One problem is that this way of thinking is clearly biased towards a certain kind of carbon-based life that has evolved on a pale blue dot in an unremarkable corner of the cosmos.
No-one's entirely sure why pale skin evolved in these farmers, but their cereal-based diet was probably deficient in Vitamin D. This would have required agriculturalists to synthesise this essential nutrient in their skin using sunlight.
Kulakow et al. (1985) argued from this that pale seed evolved only once, supporting the hypothesis that grain amaranths were domesticated only once in the Americas and the three species differentiated after domestication.
But just as cities won't prosper if they don't cater to the niche resident, the suburbs need to evolve from a pale extension of the city into something more like a self-sustaining archipelago of villages.
Here, we report that cardiac Mb deficit, associated with pale heart colour, has evolved repeatedly during teleost evolution.
It evolved into something weaker, just plain old pale ale, for the home market.
And it is also a bit strange to imagine that we descended from these creepy humanoids (they look like pale, hairless body builders) and then evolved over the course of millions of years to become humans.
I'd point to Daniel Boyarin's thesis in Unheroic Conduct, that the ideal image of Jewish masculinity was constructed in the yeshivot of Europe and idealized a bookish, pale, bearded, feminine male, and hasn't evolved much since.
Since the D. boreale and D. oculare sequences form separate sister lineages to the pale polysphondylids, this suggests that the latter evolved from a dictyostelid-type ancestor.
Seed colour evolved from an initial dark green, through yellowish green, pale yellow and finally dark brown by Stage VII (350 DAF) (Fig. 1A).
