Daily Devotional – December 20

Biology

Today, anthropologists like to classify people into different groups (races) based on their skin color and hair: Caucasoid (Europeans), Mongoloid (Chinese), Negroid, Australoid and Malayan. Yet, skin color is based simply on how much melanin is produced in each skin cell. If a person has a lot of melanin, he will be dark-skinned. If the person does not have much melanin, he will be light-skinned. When a person with lots of melanin (dark-skinned) lives in a northern country that receives little sunshine, he will not be able to absorb much vitamin D and may develop rickets. If a person with little melanin, lightskinned, lives near the equator with lots of sunshine, he may develop skin cancer. As a result, there would be natural thinning of the genetic pool in response to the environment.

During the Ice Age, people groups left the tower of Babel and spread out. People of higher latitudes began to ‘acquire’ light skin while those near the equator ‘acquired’ dark skin. But what about the Eskimo (Inuit) people living in the far north and the people of Central and South America? Why do they have middle-brown skin? Shouldn’t the Eskimos be light-skinned and the South Americans living on the equator be dark-skinned? These people groups moved out from the Tower of Babel and simply lacked the gene for lots of melanin (dark skin) that resulted in these American people groups having middlebrown skinned people. The gene pool is more important than the environment; new information cannot be added.

Adam, from whom we are all descended, had the best possible gene pool. Noah and his family were probably middle brown, possessing genes for both dark and light skin. Today, most people are middle brown. In fact, we are all one big extended family!

And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth .…

~ Acts 17:26