How did the different races come about?

[Ave Maria]

Ok, if humanity started with one man and one woman (Adam and Eve) which is what I believe since I am a Young Earth Creationist, how did all the different races come about?

 

[St. Worm2]

Good question! The Bible doesn't talk about different races though. There is, in fact, only one race, the "human" race, yes?

He made from one man* (some translations say "blood"*) every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth. Acts 17:26

After the Flood (and Babel, of course), tribes and nations became isolated in different regions of the globe and environmental factors allowed for the rise of certain traits and the suppression of others over time.

Hope that helps a bit.

Yours and His,
David
p.s. - The entire "human" race actually has the same skin color. The difference in the skin tones is produced by higher or lower levels of a substance called Melanin.

 

[Apollo Rhetor]

We are all descendents of Adam & Eve. Adam & Eve possessed in them enough genetic diversity to have children representing all the races alive today.

On the basis of "only" 6.7 % heterozygosity, Ayala calculates that the average human couple could have 10^2017 children before they would have to have one child identical to another! That number, a one followed by 2017 zeroes, is greater than the number of sand grains by the sea, the number of stars in the sky, or the atoms in the known universe (a "mere" 10^80)!

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-089.htm

There is tremendous genetic diversity within each of us. There are other explanations for the diversity, but I won't confuse you with more for now.

It may be worth your time to read about inheritence, very informative.

 

[Ave Maria]

I've always assumed that the environmental differences is what caused racial differences to come about. For example, Africans are black because they have a permanent tan or something. Please don't take this to be offensive! That's honestly what I always thought. I figured that they are dark skinned because they have lived in such a sunny region for so long that they stayed tanned almost constantly and not it's like a genetic thing.

But I agree St. Worm2, there is indeed one human race.

I have read a couple of the articles here: http://www.christiananswers.net/race.html but I didn't really understand them. I really am not very good at science and genetics and stuff really confuses me. Oh by the way, Christian Answers is an excellent Fundamentalist Christian apologetics site. They support Biblical inerrancy, and Young Earth Creationism.

 

[Micaiah]

God wrote Genesis so that even those without a PHD in science could understand the important facts we need to know about our origins. You do not have to understand it all, or know how to defend it before a PHD professor, just accept and believe it by faith.

You will be aware that there are well qualified Christian scientists who have looked into some of the issues raised, and while they do not claim to know everything, they have found time and again that the scientific evidence fits well with the earths age deduced from the Bible ie. about 6000 years. I have found the AIG site is particularly helpful.

If skin colour is due to the sun, how come the eskimos have dark skin? I'm not sure of the answer here, but I suspect that there are other factors to consider. Mind you, most of the natives I can think of with very dark skin come from countries where they are exposed to the hot sun.

 

[KleinerApfel]

God wrote Genesis so that even those without a PHD in science could understand the important facts we need to know about our origins. You do not have to understand it all, or know how to defend it before a PHD professor, just accept and believe it by faith.

That's a good point to remember, Micaiah, especially when we get confused over something which seems irresolvable, or are challenged by someone of a different view who appears more knowledgeable.

God bless, Susana

 

[lucaspa]

FYI

1 G Kirchwager, Black and white: the biology of skin color. Discover 22: 32-33, Feb. 2001.

Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin have the first comprehensive theory of skin color. Humans need sweat glands to cool their skin and brain; then they need less hair for sweat glands to work better. Then they need dark skin to protect against the effects of the sun on hairless skin. The sunburns are bad enough, but an hour of intense sunlight cuts folate (vitamin B) in half. Folate is necessary for both sperm production and normal development of the fetus. Without folate, the neural tube (spinal cord and brain) doesn't develop properly and you get birth defects such as spina bifida and worse. So, without dark skin in the tropics, men don't produce enough sperm to have kids and the kids that are conceived are going to have birth defects that kill them.

The other side of this is vitamin D. Vitamin D isn't really a vitamin. It's made in our skin by the action of UV light on cholesterol. Vitamin D is essential for a normal skeleton and nerve function. Without vitamin D, you get rickets (in both children and adults) and have nerve problems because you don't absorb enough calcium.

In the tropics, the sunlight is intense enough, even with dark skin, to make enough vitamin D. However, as humans migrated out of Africa into colder climates, they 1) began wearing more clothes and 2) the intensity of sunlight was weaker (especially in winter). So dark skinned people didn't make enough vitamin D and had rickets or nerve problems.

Skin color generally matches sunlight: the weaker the UV light, the lighter the skin. The eskimos are an exception that tests the rule. They are relatively recent migrants to the Arctic. However, they eat a lot of whale livers in their diet, and livers of animals are very high in vitamin D. So they get their vitamin D in their diet, not by sunlight converting cholesterol.

 

[JohnR7]

Good question! The Bible doesn't talk about different races though. There is, in fact, only one race, the "human" race, yes?

Race has been a falsified theory from it's very beginning. There is more diversity within a "race", then there is difference between the so called races.

 

[JohnR7]

Africans are black because they have a permanent tan or something.

Skin is white, eyes are blue or green and hair is usually either blond or red. Anything darker than that is usually caused by pigment. The melanin pigment in the skin does protect the skin from the more direct rays of the sunlight, esp. for people who live closer to the equator.

My wife is from the Philippines and she will at times carry a umbrella in the summer to keep the sun off of her, so she does not get any darker. At work she will joke with the lighter skinned people to give her some of their white, and they will joke with her to give them some of her tan.

I ran a google serch using her maiden name and there are a lot of professors at universities all over India with her last name. Which leads me to believe that somewhere along the way her family migrated to the Philippines from India. But you can not tell her apart from someone from Taiwan.

I could get someone from Malaysia, Taiwan, Polynesia, Hawaii, Alaska, Native American, Mexico and so on, inless you really knew what to look for, you would not be able to tell them apart.

 

[KleinerApfel]

I have read a couple of the articles here: http://www.christiananswers.net/race.html but I didn't really understand them. I really am not very good at science and genetics and stuff really confuses me.

Holly, I just went and looked at that article.
I agree it's a bit complex, so I thought I'd try to give a simpler explanation about genetics from my own understanding.

I'm not especially well qualified; just the equivalent of today's GCSE biology, and general nurse training.
However, sometimes it's easier for a not-so-clever person to explain than for an expert to try to simplify, so here's hoping this will help:

If anyone can improve on it please do!

God made the first human pair complete and unspoiled.

God made sure that between the two of them, Adam and Eve held every piece of genetic information which would ever be needed, in order to accomplish His purpose of filling the world with beautifully diverse people; to love Him and each other, and to care for the world in various ways.

Some characteristics are dormant or recessive, so Adam and Eve did not have to display all of these characteristics themselves, they merely carried them.

We are told that they had other children, over a period of several centuries, apart from the named ones.
Each child is unique in their genetic inheritance, as someone has already said.

I’ll use red hair for a simplified illustration of how genetic traits are inherited:

Child A
Carries the gene for red hair, as well as genes for other colours.
He has red hair himself.
He is able to pass the gene on to some or all of his own children.
Some of them will have the gene; maybe some of them will have red hair.

Child B
Carries the gene for red hair, as well as genes for other colours.
He has brown hair, yet is still able to pass on the trait for red hair to his children, just as above.

Child C
Does not inherit the gene for red hair at all, only genes for other colours.
He will only pass on the genes he does have, so can't pass on the red hair gene.
None of his children will ever have red hair, unless his wife carries the gene and passes it on to them.

If Child C marries a woman who also has no genes for red hair, they will have no red-haired children.

Some genes have to be present on both parents inorder for a child to receive them, others can be inherited from only one parent.

Suppose a group of families with this (C) and other similar genetic information move away to a remote area, and intermarry for some time.

There will never be any red haired people in that population. Other characteristics will be passed on among them.

This is what we are told happened at Babel – different tribes went to different places following the confusion of languages.

Over some years the children of children A and B and C clans will begin to look significantly different from each other.

Red hair is just one over-simplified example of how this might be seen to work.

Imagine all the genetic differences there could have been, even in the first generation after Adam and Eve:

height;
body shape;
colour of eyes, skin, hair;
straight or curly hair;
blood group;
shape of facial features;
all sorts of other things!

As others suggest, there will be an impact by climate on which characteristics thrive in a given area too.

It's not surprising to me that we have great diversity over the earth today.

God bless, Susana

 

[Ave Maria]

Holly, I just went and looked at that article.
I agree it's a bit complex, so I thought I'd try to give a simpler explanation about genetics from my own understanding.

I'm not especially well qualified; just the equivalent of today's GCSE biology, and general nurse training.
However, sometimes it's easier for a not-so-clever person to explain than for an expert to try to simplify, so here's hoping this will help:

If anyone can improve on it please do!

God made the first human pair complete and unspoiled.

God made sure that between the two of them, Adam and Eve held every piece of genetic information which would ever be needed, in order to accomplish His purpose of filling the world with beautifully diverse people; to love Him and each other, and to care for the world in various ways.

Some characteristics are dormant or recessive, so Adam and Eve did not have to display all of these characteristics themselves, they merely carried them.

We are told that they had other children, over a period of several centuries, apart from the named ones.
Each child is unique in their genetic inheritance, as someone has already said.

I’ll use red hair for a simplified illustration of how genetic traits are inherited:

Child A
Carries the gene for red hair, as well as genes for other colours.
He has red hair himself.
He is able to pass the gene on to some or all of his own children.
Some of them will have the gene; maybe some of them will have red hair.

Child B
Carries the gene for red hair, as well as genes for other colours.
He has brown hair, yet is still able to pass on the trait for red hair to his children, just as above.

Child C
Does not inherit the gene for red hair at all, only genes for other colours.
He will only pass on the genes he does have, so can't pass on the red hair gene.
None of his children will ever have red hair, unless his wife carries the gene and passes it on to them.

If Child C marries a woman who also has no genes for red hair, they will have no red-haired children.

Some genes have to be present on both parents inorder for a child to receive them, others can be inherited from only one parent.

Suppose a group of families with this (C) and other similar genetic information move away to a remote area, and intermarry for some time.

There will never be any red haired people in that population. Other characteristics will be passed on among them.

This is what we are told happened at Babel – different tribes went to different places following the confusion of languages.

Over some years the children of children A and B and C clans will begin to look significantly different from each other.

Red hair is just one over-simplified example of how this might be seen to work.

Imagine all the genetic differences there could have been, even in the first generation after Adam and Eve:

height;
body shape;
colour of eyes, skin, hair;
straight or curly hair;
blood group;
shape of facial features;
all sorts of other things!

As others suggest, there will be an impact by climate on which characteristics thrive in a given area too.

It's not surprising to me that we have great diversity over the earth today.

God bless, Susana

Thank you The Lord is my banner! I was able to understand your explanation a lot easier than I did those articles! I really appreciate you explaining it. That does make sense and I think I have heard something similar to it before. But like I said, I'm not very good at science. I really don't even have a working knowledge of genetics though. I need to study up some.

 

[KleinerApfel]

Glad that helped

Blessings, Susana

 

[PotLuck]

Absolutely spot on The Lord is my banner

In the beginning was perfection. As time goes by information is lost through mutation and please forgive the term ... "natural selection". Information is not gained through mutation but lost in keeping with "order to chaos" and not the other way around.

Yes, creationists can believe natural selection.
(a very simplified example)
Let's suppose two dogs have medium length fur with the genes to make long and short fur. Since each has both then medium fur results. short/short = short fur. long/long = long fur and short/long = medium length fur.
Let's suppose some range to a colder climate or the environment becomes colder. The short and medium fur creatures will die off and only the long fur dogs will survive. After a time only the long fur genes will be present since the short fur gene has been lost. In this respect natural selection has "weeded out" the short/medium fur dogs. They have "adapted" to their environment through natural selection.
Now, if the climate changes to become much warmer it's possible that species of dog will become extinct unable to deal with the heat since the information to produce short fur is no longer present.

 

[Dust and Ashes]

I personally believe that the genetic code for all human characteristics were in Adam and Eve. Then later on after the Flood:

Tribe A moves south into Africa. Wow, it's hot and sunny there and all the light skinned people die from skin cancer or can't reproduce (read lucaspa's post) so over thousands of years, they are all dark skinned with little body hair.

Tribe B moves up north. Yikes, it's cold up there and snows a LOT. People with light eyes suffer less from snow blindness so they survive the winters better than dark eyed people and it sure helps to have a little more body hair. Maybe blonde hair helps keep heat in better or works as camo or something. (Just throwing ideas around. )

Etc, etc, etc...

Just my opinion.

 

[PotLuck]

Yes, all info was present in Adam and Eve, they were perfect.

It's like the color white consisting of all colors.
(again this is simplistic for illustration)

On the way north a white circle loses yellow because red and blue are beneficial to adapting to the environment so purple flourishes. On the way south a white circle loses blue because red and yellow are beneficial in the south so orange is the predominant color. A little time passes and yellow in the north is lost (bred out) and in the south blue disappears.

So two "species" come from a certain "type" by loss of information, not by gaining information.

With no inbreeding between north and south it is impossible for the northern species to get back to white since the information isn't there. Same in the south.
If one of those species dies out or becomes extinct then some information from white can be lost forever.

 

[PotLuck]

Immunities can operate the same way. Adam, being perfect, could very well have been immune to everything. As time goes by information is lost and a disease comes into the world. A disease that wasn't common many years ago could become common years later simply through loss of information for immunity.

As a creationist I believe all information for all adaptations within a "type" is/was present. The loss of info specifies the species within that type that comes into being.

(pure speculation but interesting I think)
Is it possible then that immunity to AIDS, or more accurately the information to produce the immunity, was lost through the years and AIDS becomes a modern disease? If that's the case then AIDS may not have "come" from Africa OR what did come from somewhere destroyed the information for that immunity.

 

[lucaspa]

In the beginning was perfection.

Can you please provide the Biblical reference for this? I can't find "perfect" stated anywhere in Genesis 2-5 in relation to Adam and Eve. What am I missing? In Genesis 1 I find where God pronounces pieces of creation as "good" and the totality as "very good", but never perfect.

Yes, creationists can believe natural selection.
(a very simplified example)
Let's suppose two dogs have medium length fur with the genes to make long and short fur. Since each has both then medium fur results. short/short = short fur. long/long = long fur and short/long = medium length fur.
Let's suppose some range to a colder climate or the environment becomes colder. The short and medium fur creatures will die off and only the long fur dogs will survive. After a time only the long fur genes will be present since the short fur gene has been lost. In this respect natural selection has "weeded out" the short/medium fur dogs.

Why isn't this that the long furred alleles (not genes, but forms of genes are called alleles) are preserved? Now, the population is different from the one in the past, since there are only long furred alleles present.

What would happen if longer legs were required to chase down fast prey? Then you would have a population of dogs that were all long furred and long legged. Then what happens when shorter, but more erect ears are needed to adapt to hear the prey? Soon, all the long-eared and floppy-eared alleles are gone. So now you have a population of creatures with long fur, long legs, and short, erect ears. Are they still dogs? Would they still be able to breed with the original population way back in time hundreds of generations ago? Or would the genome be so different from then that the new creatures would be a new kind?

How do you stop natural selection from producing a new kind by accumulating adaptations over generations of time?

 

[PotLuck]

Is there any solid proof that I can get a new type from other types? Can I trace the path unerringly from say a fish to a cat?

A mutation within a kind loses information. Can I gain information during mutation to produce a higher kind of animal? I believe that's the mechanism used to go from particles to people but has it been shown that gaining information to build a higher animal through mutation is a scientific fact? It may be a belief but as yet it's still the theory to support evolution.

If enough information is lost during mutation the organism can't survive. I can't get from one kind to another kind by the loss of information. If I lose information on how to build a cat I get less of a cat, not another type of animal altogether. If this was the case then I should see "U turns" in the "evolutionary tree".

 

[adam149]

I've always assumed that the environmental differences is what caused racial differences to come about. For example, Africans are black because they have a permanent tan or something. Please don't take this to be offensive! That's honestly what I always thought. I figured that they are dark skinned because they have lived in such a sunny region for so long that they stayed tanned almost constantly and not it's like a genetic thing.

But I agree St. Worm2, there is indeed one human race.

I have read a couple of the articles here: http://www.christiananswers.net/race.html but I didn't really understand them. I really am not very good at science and genetics and stuff really confuses me. Oh by the way, Christian Answers is an excellent Fundamentalist Christian apologetics site. They support Biblical inerrancy, and Young Earth Creationism.

Geneticists do not feel that enviromental factors have anything to do with skin color.

The concept that racial differentiation (e.g. physiology, appearance, shape of bones, skin color, etc) can be permenantly influenced by enviromental factors. In fact, that very idea comes from the old evolutionary hypothesis of Lamarkism. Lamark was a philosophy (non-scientist) who postulated that effects happening to parents would be passed on to children. For example, if a giraffe strained its neck to get at the leaves at the top of trees and it's neck got a little longer as a result of the stretching, when that giraffe had offspring, they would start with that slightly longer neck. They would stretch too, and their necks would get longer. And they would have offspring which would stretch, etc, etc., and eventually, the giraffe's neck would be at the length it is today. Even Charles Darwin bought into this theory of evolution.

But it poses some problems, because the theory predicts that if a parent were to have their arm chopped off, any children would not have that arm the parent lost. Mendel, the father of modern genetics disproved this theory when he lopped the tails off of 19 generations of mice, but the new born mice always had tails.

Skin color is determined by genetics. Here are some good articles on the origin of the races and genetics.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/AnswersBook/races18.asp

also see this site: http://www.onehumanrace.com/

THe chapters to the book One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism are online
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/oneblood/intro.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/OneBlood/chapter1.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/OneBlood/chapter2.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/OneBlood/chapter3.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/oneblood/chapter4.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/OneBlood/chapter5.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/oneBlood/chapter6.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/oneblood/chapter7.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/oneblood/chapter8.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/oneblood/chapter9.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/oneblood/chapter10.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/OneBlood/chapter11.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/OneBlood/closing.asp

 

[KleinerApfel]

What would happen if longer legs were required to chase down fast prey? Then you would have a population of dogs that were all long furred and long legged. Then what happens when shorter, but more erect ears are needed to adapt to hear the prey? Soon, all the long-eared and floppy-eared alleles are gone. So now you have a population of creatures with long fur, long legs, and short, erect ears. Are they still dogs? Would they still be able to breed with the original population way back in time hundreds of generations ago? Or would the genome be so different from then that the new creatures would be a new kind?

How do you stop natural selection from producing a new kind by accumulating adaptations over generations of time?

They would still be dogs surely?

Blessings, Susana