This interactive assessment of the short film The Biology of Skin Color contains four automatic pause points, during which students answer questions about the film to assess their understanding of the concepts presented. After answering all the questions, students can view and print their answers.

Additional information related to pedagogy and implementation can be found on this resource’s webpage, including suggested audience, estimated time, and curriculum connections.

Key Concepts

• Some traits can provide an advantage to an organism in certain environments but be a disadvantage in other environments.
• Inherited traits that provide a survival and reproductive advantage in a particular environment are more likely to be passed on to the next generation and thus become more common over time.
• Human populations living many generations in a particular part of the world may share variations in certain traits. In spite of these variations, all humans are very closely related and share most traits.
• Variations in genes can lead to differences in biological traits. By studying the DNA sequences of large numbers of people from different populations, scientists can estimate when and where those variations arose.
• Evolution involves trade-offs; a change in a gene that results in an adaptation to one aspect of the environment may be linked to a disadvantage with respect to another aspect of that same environment.
• Molecules in living organisms absorb or reflect certain wavelengths of light from the sun. When a molecule absorbs light, the energy is transformed into other forms of energy.

Student Learning Targets

• Explain the cellular and molecular mechanisms that determine the color of human skin.
• Explain how variations in skin color in humans evolved.