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 & 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 color. 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 color 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 color or physical appearances. Clearly, though, there are groups of people who have certain features (e.g.,skin color) in common, which makes them different from other groups. For convenience, we shall refer to these groups races, since the human races are all part of one species-Homo sapiens (wise man). This , of course, tells us immediately that all races can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring; if not, they would have been 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 these classifications, there may be many different sub-groups. (the classifications themselves smack of the evolutionary influence on scientist)
Virtually all evolutionist would agree that the various races of men did not have separate origins, that is, they did not evolve from different groups of animals, for instance. So they would agree with the Biblical creationist that all races have a 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 understandable but incorrect. Let's look at skin color , 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 colorings. And since different chemicals for coloring 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 with a short time?
We will shortly see how all the shades of skin color would take 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 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 your friends are Caucasian, you may have noticed that when they 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 color. As the summer went on, however, some became much darker than others. Even very dark skinned races are not born with such a color. It takes exposure to sunlight to switch on the melanin factories in your skin. In very dark skinned people , the areas such as the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, which are very rarely exposed to sunlight, generally stay much lighter than the rest of the body.
Let's look at a few observations which can help us to explain how many different skin colors can arise in a short time. (From here on, whenever we use such words as different colors, we are , strictly speaking, referring to different shades of the same color!) If a person from a very black race marries someone from a very white race, their offspring (called mulattos) are mid-brown. It has been known that if people of mulatto descent marry, their offspring may be virtually any color, 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.
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.
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 color you will have a good basic understanding of heredity (simplified , of course). Blue and brown eyes are also a result of wether you have melanin in the iris of your eye. If you have it,your eyes are brown; if not, they are appear blue, but they are, in fact, non-brown. (the sky appears blue, but has no blue coloring 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 (let's call it b) which occupies the same place in the blueprint, and which says nothing about manufacting melanin. So, if you inherit the B from your father, and b from your mother, they will line up together, like this... Bb. See figure 2 below, figures 3 & 4 show different combonations.
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 color is Bb, then his sperm can carry either b or B. So in Figure 5, we can see how eye color can be inherited.
Look at Figure 4, 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 Figure 4,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 in a moment!)See Figure 1
The square gives 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 quater of such a couple's children will have blue eyes.
We know that skin color is governed by at least two (possibly 4, which does not detract from the arguement using two as a useful example, and actually makes for a greater range of skin shading) 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) (see Figure 7)
What would happen , by using a punnet square, if two such mid-brown mulatto people were to marry? See figure 6. (the shading of the squares roughly indicates the resultant skin color)
Surprisingly , we find that an entire range of color, 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 consistantly 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 colors, all their children will be black - "a pure 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 colors, 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 possible , beginning with two middle-brown parents, to get not only all the colors, but also races with permanently different shades of coloring. 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 middle-brown colored 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 colors, often in the same family. In Britain there were born a most interesting set of twins. One is obviously white, the other obviously dark-skinned. Of course, this is not amazing at all when you do the exercise on paper, based on what we have discussed. (a clue if you want to do it yourself; mother cannot be AABB)
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 link together. However, the basic point is unaffected.
Even today, close observation shows that within a particular race you will see a feature normally associated with another. For instance, you will occasionally see a European with broad flat nose, or a Chinese with very pale skin. Geneticists who study other , less obvious, characteristics are now aware that the differences between the average of each race is not as great as the existing variation within each race! This also argues strongly againist the idea that the races have been evolving separately for long periods.
