Friday TED Talk: Nina Jablonski on Skin Color

In this talk from the February 2009 TED Conference, anthropologist Nina Jablonski rehearses the simple correlation between skin color and exposure to the sun. Charles Darwin had alluded to this as a factor in the evolution of skin color, but as Prof. Jablonski explains, he lacked access to the definitive kind of data that NASA could provide, and so was reluctant to publish it as a conjecture:

You may read more about Nina Jablonski here; there is information about the book she has written on this topic here. A transcript of an interview she gave to TED is here. The high-res version of her talk is here, and you may download the talk in other versions from this page.

The TED Global2009 Conference just finished, and there were some truly marvelous talks which I plan to feature as the videos are put up on the TED site. (Right now, the only one available is the talk by Gordon Brown which I featured earlier this week.)