Sunday, March 6, 2011

What Color Was Adam?

Even within 'the church' there is racism and issues of color. Maybe if we understand more about how God created color, we will see all men as equal.

From CreationMoments.com

In western countries, nearly every imaginative painting of Adam and Eve depict two adult Caucasians with fair skin and blue eyes. These images, even used as Bible illustrations, tend to shape the reader's mental image of the first man and woman. The Sunday-school origin of the dark races is often that they were descendants of Adam and Eve who had migrated to a hot climate where the suntan eventually became an inherited characteristic. These images and explanations discredit Christianity.

The true explanation began to be resolved in 1913 when it was shown that human beings carry two genes for color and that each gene consists of "black" or "white" alleles. One allele was received from the mother and the other from the father. The allele is part of the gene, and the gene is part of the DNA – while the DNA resides in the nucleus of every cell in our body.

Our skin color is caused by the pigment melanin, and this is controlled by two pairs of genes that geneticists refer to using the letter designations Aa and Bb, where the capital letter represents dominant genes and the small letters represent recessive genes. A and B, being dominant, produce melanin in good quantity while recessive a and b produce only a minor amount of melanin.

Hence, our coloration depends upon the number of black and white alleles we received from our parents. The color genes express themselves in only one place – specialized skin cells called the melanocytes – that produce granules of melanin that are delivered to neighboring cells.

Eve was made from Adam's rib and was thus a clone of Adam [Genesis 2:21-22]. They would therefore have had identical genes for melanin production. If they were both AABB, they would have been Negroid and produced children of only the darkest of Negroid coloration. If this were the case, the world's population today would be entirely Negro. In fact, only about 10% of the world's population is Negro, so we can be certain that our first parents were not of the AABB combination.

By the same argument, if Adam and Eve had both been aabb, all their children would have been aabb meaning that all their descendants would be the lightest Caucasoid possible – there would be no other colors.

Clearly, this is not the case, so by a process of deduction we can conclude that Adam and Eve were heterozygous, each having two dominant and two recessive genes, AaBb. They would thus have been middle-brown in color and from them, in one generation, the various shades of brown would have been produced.

These color differences were likely amplified following the business at the Tower of Babel [Genesis 11:1-9] when the human gene pool was divided. Loss of genetic information in an isolated population is well known and a problem to breeders of pure-bred dogs, horses and other animals.

It seems that one population group that migrated from the Tower of Babel suffered a greater loss of the genetic information required to produce the melanin and became the Caucasians. The bottom line is that Adam was not white or black but a good middle brown.

Reference: Harrub, B. and Bert Thompson. 2003. The Truth About Human Origins. Alabama: Apologetics Press, Inc. Pages 444-445.

Visit CreationMoments.com for more interesting information.

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4 comments:

Unknown said...

You almost lost me at the "Eve was made from Adam's rib and was thus a clone of Adam [Genesis 2:21-22]" part. A clone is identical, which would mean the same gender. Clearly there was a work of differentiation here. God could do more with "fashioned" her from a rib than make an exact copy and it would certainly have been the point to make her a "suitable helper". So the genetics of of skin color might have also been differentiated into something like Ab and Ba which would allow for all subsequent combinations.

sharingsunshine said...

It's definitely a thought-provoking article and I don't like the word "clone" being used ... but I guess it's to paint a picture of today's scientific language.

Unknown said...

Lets start with some facts garden of Eden was located in Africa. The Gihon river ran through the land. Gihon aka Nile river is located in cush (ethopia).So its safe to say that Adam was place on the continent of Africa.

Adam's name in Hebrew tongue is dark or red earth. It is a sure thing that Adam, being made from dirt in the heart of Africa, was not a white man. This would be most inconsistent with the character of God who does all things well, since its widely known that a light-skinned person would have an extremely time surving in the climate of Africa. Undoubtedly, Adam was a man of color.

Some years ago a group of notable scientists proved mother of all creation was a black-skinned woman. This article appeared on the front cover Newsweek magazine in the sept. 23,1991 issue and a similar article appeared in U.S news and World Report in the Sept 16, 1991.
These are all facts!!! Ladies and Gentleman

sharingsunshine said...

The Bible does give us information on the location of Eden. Per Wikipedia:

The Genesis creation narrative relates the geographical location of both Eden and the garden to four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates), and three regions (Havilah, Assyria, and Kush).

["Kush" is often incorrectly translated as Ethiopia, which was also known as Cush, but in this case thought to be referring to Cossaea which, unlike Ethiopia, does lie within the region being described. See E. A. Speiser, The Rivers of Paradise, reprinted in R. S. Hess & D. T. Tsumura (eds.), I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood, Eisenbrauns, 1994.]

There are hypotheses' that place Eden at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates (northern Mesopotamia), in Iraq (Mesopotamia), Africa, and the Persian Gulf.

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