> you didn't ask for proof, you asked for evidence I didn't ask for evidence from you. I asked more specifically "Are there any studies giving strong evidence

> you didn't ask for proof, you asked for evidence I didn't ask for evidence from you. I asked more specifically "Are there any studies giving strong evidence as to the causation for evolving white skin? > do you know whether smoking causes cancer? Because all the evidence we have that it does is based on correlation. That's wrong. We understand why smoking causes cancer. Just for example one of chemicals produced by tobacco smoke is benzoapyrene which is a DNA disruptor, producing mutations that can lead to cancer. [1] > It's fundamentally impossible to prove, all we have is evidence. That's progress. We've gone from "It must be important if it was worth evolving white skin over" to "we can't prove that's why we have white skin". The Wikipedia sentence claims an "abundance" of evidence and then only gives one source, which is behind a paywall. So I'm going to recommend an edit to that article to either give more sources or change the "abundance" claim. Furthermore just a few sentences later it contradicts itself with this: "This accounts for the development of dark skin pigmentation of people living near the equator but does not account for the increasingly lighter-skinned people living outside the tropics." Yet more doubt as to why we have white skin. From your source. Finally, the article that started this discussion provides strong evidence that our need for vitamin D is less important than we previously thought. For sure very low levels of vitamin D are dangerous. But the link between vitamin D and health could be reverse causation: sick people stay inside and therefor have less vitamin D. It could also be that exposure to sun provides something more important to health than vitamin D that we are not aware of yet. So the claim that we evolved white skin just for vitamin D is increasingly on less stable ground. I'll stop here because I'm happy that you've gone from what seemed like a factual claim to you claiming that it's something we cannot prove. Who knows, maybe someone clever can prove it. But it sure does seem like the evidence itself (about both vitamin D and skin color) is fairly rapidly changing. [1] https://www.mskcc.org/news/how-do-cigarettes-cause-cancer https://www.mskcc.org/news/how-do-cigarettes-cause-cancer