How did all the Different Races Arise? (from Noah's family)
According to the Bible, all humans on earth today are descended from Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives, and before that from Adam and Eve. It is obvious that we have many different groups or races with what seem to be greatly differing features. The most obvious of these is skin colour. Many see this as a reason to doubt the Bible's record of history. They believe that the various groups could have arisen only by evolving separately over tens of thousands of years.
As will be seen, this is not so. Modern knowledge of how features such as skin colour are inherited shows that it would have taken only a few generations after an event such as the Bible records as having happened at Babel to produce many different groups with distinct characteristics. And there is good evidence to show that, in fact, the various groups of people we have today have not been separated for huge periods of time.
What is a "Race"?
In one sense, of course, there is only one race--the human race. The Bible teaches us that God has "made of one blood all nations of men" (Acts 17:26). Scripture distinguishes people by tribal or national groupings, not by skin colour or physical appearances. Clearly, though, there are groups of people who have certain features (e.g., skin colour) in common, which makes them different from other groups. For convenience, we shall refer to these groups as races, since the human races are all part of one species--Homo saplens (wise man). This, of course, tells us immediately that all races can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring; if not, they would have to be classified as separate species. This indicates that the biological differences between the races are not very great.
Anthropologists generally classify people into a fairly small number of main racial groups, such as the Caucasoid, the Mongoloid (which includes, for example, the American Indians), the Negroid, and the Australoid (the Australian Aborigines). Within each classification, there may be many different sub-groups.
Virtually all evolutionists would agree that the various races of men did not have separate origins, that is, they did not each evolve from a different group of animals, for instance. So they would agree with the Biblical creationist that all races have come from the same original population. Of course, they believe that such groups as the Aborigines and the Chinese have had many, many tens of thousands of years of separation, and most people believe that there are such vast differences between the races that there had to be many years for these differences to somehow develop. One reason for this is that people believe that some races have unique features in their hereditary make-up which others do not. This is an understandable but incorrect idea.
Let's look at skin colour, for instance. It is easy to think that since different groups of people have yellow skin, red skin, black skin, white skin, and brown skin, there must be many different skin pigments or colourings. And since different chemicals for c olouring would mean a different genetic recipe or code in the hereditary blueprint in each race, it appears to be a real problem. How could all those differences be present within a short time?
The fact is, however, that there is only one melanin. This is a brownish pigment which we all have in special cells in our skin. If we have none (as do people called albinos, who suffer from an inherited mutation-caused defect, which means they lack the ability to produce melanin), then we will have a very white skin colouring (actually pink-white because of blood vessels showing through the skin). If we produce only a little melanin, it means that we will be European white. If our skin produces a great deal of melanin, we will be a very deep black. And in between, of course, are all shades of brown. There are no other skin pigments; other factors such as the extra thickness of the overlying skin in the Chinese, for example, can give a yellowish effect. And this is not only true for skin colour. Whatever feature we may look at, no race has anything which is, in its essence, uniquely different from that possessed by another. For example, the Chinese eye, or almond eye, gets its appearance simply by having an extra fold of fat. Both Chinese and Caucasian eyes have fat--the latter simply have less of it.)
We will shortly see how all the shades of skin colour would take only a very short time to come about, but first let's just find out what melanin is for. It protects the skin against the effects of sunlight. If you have too little in a very sunny environment, you will very easily suffer from sunburn and skin cancer. If you have a great deal of melanin, and you live in a country where there is little sunshine, it is much harder for your body to get adequate amounts of vitamin D (which needs sunshine for its production in your body), and you may suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which could cause a bone disorder such as rickets.
We also need to be aware that one is not born with a genetically fixed amount of melanin, but rather with a genetically fixed potential to produce a certain amount in response to sunlight. For example, if you are a Caucasian, you may have noticed that when your friends headed for the beach at the very beginning of summer, they may, if they spent all their time indoors during winter, have all been more or less the same pale white. As the summer went on, however, some became much darker than others.
Let's look at a few observations which can help us to explain how many different skin colours can arise in a short time. (From here on, whenever we use such words as different colours we are, strictly speaking, referring to different shades of the one colour.) If a person from a very black race marries someone from a very white race, their offspring (called mulattos) are mid-brown. It has long been known that if people of mulatto descent marry, their offspring may be virtually any colour, ranging from very black to very white. Understanding this gives us the clues we need for our overall question, so we must first look, in a simple way, at some of the basic facts of heredity.
Heredity
Each of us carries in our body information which describes us in the way a blueprint describes a finished building. It determines not only that we will be human beings, rather than cabbages or crocodiles, but also whether we will have blue eyes, short nose, long legs, etc. When a male sperm fertilizes an egg, all the information that specifies how the person will be built (ignoring such superimposed factors as exercise and diet) is already present. This information is not in written form, at least not in an ordinary type of language, but it is written down in one sense. A piece of string with beads on it can carry a message in Morse code.
Can you see how the piece of string, by the use of a simple sequence of short beads, long beads, and spaces (to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code), can carry the same information as the English word "help" typed on a sheet of paper? The entire Encyclopedia Britannica could be written thus in Morse Code on a long-enough piece of string.
In a similar way, the human blueprint is written in a code (or language convention) which is carried on a very long chemical called DNA.
DNA
The word "gene" means a small part of that information which carries the instructions for only one feature. A small length of string with only one specification on it is a simple way of understanding it.
For example, there is one gene which carries the instructions on how to make haemoglobin, the chemical which carries oxygen in your red blood cells. If that gene has been damaged by mutation, the instructions will be faulty, so it will make a crippled form of haemoglobin, if any. (There are a number of diseases, e.g., sickle-cell anaemia and thalassaemia, which result from such mistakes, called mutations.)
So, going back to that cell, that egg which has just been fertilized - where does all its information, its genes, come from? One half has come from the father (carried by the sperm), and the other half from the mother (carried in the egg). Genes come in matching pairs, so in the case of haemoglobin, for example, we have two genes, which both contain the code (instruction) for haemoglobin manufacture, one from the mother and one from the father. This is a very useful arrangement, because if you inherit a gene from one parent which is damaged and can instruct your cells to produce only a defective haemoglobin, the other one from the other parent will continue to give the right instructions, so that only half the haemoglobin in your body is defective. (In fact, each of us carries hundreds of mistakes, inherited from one or the other of our parents, which are usefully covered up by being matched with a normal gene from the other parent.)
Let's take another example, to ensure that before we talk about skin colour you will have a good basic understanding of heredity (simplified, of course). Blue and brown eyes are also a result of whether you have melanin in the iris of your eye. If you have it, your eyes are brown; if not, they appear blue, but they are, in fact, non-brown. (The sky appears blue, but has no blue colouring chemical in it.)
Let's call the gene which gives the instructions to make melanin in your iris B. This gene says to your cells, in effect, "Make melanin for the iris." There is another gene {1} (let's call it b) which occupies the same place in the blueprint, and which says nothing about manufacturing melanin. So if you inherit the B from your father, and b from your mother, they will line up together.
Remember that a sperm from a man, or an egg from a woman, can carry only one half of any pair--if a man's code in relation to his eye colour is Bb, then his sperm can carry either b or B.
Can you see how a child can be born with blue eyes although both parents have brown eyes? This is because both parents carried the hidden factor for blue eyes. Continuing with this, we can work out what proportion of their offspring, on average, should have blue eyes. We do this by means of a simple concept called a punnet square. (Just persevere a little; it becomes relevant to skin colour in a moment!)
The squares give you the possible combinations in the offspring; it is a little like finding a location from a street map; BB is where the horizontal B meets the vertical B, and so on. You can see that there are three ways to get brown eyes and only one way to get blue. This means that, on average, only one quarter of such a couple's children will have blue eyes.
Skin Colour
We know that skin colour is governed by at least two (possibly more) sets of genes. Let's call them A and B, with the correspondingly more silent genes a and b, in a similar way to the eye example. (The small letters in this case code for a small amount of melanin.) So a very dark race which, on intermarriage, kept producing only very dark offspring, would be AA BB; the same situation for a very fair-skinned race would be aa bb. Let's look at what combinations would result in a mulatto (the offspring of an AA BB and aa bb union).
What would happen, by using a punnet square, if two such mid-brown mulatto people were to marry (the shading of the squares roughly indicates the resultant skin colour)?
Surprisingly, we find that an entire range of colour, from very white to very black, can result in only ONE GENERATION, beginning with this particular type of mid-brown parents.
Those children born with AABB, who are pure black (in the sense of consistently having no other types of offspring), have no genes for lightness at all. If they were to marry and migrate to a place where their offspring could not intermarry with people of different colours, all their children will be black--a pure "black line" will result. Those who are aabb are white; if they marry other whites and migrate to a place where their offspring cannot marry other colours, a pure (in the same sense) "white line" will result--they have lost the genes which give them the ability to be black, that is, to produce a large amount of melanin.
So you can see how it is easily possible, beginning with two middle-brown parents, to get not only all the colours, but also races with permanently different shades of colouring. But what about races which are permanently middle-brown, such as we have today? Again, this is easily explained. Those of aaBB or AAbb, if they no longer interact with others, will be able to produce only mid-brown coloured offspring. (You may want to work this out with your own punnet square.)
If these pure lines were to interbreed again with other such lines, the process would be reversed. In a short time, their descendants would show a whole range of colours, often in the same family.
If all the humans on earth were to intermarry freely, and then break into random groups which kept to themselves, a whole new set of combinations could emerge. It may be possible to have almond eyes with black skin, blue eyes with black frizzy short hair, etc. We need to remember, of course, that the way in which genes express themselves is turning out to be much more complex than this simplified picture. Sometimes certain genes are linked together. However, the basic point is unaffected.
Even today, close observation shows that within a particular race you will often see a feature normally associated with another. For instance, you will occasionally see a European with a broad flat nose, or a Chinese with very pale skin. Geneticists who study other, less obvious, characteristics are now aware that the difference between the average of each race is not as great as the existing variation within each race. This also argues strongly against the idea that the races have been evolving separately for long periods.
What Really Happened?
We can now reconstruct the true history of the races, using:
- The background information given above.
- The information given by the Creator Himself in the book of Genesis.
- Some consideration of the effect of the environment.
The first created man, Adam, from whom all other humans are descended, was created with the best possible combination of genes--for skin colour, for example. A considerable time after creation, a world-wide flood destroyed all humans except a man called Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. This flood greatly changed the environment. Afterwards, God commanded the survivors to multiply and cover the earth. A few hundred years later, men had chosen to disobey God and to remain united in building a great city, with the Tower of Babel as the focal point of rebellious worship. From Genesis 11:1-32 we understand that up to this time there was only one language, and that God judged the people's disobedience by imposing different languages on man, so that they could not work together against God, and so that they were forced to scatter over the earth as God had originally intended.
So all the races - the Negro, the European, the Australian Aboriginal, and the others - have come into existence since that time.
Noah and his family were probably mid-brown, with genes for both dark and light skin, because a medium skin colour (dark enough to protect against skin cancer, yet light enough to allow vitamin D production) would be the most suitable in the world before the Flood. (It is likely that there were then no harsh extremes of climate.) As all the factors for skin colour were present in Adam and Eve, they would most likely have been mid-brown as well. In fact, most of the world's population today is still mid-brown in colour.
After the Flood, for the few centuries until Babel, there was only one language and one culture group. Thus, there were no barriers to marriage within this group. This would tend to keep the skin colour of the population away from the extremes. Very dark and very light skin would appear, of course, but people tending in either direction would be free to marry someone less dark or less light than themselves, ensuring that the average colour stayed roughly the same. The same would be true of other characteristics, not just skin colour. Under these sorts of circumstances, distinct racial lines will never emerge. This is true for animals as well as human populations, as every biologist knows. To obtain such separate lines, you would need to break a large breeding group into smaller groups and keep them separate, that is, not interbreeding any more.
The Effects of Babel
This is exactly what happened at Babel. Once separate languages were imposed, there were instantaneous barriers. Not only would people tend not to marry someone they couldn't understand, but entire groups which spoke the same language would have difficulty relating to and trusting those which did not. They would tend to move away or be forced away from each other, into different environments. This, of course, is what God intended. It is unlikely that each small group would carry the same broad range of skin colours as the original, larger group. So one group might have more dark genes, on average, while another might have more light genes. The same thing would happen to other characteristics: nose shape, eye shape, etc. And since they would interbreed only within their own language group, this tendency would no longer be averaged out as before.
As these groups migrated away from Babel, they encountered new and different climate zones. This would also have affected the balance of inherited factors in the population, although the effects of the environment are nowhere near as important as the genetic mix with which each group began. As an example, let us look at people who moved to cold areas with little sunlight. In those areas, the dark skinned members of any group would not be able to produce enough vitamin D, and thus would be less healthy and have fewer children. So in time, the light-skinned members would predominate. If several different groups went to such an area, and if one group happened to be carrying few genes for lightness, this particular group could in time die out. This natural selection acts on the characteristics already present, and does not evolve new ones.
It is interesting to note that in the Neanderthals of Europe, an extinct race of men now recognized as fully human, virtually all showed evidence of vitamin D deficiency in their bony skeletons. In fact, it was this, plus a large dose of evolutionary prejudice, which helped cause them to be classified as ape-men for a long time. It is thus quite plausible to suggest that they were a dark-skinned race who were unfit for the environment into which they moved because of the skin colour genes they began with. (Notice that this natural selection, as it is called, does not produce skin colours, but only acts on the created colours that are already there.)
Conversely, fair-skinned people in very sunny regions could easily be affected by skin cancer, in which case dark skinned people would more readily survive.
So we see that the pressure of the environment can (a) affect the balance of genes within a group, and (b) even eliminate entire groups. This is why we see, to a large extent, a fit of characters to their environment (e.g., Nordic people with pale skin, equatorial people with dark skin).
But this is not always so. The Eskimo has darkish skin, yet lives where there is not much sun. The pygmy is in a hot area, but rarely experiences sunshine in his dense jungle environment. And pygmies may be a good example of another factor which has affected the racial history of man: discrimination. If a variation from the normal occurs (e.g., a very light person in a dark race), then historically it has been usual for that person to be regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Thus, such a person would find it hard to get a marriage partner. This would further tend to eliminate light genes from a dark race, and vice versa. In this way, groups have tended to "purify" themselves. Also, in some instances, interbreeding in a small group can highlight any commonly occurring unusual features which would previously have been swamped by continual intermarriage. There is a tribe in Africa whose members all have grossly deformed feet as a result of this inbreeding.
To return to pygmies, if people possessing genes for such short stature were discriminated against because of their size, and a small group of them sought refuge in the deepest forest, their marrying only each other would ensure a pygmy race from then on. The fact that pygmy tribes never have their own languages, but instead speak dialects of neighbouring non-pygmy tribal languages, is good evidence in support of this.
The Effects of Choice
Human groups that were already equipped with certain characteristics may have made deliberate (or semi-deliberate) choices concerning the environments to which they migrated. For instance, people with genes for a thicker, more insulating layer of fat under their skin would tend to leave areas that were uncomfortably hot.
Other Evidence
The evidence for the Bible's account of human origins is more than just biological and genetic. Since all races descended from Noah's family a relatively short time ago, we would be surprised if, in the stories and legends of many of the groups, there was not some memory, albeit distorted by time and retelling, of such a catastrophic event. In fact, an overwhelming number of cultures do have such an account of a world-destroying Flood. Often these have startling parallels to the true, original account (eight people saved in a boat, a rainbow, the sending of the birds, and more).
Summing Up
In summary, the dispersion at Babel, breaking a large interbreeding group into small, inbreeding groups, ensured that the resultant groups would have different mixes of genes for various physical features. By itself, this would ensure, in a short time, that there would be certain fixed differences in some of these groups which we would call separate races. In addition, the selection pressure of the environment would modify the existing combinations of genes, causing a tendency for characteristics to suit their environment. There has been no simple-to-complex evolution of any genes, for the genes were present already. The features of the various races result from different combinations of previously existing created genes, plus some minor changes in the direction of degeneration, resulting from mutation (accidental changes which can be inherited). The originally created (genetic) information has been either reshuffled or degenerated, not added to.
Consequences of a False Belief Concerning the Origin of the Races
Rejection of the Gospel Since the accuracy of the historical details of Genesis is crucial to the trustworthiness of the Bible and to the whole Gospel message, {3} the popular belief that races have evolved their different features, and could not all have come from Noah's family, has eroded belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Racism One of the biggest justifications for racial discrimination in modern times is the belief that, because races have allegedly evolved separately, they are at different stages of evolution, and some races are more backward. Thus, the other person's race may not be as fully human as your own.
Influence on Missionary Outreach Historically, the spread of evolutionary belief was associated with a slackening of fervour to reach the lost in far-away countries. The idea of savage, half-evolved inferior peoples somehow does not give rise to the same missionary urgency as the notion that our cousins, closely linked to us in time and heredity, have yet to hear the Gospel. Even many of the finest of today's missionary organizations have been influenced, often unconsciously, by this deeply ingrained belief in the evolutionary view of how other peoples and their religions came about.
The Bible makes it clear that any newly "discovered" tribe is not a group of people who have never had any superior technology or knowledge of God in their culture. Rather, their culture began with (a) a knowledge of God, and (b) technology at least sufficient to build a boat of ocean-liner size. In looking for the reasons for some of this technological loss and cultural degeneration (see Appendix II in this topic), Romans 1:1-32 suggests that it is linked to the deliberate rejection by one of their ancestors of the worship of the living God. A full appreciation of this would mean that we would not see the need to educate several generations and give them technical aid as a first priority, but would see their real and urgent need for the Gospel as first and foremost.
In fact, most "primitive" tribes still have a memory, in their folklore and, religion, of the fact that their ancestors turned away from the living God, the Creator. Don Richardson, missionary of Peace Child fame, has shown that a missionary approach, unblinded by evolutionary bias, and thus looking for this link and utilizing it, has borne a bountiful and blessed harvest on many occasions.
Jesus Christ, God's reconciliation in the face of man's rejection of the Creator, is the truth that can set men and women of every culture, technology, race or colour, truly free.
Appendix 1: Black People and the Curse on Ham
The above shows clearly that the blackness of, for example, Negroes, is merely one particular combination of inherited factors. This means that these factors themselves, though not in that combination, were originally present in Adam and Eve. Black skin could not, therefore, have come about from the curse on Ham. This common belief that the skin colour of black people is a result of a curse on Ham and his descendants is nowhere taught in the Bible. It has been used to justify slavery and other non-Biblical racist attitudes. It is traditionally believed that the African nations are largely Hamitic, and there is some evidence for this. Genesis suggests that the dispersion was probably along family lines, and it may be that Ham's descendants were on average darker than, say, Japheth's. However, it could just as easily have been the other way around.
Appendix II: "Stone Age" People
Archaeology shows that there were once people who lived in caves and used simple stone tools. Observation shows that there are still people who do the same. We have seen evidence that all people on earth today are descended from Noah and his family. Before the Flood, Genesis indicates, there was at least sufficient technology to make musical instruments, to farm, build cities, and build a very large seaworthy vessel. After the dispersion at Babel, the hostilities induced by the new languages may have forced some groups to scatter rather rapidly, finding shelter where and when they could.
In some instances, the stone tools may simply have been a stage until their settlements were fully established, and they had found and exploited metal deposits, for example. In others, the original diverging group may not have taken all the knowledge with them. Ask an average group today how many of them, if they had to start again, as it were, would know how to find, mine, and smelt metal-bearing rocks (ore bodies)? Obviously, there has been technological degeneration.
In some cases, harsh environments may have contributed. The Australian Aborigines have a technology and cultural knowledge which, in relation to their lifestyle and need to survive in the dry outback, is most appropriate. This includes aerodynamic principles used in making boomerangs (some of which were designed to return to the thrower, others were not).
Sometimes we see evidence of degeneration which is hard to explain, but is real, none the less. For instance, when Europeans arrived in Tasmania, the Aborigines there had the simplest technology known. They caught no fish, and did not know how to make fire. Yet recent archaeological discoveries lead us to infer that some generations earlier they had more knowledge and equipment.
For instance, archaeologist Rhys Jones believes that in the Aborigines' distant past, these people had equipment to sew skins into more complex clothes than the skins they just slung over their shoulders, according to all descriptions in the early 1800s. It also appears that they were in fact catching and eating fish in the past, but when white men arrived, they had not been doing this for a long time. From this we infer that technology can indeed be lost or abandoned, and is not always retained and built upon.
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Romans 8:28
