beautiful mutants?

researchers at penn state have recently pointed out that light skin is due to a mutation in a single gene.

The team started with the recently released HapMap -- a free and publicly accessible database of DNA sequence variation in the human genome. When researchers looked at variations within the human SLC24A5 gene, they found that the protein specified by the gene was identical in all populations studied, except for the amino acid at one position. At that position, West Africans and East Asians shared the same ancestral sequence with other vertebrates, including zebrafish and chimpanzees. In contrast, all individuals in the European population tested showed a change in one amino acid.

beautiful mutants, indeed.