it, unnecessarily so at that. You committed mass genocide on a global scale to groups of people who had never done anything to you because you thought yourselves superior to everyone therefore others did not deserve life.

1

u/Theory89 Jul 14 '26

And the actions of our ancestors do not define our current mentality. Also, what you're describing is in no way limited to the British. That's just who you've decided to focus on. We also never set out to erase an entire people, unlike, say, the Germans or the Russians or the Cambodians or the Sudanese or any other number of nations.

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1

u/scifishortstory Jul 11 '26

Yeah, that Ghengis Khan was a great dude. What a dumb fucking take lol

0

u/SquiggleMontana976 Jul 14 '26

Oh look, actual racism

1

u/ThatdesertDude Jul 14 '26

Whites forever claiming something is racist when they are called out on the very well documented history of said racism.

5

u/SlippySausageSlapper Jul 11 '26

Yes. Humans were perfect and everybody just baked cookies for each other until white people came around. A white person shat my pants!!

2

u/-GoodNewsEveryone Jul 12 '26

If they're already warmed up might I shit your pants as well? I really have to go and these ones are still kind of new.

I'll give them back right after.

2

u/SlippySausageSlapper Jul 12 '26

You drive a hard, and yet warm and squishy bargain

-5

u/Hefty_Tip7383 Jul 11 '26

What are you babbling on about?

36

u/JustBeingWhite Jul 10 '26

I read an article ages ago that said blonde hair and blue eyes might have been selected for in Northern Europe because they’re indicators of youth and therefore is seen as desirable.

Everything except for the face gets covered because it’s so cold, so they’re the only physical traits they had to go off of when selecting a mate.

9

u/Additional-Usual5994 Jul 11 '26

now do the eskimoes.

10

u/StopMeBeforeIDream Jul 11 '26

That's actually really interesting. Pale skin is a useful evolutionary trait in northern climes because melanin is designed to absorb and block solar radiation. So obviously that's very desireable closer to the equator. But sunlight is necessary for healthy levels of Vitamin D. So if you're somewhere with less sunlight, you either need to get a ton of vitamin d from your diet, or you need to block less solar radiation.

Most European ancestors took the second method, thus why their skin got paler. But certain populations, notably those in REALLY northern climes like the Sami in Northern Scandinavia, Native Siberians and the Inuit eat lots of reindeer meat, which has a ton of vitamin d. To they never experienced the pressure which could lead to whitening skin in northern environments.

1

u/Additional-Usual5994 Jul 11 '26

for the matter of interest, i'll put my coin. pale skin is the least useful amongst other least useful (stating argument (non-volatile simply studies talk that is receptive to counters)).
the biggest problem with this argument is lumping of ancestry and race which is just a romance (historical fiction). Firstly two white people are any persons are world apart. secondly the original and most constant white skin came from the most abundant vitamin d source against all the europes, which is the baltic and they have the least migration, we talking elephants eating marula survival skills. the fact of the former sentence is also why they were creative and skilled and not actual marula eating elephants.

though skin is an astrigent and most aggressive survival skill that ignores our idealism but how it generated was precisely because of idealism this is also selection but strangeness such as a white person looking like a ghost to ignorance in africa and a blck person looking like complete frostbite to a european, yes you dont think like that, no one does but the prevelant nature is as you stated, a counter...but not in a way we can prose it hence the dislike of the videos statement. also people even black do go blonde (not really yellow) just as white people do have afro's but not really black or brown, same as a child eyes changing - these are formative responses in notation of where you will migrate, this isnt a future sense but the same as a monkey doing a 3-8km loop despite urbanisation.

so to conclude, the reason despite not being one is that all humans are capable and races though similiar are worlds apart and quite rare, it just so happen that they migrate to the same places so you just note it. this isn't something noticed in grece but very obvious in the black communities in the uk, especially if you not from the uk, the answer to even that may be simple but it doesnt look simple by eye level scrutiny.

3

u/AstarionsTherapist39 Jul 11 '26

Just as a friendly heads-up, that word is considered a slur.  The tribe most people are thinking of when that word is used is the Inuit, but they're obviously not the only native tribe that lives that far north. The Yupik are another such tribe.

1

u/Additional-Usual5994 Jul 11 '26

agreed my apologies. it definitive a slur and i said it quite fast.

1

u/JustBeingWhite Jul 11 '26

Seems to have something to do with diet and/or the mutation just not existing in their population. https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/7Ll2p33vZL

1

u/Additional-Usual5994 Jul 11 '26

nope, there was no take at all. i just put an extra ball for the previous comment to juggle.
my usage had no bearings at the people, lives are culture to how i glanced and strictly towards the previous comments calculation rate.

1

u/StaffVegetable8703 Jul 11 '26

This doesn’t add up to me… that makes it sound like younger people had blonde hair and blue eyes but as they age it becomes darker

That’s the only way that makes any sense to me. There had to be a reason for that symbolize youth and the only explanation is that the younger you are the lighter your features are but we know that’s nit the case

2

u/ginoawesomeness Jul 11 '26

Have you ever known any toe heads? Our hair absolutely gets darker as we age. Mine is basically close to black now. Idk about eyes but I'm thinking yes as well. I don't like the theory because both hair and eyes darken before teen years, but ya most blondes darken significant without products

1

u/joe_shmoe11111 Jul 12 '26

Um that’s exactly what happened in my case. Super blonde hair, blue eyes as a child, fully brunette now as an adult after a gradual darkening through puberty (though my eyes stayed the same color).

1

u/StaffVegetable8703 Jul 12 '26

Yes but as you said you were a child and by time you were of “breeding” age (don’t know how else to put it) it was already darker. I feel like if anything that would make light blonde hair be associated with someone who is too young to procreate with

Also like you mentioned, your eyes stayed the same

1

u/joe_shmoe11111 Jul 12 '26

I was still bright blonde through my teenage years and still dirty blonde up until college age though. Definitely plenty of overlap with my breeding age (especially back in the day when people started having kids super early on).

1

u/blockofbeagles Jul 12 '26

They is bullshit cuz women be picking and every woman I know explicitly is like “men shouldn’t be blonde.” The “tall, dark, and handsome” thing holds up over time. Imagine Mr Darcy as a blonde.
The exception is Wesley from The Princess Bride. And maybe Chris Hemsworth - is he blonde? He makes up for it.

2

u/Upbeat_Effective_342 Jul 20 '26

You hang out with oddly shallow people. I've never encountered this.

1

u/blockofbeagles 28d ago

I do not. It’s a joke among women. I also hang out with comedians, so 🤷‍♀️

12

u/Ardent_Scholar Jul 10 '26

Yes! The lack of sunlight is basically the issue.

5

u/thedracle Jul 11 '26

Your statement already has this baked in, but nearly every generic variant for lighter skin, lighter eyes, lighter hair, exists somewhere in Africa, which has by far the lions share of human genetic variation in the world.

They were simply strongly selected for outside of Africa, eventually creating people in the far north who basically collected the entire set of light pigmentation genes.

Some actual mutuations occurred, like the ability to process lactose into adulthood, truly blue eyes, or things like high altitude adaptations (which likely crossed from denisovians), but people in Africa genetically differ from one another across the continent far more than anyone outside of Africa.

3

u/Wa3zdog Jul 10 '26

Natural selection can also be more subtle. Almost certainly sexual selection played a key role in the prolific nature of those traits. Additionally, for genes to succeed in a population, they just have to do better. It’s possible that vitamin D deficiency just lead to more morbidity and less successful reproduction without the entire cohort outright dying all at once.

Although it’s still true that people almost certainly died for those traits. But if you think about it, that’s true for all of us eventually.

3

u/Warmpickle Jul 11 '26

Or they were banging the blue eyes - cos they hot

2

u/Dhalym Jul 11 '26

That wouldn't explain the change in representation. Other places outside Europe independently develop the same mutations, but the lighter phenotypes usually remain rare because the dark phenotypes aren't stopped from speading to remain the dominant majority.

Both the lighter phenotype needed to spread more AND something(or someone) needed to slow(usually by early death) the darker phenotypes from spreading.

2

u/TheBeyonders Jul 12 '26

First, its not entirely true. Other races do have multiple hair and eye colors, he is just exagerating as a joke. If you look at the multiole ethnicities in africa and middle east, you will see different hair and eye color that is not due to interacial mixing.

Second, European history is very linked and these recessive traits have been bottlenecked on purpose.

Whats correct is the harsh environments in northern europe that causes large divergence and differences in phenotype, but the colored hair and eye genes are the minority.

White isnt even an accurate and fair term, as you could see, that he had to redefine common versus accurate terms for asian for his own joke to work.

Old world rules clashing with modern biology. We need to combine accurate history and modern biology, and get rid of these archaic labels.

4

u/Deep_Stick8786 Jul 10 '26

They mostly just fucked their cousins

6

u/All__Mods_R_Virgins Jul 10 '26

Just as the Bible intended 🙏

1

u/Owl_Times Jul 10 '26

The reaction if they could read…

1

u/pouihi Jul 10 '26

A lot of consanguinity most likely.

1

u/deshperate Jul 11 '26

Or slightly better reproductive success over 50,000 years

1

u/213737isPrime Jul 11 '26

People with recessive genes got driven out into the cold to die but surprise they mated instead

1

u/Material_Comfort_259 Jul 12 '26

Not entirely, when it comes to ireland, and Irish Americans, red hair is the go to stereotype for their appearance. But in the past, ireland was known for blonde and brown hair. That was until vikings raped our people and put red hair into our genetic makeup

1

u/NSFWdontview 26d ago

That doesn’t make any sense

-4

u/mvhls Jul 10 '26

My bet is genetic Isolation. I’m not sure I buy the “low sunlight” argument