Adam, Genetics and Armstrongism
Back in the Seventies, the views of Herman Hoeh and Dean Blackwell were the Worldwide Church of God’s answer to anthropology. From Hoeh and Blackwell I learned that Adam was a Caucasian and non-Caucasian races seemed to be unanticipated mutations and not a part of God’s original intention. The latter idea was eventually dropped. The former has always remained in place. Since those days anthropology has been revolutionized by the rising field of Genetics. In this article, I am going to use the findings of Genetics as an exegetical tool to interpret the account of Adam as it relates to human origins.
A Word on Haplogroups
In greatly simplified terms, haplogoups are genetic configurations that may be used as traceable markers. Haplogroups are contained within the DNA of our cells. The rules of the tracing game are that Y-haplogroups are inherited only through the masculine line and mitochondrial haplogroups are inherited only through the female line. These haplogroups are related to one another in a tree structure that encompasses all of mankind. The overwhelmingly prevalent Y-haplogroup in the British Isles is R1b, for instance. My Y-haplogroup is R1b1a2a1a1b4. The additional characters in the string after R1b reflect finer genetic detail.
The Man Adam
If Adam was the first man and a Caucasian, where did all the varied races come from? Herman Hoeh explained the racial diversity of mankind by positing the idea that Ham married a Black woman and Japheth married an Asian woman and this was followed by some kind of genetic drift among their offspring that produced all the races. Genetics will lead us to a much different conclusion.
The Biblical Adam was Y-haplogroup J. As Spencer Wells (geneticist, anthropologist) has pointed out, both the Jews and the Adnanite Arabs claim descent from Abraham. Both groups are Y-haplogroup J. (No population is pure. Intermarriage will always introduce some “foreign” haplogroups into populations.) The Bible, by including genealogies, conveniently gives us the ability to trace genetic descent. Tracing Abraham’s Y-haplogroup backward through the masculine line, we can know that Adam was Y-haplogroup J. If Adam of Genesis lived within the last 6,000 years (or even if he lived much earlier) there has been insufficient time for Adam to be different from Abraham in haplogroup based on mutational rates of change. Haplogroups diversify very slowly – 6,000 years is just a small duration on that timescale.
Noah, as a descendent of Adam in the masculine line, was also Y-haplogroup J, as were Shem, Ham and Japheth. If the Flood were global and only the riders on the Ark survived, all the human males in the world now would be uniformly Y-haplogroup J. Instead we have a broad range of other Y-haplogroups. And these other Y haplogroups did not originate after the Flood (if we accept the typical dates for the Flood). This is established through both mutational rate studies and the excavation of ancient DNA. Y-haplogroup R, predominant now in Europe, for instance, was found in a skeleton in Siberia dating from 24,000 years ago, millennia before the putative date of the Flood. The earliest haplogroup, A00, originated about 270,000 years ago.
Conclusions
Though the material above is briefly presented, a number of conclusions may be drawn.
1. Adam was not the progenitor of all mankind. Human Y-haplogroups predate Adam significantly. Adam was the progenitor of the Jews and the Bible is about the Jews. Genesis 10 does not reflect the races of man but, as the passage states, the “clans of Noah’s sons.” (It is interesting that the Hebrew term “goyim” used for Gentile nations may mean something like “a bunch of animals.”)
2. The descendants of Adam were a collection of Middle Eastern peoples, surrounded by other tribes and nations, who all carried Adam’s Y-haplogroup. Some apparently dispersed among other peoples; hence, we may read about their migrations in classical literature.
3. The Flood was not global. Had the Flood been global, all of the Y-haplogroups we have now would have vanished and been replaced by just Y-haplogroup J carried by Noah and his sons.
4. The people of Britain, Ireland and Northwest Europe are predominantly Y-haplogroup R1b and are not descended from Jacob of the Bible because Jacob was Y-haplogroup J as we have seen. Their genetic status incontrovertibly places them in the Gentile category. Further, Adam is not the father of these Gentiles “physically” though one could effectively defend the idea that Adam is their father “spiritually”.
In this article, I did not present a model of human origins that reconciles the Bible with Genetics in any detail. I just sketched out a macro perspective. And any such detailed model developed will always be contestable, but it is clear that, for a model to be credible, it must conform to the science of Genetics. Even though there is much yet to be understood about this, what we can now most certainly conclude is that Herbert W. Armstrong and Herman Hoeh were wrong in their ideas about the origin and races of mankind.
submitted by Neo
