Adam Was "White" ?????

                        Ever wonder if Adam was black or white?

Let’s try and simplify things so the scientific jargon doesn’t confuse us too much.  All living things including humans are made up of atoms that join together to make DNA. Remembering that it is an atom, not Adam although it is perfectly OK for religious purposes to use that metaphor.   It took more than one atom to develop the human DNA.  Thus we have Atom 1 {Adam if you prefer} joining with Atom 2 {Eve if you prefer} to make us human. Logic might suggest then, that humans are both male and female in our origins?

In western countries, unfortunately nearly every imaginative painting of Adam and Eve depict two adult Caucasians with fair skin and blue eyes. I think the same mistake was made of the Jesus paintings.  These images, even used as Bible illustrations, tend to shape the reader's mental image of the first man and woman and many conclude that Jesus himself was white.  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 religions, especially Christianity and have only added fire to white supremacy.  Scientific studies of DNA and genetic history are proving this to be misguided information.

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.

According to the biblical story, 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 black and produced children of only the darkest of black coloration. If this were the case, the world's population today would be entirely black. In fact, only about 10% of the world's population is black, 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 white 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. The bottom line is that we can conclude that Adam and Eve were not white or black but a good middle brown. That would make us all a bit black, a bit white or somewhere in-between no matter where you live on this planet.  No one should be labeled by color, race or ethnic background, we are all just people folks. Its so simple its hard to teach.  

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

                                          "Ebony and Ivory"