OCA2 makes East Asians white and Europeans blue

Over the history of this weblog I have blogged about pigmentation a fair amount. The major reason is that that's where the money is; unlike height, let alone intelligence, the genetic architecture and evolutionary history of pigmentation has been elucidated with relative clarity. That is, we know roughly the number and nature of the genes which control much of the between population variation in pigmentation. And, we also have some sense of whether the variation is due to natural selection, as well the historical trajectory of the between population differences. For example, consider the HERC2-OCA2 region of the genome in West Eurasians. It is responsibe for ~75% of the variation in blue vs. non-blue eye color. It also seems to be responsible for some variation in skin complexion. This makes sense, as one would presume that different pigmentation related phenotypes would be controlled by the same set of genes. Finally, ...