One Blood

The biblical answer to racism

by Ken Ham, Dr Don Batten and Dr Carl Wieland

Chapter 4

One race

There is really only one race—the human race. 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 distinguish them from other groups. As stated earlier, we prefer to call these ‘people groups’ rather than ‘races.’

All peoples can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring. This shows that the biological differences between the ‘races’ are not very great at all. In fact, the DNA differences are trivial, as already pointed out (see chapter 3).

Anthropologists generally classify people into a fairly small number of main racial groups, such as the Caucasoid (European or ‘white’¹), the Mongoloid (which includes the Chinese and the American Indians), the Negroid (black Africans), and the Australoid (the Australian Aborigines). Within each classification, there may be many different subgroups.

Virtually all evolutionists would now agree that the various people groups did not have separate origins; that is, in the evolutionary belief system, the different people groups did not each evolve from a different group of animals. So they would agree with biblical creationists that all people groups have come from the same original population. Of course, they believe that such groups as the Aborigines and the Chinese have had many tens of thousands of years of separation. Most people believe that there are such vast differences between groups that there had to be many years for these differences to somehow develop.

One reason for this is that many people believe that the observable differences come from some people having unique features in their hereditary makeup which others lack. This is an understandable but incorrect idea. 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 people group, it appears to be a real problem. How could all those differences develop within a short time?

Here’s how. We all have the same coloring pigment in our skin: melanin. This is a dark brownish pigment that is found in special cells in our skin. If we have none (as do people called albinos, who suffer from an inherited mutation-caused defect, so they lack the ability to produce melanin), then we will have a very white or pink skin coloring. If we produce 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 significant skin pigments.²

In summary, from currently available information, the really important factor in determining skin color is melanin—the amount produced.

Caucasian and Asian eyes differ in the amount of fat around the eye, as well as a ligament that is lost in most non-Asian babies at about six months of age (arrow).

This situation is true not only for skin color. Generally, whatever feature we may look at, no people group has anything that is, in its essence, uniquely different from that possessed by another. For example, the Asian, or almond-shaped, eye gets its appearance simply by having an extra fold of fat. Both Asian and Caucasian eyes have fat—the latter simply have less of it.

What does melanin do? It protects the skin against damage by ultraviolet light from the sun. If you have too little in a very sunny environment, you will more 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). You may then 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, increasing in response to sunlight. For example, if you are in a Caucasian community, you may have noticed that when your friends headed for the beach at the very beginning of summer, they may, if they spent 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.

But how do we explain the formation of many different shades of skin color arising in such a short biblical time scale (a few thousand years)? Let’s look at a few observations that can help us to explain this. From here on, whenever we use such words as ‘different colors,’ we are, strictly speaking, referring to different shades of the one color, melanin.

If a person from a very black people group marries someone from a very white group, their offspring (called ‘mulattos’) are mid-brown. It has long been known that when mulattos marry each other, 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.

Heredity

Each of us carries information in our body that describes us similar to 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 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 in coded form in our DNA.³ To illustrate coding, a piece of rope with beads on it can carry a message in Morse code.

Can you see how the piece of rope, by using 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 Bible could be written thus in Morse code on a long enough piece of rope.

In a similar way, the human blueprint is written in a code (or language convention), which is carried on very long chemical strings called DNA. This is by far the most efficient information storage system known, surpassing any foreseeable computer technology.⁴ This information is copied (and reshuffled) from generation to generation as people reproduce.

The word ‘gene’ refers to a small part of that information which carries the instructions for manufacturing only one enzyme, for example.⁵ A small portion of the ‘message string,’ with only one specification on it, would be a simple way of understanding this gene concept.

For example, there is a gene that carries the instructions on how to make hemoglobin, the chemical (protein) which carries oxygen in your red blood cells. (Actually, there is more than one gene for hemoglobin, but that does not alter the principles of this necessarily simplified illustration.) If that gene has been damaged by mutation (such as when there are copying mistakes during reproduction), the instructions will be faulty, so it will make a crippled form of hemoglobin, if any. (There are a number of diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia and thalassaemia, which result from such mistakes.)

So, going back to that cell, and that egg which has just been fertilized—where does all of 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 hemoglobin, for example, we have two genes, which both contain the code (instruction) for hemoglobin 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 that is damaged and can instruct your cells to produce only a defective hemoglobin, you are likely to get a normal one from the other parent which will continue to give the right instructions. Thus, only half the hemoglobin in your body will be defective. (In fact, each of us carries hundreds of mistakes, inherited from one or the other of our parents, which are usually covered up by being matched with a normal gene from the other parent—this was discussed earlier.)

Skin color

We know that skin ‘color’ is governed by more than one gene. For simplicity, let’s assume there are only two,⁶ A and B, with the correspondingly ‘more silent’ genes a and b. The small letters in this case will code for a small amount of melanin in the skin. So, a very dark group of people which, on intermarriage, kept producing only very dark offspring, would be AABB; the same situation for a very fair-skinned people would be aabb. The illustration, right, shows what combinations would result in a mulatto (the offspring of an AABB and aabb union).

What would happen, using the Punnett square, if two such mid-brown mulatto people were to marry (the shading of the squares roughly indicates the resultant skin color)?

Surprisingly, we find that an entire range of ‘colors,’ 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 [or M_AM_AM_BM_B in the following illustration], 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 lighter color, all their children would be black—a pure ‘black line’ would result.

Those with aabb [or m_Am_Am_Bm_B] are white. If they marry other whites and migrate to a place where their offspring cannot marry darker people, a pure (in the same sense) ‘white line’ will result—they have lost genes that 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 ‘colors,’ but also people groups with stable coloring. But what about people groups that 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 colored offspring. (You may want to work this out with your own Punnett square.)

If these 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. The photo below shows what were called Britain’s ‘most amazing twins.’ One is obviously light, the other obviously darker-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.) Also, the twins are obviously not identical twins (monozygous), which are derived from the same egg.

If all the humans on earth were to intermarry freely and then break into random groups that 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, tightly curled 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 people group you will often see a feature normally associated with another group. For instance, you will occasionally see a European with a broad flat nose, or a Chinese person with very pale skin, or Caucasian eyes. As pointed out previously, most biologists now agree that among modern humans, ‘race’ has little or no biological meaning. This also argues strongly against the idea that the people groups have been evolving separately for long periods.

What really happened?

We can now reconstruct the true history of the ‘people groups’ using:

• The information given by the Creator himself in the book of Genesis

• The background information given above

• Some consideration of the effect of the environment

The first man, Adam, from whom all other humans are descended, was created with the best possible combination of genes—for skin ‘color,’ for example. A long time after creation, a worldwide 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 (Gen. 9:1). A few hundred years later, men chose 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, we understand that up to this time there was only one language. 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 intended.

So all the ‘people groups’—‘black’ Africans, Indo-Europeans, Mongols and others—have come into existence since that time. Some people sadly have promoted the false idea that dark skin is related to the so-called but nonexistent curse of Ham. See chapter 6 for details on this topic.

Noah and his family were probably mid-brown, with genes for both dark and light skin, because a medium skin ‘color’ would seem to be the most generally suitable (dark enough to protect against skin cancer, yet light enough to allow vitamin D production). As all the factors for skin ‘color’ 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.

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 ‘color’ 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 ‘color’ stayed roughly the same.

The same would be true of other characteristics, not just skin ‘color.’ Under these sorts of circumstances, distinct, ‘constant’ differences in appearance 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 would have been 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 latter, of course, is what God intended. But this intention could not have included keeping ‘different races’ apart —there were no such recognizable groups yet!

It is unlikely that each small group would carry the same broad range of skin ‘colors’ 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 not nearly 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 Neandertals of Europe (an extinct variety of man now recognized as fully human⁷), many showed evidence of vitamin D deficiency in their bones. In fact it was this, plus a large dose of evolutionary prejudice, which helped cause them to be classified as apemen for a long time. It is thus quite plausible to suggest that they were a dark-skinned people group who were unfit for the environment into which they moved because of the skin-color genes they began with. Notice that this natural selection, as it is called, does not produce skin ‘colors,’ but only acts on the created ‘colors’ 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 characteristics to their environment (e.g. Nordic people with pale skin, equatorial people with dark skin, etc.).

But this is not always so. An Inuit (Eskimo) has brown skin, yet lives where there is not much sun. Presumably they have a genetic makeup such as AAbb which would not be able to produce lighter skin. On the other hand, native South Americans living on the equator do not have black skin. These examples show that natural selection does not create new information—if the genetic makeup of a group of people does not allow variation in ‘color’ toward the desirable, natural selection cannot create such variation.

African Pygmies live in a hot area, but rarely experience strong sunshine in their dense jungle environment, yet they have dark skin.

Pygmies may be a good example of another factor that has affected the racial history of man: discrimination. If a variation from the normal occurs (e.g., a very light person among a dark people), 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. People could also recognize the poor fitness of certain characteristics in their environment, and so these become incorporated into the selection criteria for marriage partners. This would further tend to eliminate light genes from a dark people near the equator, and dark genes from light people at high latitudes. In this way, groups have tended to ‘purify’ themselves.

Also, in some instances, inbreeding in a small group can highlight any commonly occurring unusual features that 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 short stature were discriminated against, 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 have never been observed to have their own languages, but instead speak dialects of neighboring non-Pygmy languages, is good evidence in support of this.

The effects of choice

People 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 gene combinations 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 peoples descended from Noah’s family after the Flood 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).⁸

The following very brief excerpt is from just one of the many Australian Aboriginal dreamtime legends that are no doubt changed records of the Flood account as given in Genesis:

Long, long ago, before the great flood … . Then came the flood … tops of the mountains standing up above it like islands. The water kept on rising, and finally even the mountain peaks disappeared. The world was one vast, flat sheet of water, and there was no place for the Nurrumbunguttias to live … . Slowly the flood waters receded. The mountaintops appeared again, and the spear heads of trees showed above the water. The sea went back into its own place, and the land steamed under the hot sun … . Animals, birds, insects, and reptiles appeared once more and made their homes on the quickly-drying plains.⁹

Some legends even mention three brothers (possibly the three sons of Noah?):

Unlike the majority of ancestors, who were products of the land they occupied, Yahberri, Mahmoon, and Birrum came from a distant land. The three brothers, together with their grandmother, arrived in a canoe made from the bark of the hoop pine tree, goondool.¹⁰

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, commonly called ‘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 dominant features of the various people groups 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 has degenerated, not been added to.

As one researcher put it, ‘It’s kind of like if all of us are recipes. We have the same ingredients, maybe in different amounts, no matter what kind of cake we turn out to be.’¹¹ In other words, just as someone can take a cake mix and make a number of different cakes, all with the same basic recipe, but slight variations—so we can think of Adam and Eve as having the original DNA recipe if you like, and all their descendants have the same basic ‘recipe’ with slight variations.

Consequences of false beliefs about the origin of ‘races’

• Rejection of the gospel

  The accuracy of the historical details of Genesis is crucial to the trustworthiness of the Bible and to the whole gospel message.¹² So the popular belief that people groups evolved their different features, and could not all have come from Noah’s family (contrary to the Bible), 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 people groups have allegedly evolved separately, they are at different stages of evolution, and some people groups are less evolved. Thus, the other person may not be as fully human as you. This sort of thinking inspired Hitler in his quest to eliminate Jews and Gypsies and to establish the ‘master race.’ Sadly, some Christians have been infected with racist thinking through the effects on our culture of evolutionary indoctrination, that people of a different ‘color’ are inferior because they are supposedly closer to the animals.¹³

  For instance, consider the way in which people in America were indoctrinated in ideas that fueled prejudice and racism towards certain groups of people.

  In 1907, a Scientific American article stated:

  The personal appearance, characteristics, and traits of the Congo Pygmies … [conclude they are] small, apelike, elfish creatures … . They live in dense tangled forest in absolute savagery, and while they exhibit many ape-like features in their bodies … .¹⁴

  Books such as The History of Creation by Ernst Haeckel were studied in the universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Students read such things as:

  Nothing, however, is perhaps more remarkable in this respect, than that some of the wildest tribes in southern Asia and eastern Africa have no trace whatever of the first foundations of all human civilization, of family life, and marriage. They live together in herds, like apes, generally climbing on trees and eating fruits; they do not know of fire, and use stones and clubs as weapons, just like the higher apes … . At the lowest stage of human mental development are the Australians, some tribes of the Polynesians, and the Bushmen, Hottentots, and some of the Negro tribes.¹⁵

  And in 1924, the then New York Tribune newspaper carried an article about the Tasmanian Aboriginals, declaring: ‘Missing Links With Mankind in Early Dawn of History.’¹⁶

  Imagine what the people of England thought when they read an article in the New Lloyd’s Evening Post about two Australian Aboriginals who were brought back to England:

  They appear to be a race totally incapable of civilization … these people are from a lower order of the human race.¹⁷

  No wonder racist attitudes abound throughout countries like America and other nations.

• Influence on missionary outreach

  Historically, the spread of evolutionary belief was associated with a slackening of fervor by Christians to reach the lost in faraway 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.

All tribes and nations are descendants of Noah’s family!

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 chapter 9), Romans 1 suggests that it is linked to the deliberate rejection by their ancestors of the worship of the living God.

A full appreciation of this would mean that, for such a group, 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.¹⁸

For instance, consider the following excerpt from a book on Australian Aborigine dreamtime legends. Notice the similarity to the account of the forbidden fruit and the Fall in Genesis. It can bring tears to one’s eyes to realize these people once had the truth of the Genesis account:

The first man ever to live in Australia was Ber-rook-boorn. He had been made by Baiame. After establishing Ber-rook-boorn and his wife in a place that was good to live in, he put his sacred mark on a yarran tree nearby, which was the home of a swarm of bees. ‘This is my tree,’ he told them, ‘and these are my bees. You can take food anywhere you like in the land I have given you, but this tree, the bees, and the honey they make, you must never touch. If you do, much evil will befall you and all the people who will come after you.’ … But one day, when the woman was gathering firewood, her search carried her to Baiame’s tree. … A brooding presence seemed to hover above her, and she raised her eyes once more. Now that she was closer to the tree she saw the bees hovering round the trunk, and drops of honey glittering on the bark. She stared at them, fascinated by the sight. She had tasted the sweet excretion only once before, but here was food for many meals. She could not resist the lure of the shining drops. Letting her sticks fall to the ground, she began to climb the tree. Suddenly there was a rush of air and a dark shape with huge black wings enveloped her. It was Narahdarn the bat, whom Baiame had put there to guard his yarran tree. Ber-rook-boorn’s wife scrambled down and rushed to her gunyah, where she hid in the darkest corner. The evil she had done could never be remedied. She had released Narahdarn into the world, and from that day onwards he became the symbol of the death that afflicts all the descendants of Ber-rook-boorn. It was the end of the golden age for Ber-rook-boorn and his wife.¹⁹

Jesus Christ, God’s reconciliation in the face of man’s rejection of the Creator, is the only truth that can set men and women of every culture, technology, people group or ‘color,’ truly free (John 8:32; 14:6).

Thus, the answer to racism is to believe and apply the history of the human race as given in Scripture. If every person were to accept that:

They are all equal before God,
All humans are descendants of Adam,
All people are sinners in need of salvation,
Everyone needs to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord of their life,
Each person must build his or her thinking on God’s Word,
All behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, etc. should be judged against the absolutes of God’s Word, no matter what culture one is from—

then the problem of racism would be solved.

People without souls?

Sadly, though, once again the progressive creationists have to resort to anti-biblical explanations for the differences in the human race, because of their compromise with billions of years. For instance, once one accepts the notion of billions of years of earth’s history, then that idea somehow has to be fitted into the Bible’s time frame of history.

Progressive creationists recognize that they can’t put millions of years into the genealogies from Adam to Christ, or they would make nonsense of them. The genealogies are there to show us that Christ can be traced back to the first Adam—after all, He is the ‘last Adam.’ Therefore, they have to place these millions of years before Adam.

Now the problem is this: these same dating methods they accept as absolute, ‘date’ human skeletons back nearly two million years. Because of this compromise, they have to account for numerous human beings before Adam. Hugh Ross therefore proposes:

Starting about two to four million years ago, God began creating man-like mammals or ‘hominids.’ These creatures stood on two feet, had large brains, and used tools. Some even buried their dead and painted on cave walls. However, they were very different from us. They had no spirit. They did not have a conscience like we do. They did not worship God or establish religious practices. In time, all these man-like creatures went extinct. Then, about 10 to 25 thousand years ago, God replaced them with Adam and Eve.²⁰

If this is true, however, then think through the implications. According to the same types of dating methods the progressive creationists accept as absolute, the Australian Aborigines and American Indians are dated back 40,000 to 60,000 or more years ago. Thus, to be consistent, Ross would have to label these people as not being descendants of Adam and Eve (thus, they would have no souls).

Again, when someone adds man’s opinions (e.g., millions of years) to the Bible, then one has to distort biblical truth and come up with fanciful stories to account for their compromise.

References and notes

1. However, people inhabiting the Indian subcontinent are mainly Caucasian and their skin color ranges from light brown to quite dark. Even within Europe, skin color ranges from very pale to brown.
2. Other substances can in minor ways affect skin shading, such as the colored fibers of the protein elastin and the pigment carotene. However, once again we all share these same compounds, and the principles governing their inheritance are similar to those outlined here. Factors other than pigment in the skin may influence the shade perceived by the observer in subtle ways, such as the thickness of the overlying (clear) skin layers, the density and positioning of the blood capillary networks, etc. In fact, ‘melanin,’ which is produced by cells in the body called melanocytes, consists of two pigments, which also account for hair color. Eumelanin is very dark brown, phaeomelanin is more reddish. People tan when sunlight stimulates eumelanin production. Redheads, who are often unable to develop a protective tan, have a high proportion of phaeomelanin. They have probably inherited a defective gene which makes their pigment cells ‘unable to respond to normal signals that stimulate eumelanin production.’ See P. Cohen, Redheads Come Out of the Shade, New Scientist 147(1997):18.
3. Most of this DNA is in the nucleus of each cell, but some is contained in mitochondria, which are outside the nucleus in the cytoplasm. Sperm contribute only nuclear DNA when the egg is fertilized, so mitochondrial DNA is generally inherited only from the mother, via the egg.
4. Dr Werner Gitt, Dazzling design in miniature, Creation 20(1):6, December 1998–February 1999.
5. Incredibly, sometimes the same stretch of DNA can be ‘read’ differently, to have more than one function. The creative intelligence behind such a thing is mind-boggling.
6. This simplification is not done to help our case—the more genes there are, the easier it is to have a huge range of ‘different’ colors. The principle involved can be understood from using two as an example.
7. For a detailed examination and refutation of the so-called apemen’ see Dr Marvin Lubenow, Bones of Contention, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 1992.
8. A.W. Reed, Aboriginal Fables and Legendary Tales, A.H. & A.W. Reed Pty. Ltd., Sydney, Australia, 1965.
   A.W. Reed, Aboriginal Legends: Animal Tales, A.H. & A.W. Reed Pty. Ltd., Frenchs Forest, NSW, Australia, 1980.
   A.W. Reed, Aboriginal Myths: Tales of the Dreamtime, A.H. & A.W. Reed Pty. Ltd., Chatswood, NSW, Australia, 1980.
   A.W. Reed, Aboriginal Stories of Australia, A.H. & A.W. Reed Pty. Ltd., Frenchs Forest, NSW, Australia, 1980.
   A.W. Reed, More Aboriginal Stories of Australia, A.H. & A.W. Reed Pty. Ltd., Sydney, Australia, 1980.
9. Reed, Aboriginal Fables and Legendary Tales, pp. 34–35.
10. Reed, Aboriginal Myths: Tales of the Dreamtime, p. 70.
11. ‘We’re All the Same,’ <www.abcnews.com>, Science page, 10 September 1998.
12. Ken Ham, The Lie: Evolution, Master Books, Inc., Green Forest, AR, 1987.
13. Of course racism pre-dated Darwinian evolution: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked’ (Jer. 17:9), but firstly, there were evolutionary theories around long before Darwin, and secondly, Darwinism gave a seeming scientific respectability to racism. The bottom line is that pre-Darwinian racism was equally contradicted by the biblical history of mankind.
14. Arthur H. J. Keane, Anthropological Curiosities; the Pygmies of the World, Scientific American 64(99):107–108, 1907; Supplement 1650.
15. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, translated by Prof. E. Ray Lankester, Henry S. King & Co., London, 1876, Vol. II, pp. 362–363.
16. A.S. Brown, Missing Links with Mankind in Early Dawn of History, New York Tribune, p. 11, 10 February 1924.
17. Ali Gripper, Blacks Slain for Science’s White Superiority Theory, The Daily Telegraph Mirror, p. 32, 26 April 1994.
    Carl Wieland, Evolutionary Racism, Creation 20(4):14–16, September–November 1998.
18. Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts, Regal Books, Division of Gospel Light, Ventura, CA, 1986.
19. Reed, Aboriginal Fables and Legendary Tales, pp. 21–22.
20. Hugh Ross, Genesis One, Dinosaurs, and Cavemen, Reasons to Believe webpage, Children’s Creation Story, <www.reasons.org/kidsspace/dinocave.html> as of 29 September 1999.