Shattering the Myth of Race: Genetic Realities and Biblical Truth (Paperback)

Foreword by John M. Perkins........................................vii
Acknowledgments.....................................................ix
Introduction.........................................................x
Chapter 1  Changing the Script.......................................1
Chapter 2  Roots of the Concept of Race..............................9
Chapter 3  Race and Economics.......................................21
Chapter 4  Slavery and Abolition in the United States...............29
Chapter 5  Development of Genetics as a Science.....................43
Chapter 6  Comparison Studies at the Level of DNA...................50
Chapter 7  Evolutionary Genetics as an Argument for Racial
Superiority.........................................................62
Chapter 8  The Scientific Community and the Concept of Racial
Superiority.........................................................76
Chapter 9  A Christian Perspective on Race: Personal
Reflections.........................................................99
Epilogue...........................................................117
References.........................................................119

Chapter One

Changing the Script

Why a new book addressing the issue of race? From my experience, and probably from yours also, racial identity has been such an established part of culture in the United States and many other countries that it can't be ignored. During times of social strife, race has sometimes dwarfed all other issues. Many people are surprised, then, to learn that the idea of three or four races of humanity is a relatively new one in history, and not an established fact, like the tides or the rotation of the earth.

    But are there any real differences that justify an ethnic bias, differences rooted in our nature, profound chasms existing before the development of our cultural boundaries and perhaps even directing their development? Are there biological cues that genuinely break the human race into several races or subspecies and tell us in advance how someone is going to behave and think? If there are, that is the essence of the concept of race. If there are not, are we deceiving ourselves on a daily basis? In the United States, when we refer to someone in everyday conversation as "black" or "white," what does that mean? Are we talking about biology or culture?

    Part of the triumph of Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeal to the conscience of Americans, black and white, was to nourish doubts about the existence of the term race. Since the 1960s, for many people in our country, the old racist framework has been rejected, but language to replace the old terms has not yet arisen. Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, taking moviegoers as close as we can go to experiencing the reality of a slave ship, has also aided the nation by giving us all a vivid insight into how the idea of race began in this country. As time moves on, new chapters in this story will be written: their content rests with us.

THE DECEPTIVE DRAMA

The central idea of this book, as the title states, is that race is a myth. There is only the human race, from every perspective: biological, historical, and in God's Word, the Bible. For the past five hundred years, Western society has been playing out a role in a drama written by the Enemy of our souls, the myth of the master race, and every act has been a tragedy. It's time to change the script.

    Although politics in the United States does not today involve open campaign calls for segregation, such as commonly occurred in the American South, our culture continues to simmer with racial tensions, perhaps more openly now than in the past as expectations for the country have been raised.

    Dinesh D'Souza devotes a chapter of The End of Racism to current episodes of bigotry and related brutality in the United States (D'Souza, 387-429). Ugly incidents originating in bigotry continue to plague us as a nation; violence of all types, often drug- or gang-related, occurs daily, and it's hard to sort out motivations after the fact. Often skin color or a different face is excuse enough: blacks and whites brawl outside a bar; a black family's home is destroyed by whites; a white college student is badly beaten by blacks; a Korean store owner is intimidated; a crowd chases teenage Puerto Ricans; and on and on. In Philadelphia, one incident in 1997 in a predominantly white neighborhood led the Roman Catholic cardinal, Anthony Bevilacqua, to write a pastoral letter to all the area's Catholics regarding the sin of racism (Bevilacqua). The country was sickened by the kidnapping of a black man and his brutal death at the hands of white supremacists in Texas in June 1998. There is evidence from the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the man sentenced for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, that he was following the ideas in a white supremacist novel, hoping to provoke a civil war along racial lines.

    In our recent past are the reminders of regimes built around a racial or an ethnic identity. In June 1998, for example, a South African scientist, Daan Goosen, described for the South African Commission on Truth and Reconciliation how a secret bacterial warfare lab under the apartheid system had tried to find or develop disease strains or vaccines that would selectively kill or sterilize people with dark skins (PBS).

    In the late 1990s, some Americans still hold elaborate racial myths. For example, some members of white militias hold the idea of Kingdom Identity or Christian Identity, which says that Adam and Eve were the first white people, a separate and superior species from "beasts of the field," defined as Africans and Asians (Abanes, 162-63; Kingdom Identity website). In this theology Jews are the offspring of sex between Eve and Satan (Abanes, 162; Kingdom Identity website). The motivation for a number of mass murders in the late 1990s has been connected to Kingdom Identity theology (Lessner).

    The reverse of this view has been shown by the Nation of Islam, whose founder, Elijah Muhammad, preached that "the original man, Allah, is none other than the black man. The black man is the first and last, maker and owner of the universe.... The white race is not, and never will be, the chosen people of God" (quoted in D'Souza, 427). In this theology, all nonblack peoples were bred from the original blacks by an evil scientist, Yacub, with whites being the last and most dangerous. Exiled to Europe, whites allegedly mated with animals, thus producing the Jews.

    A common theme in these racial theologies is hatred of the Jews, a hatred that suggests the hidden, demonic origin of these theologies.

A WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD

By the time you have finished this book, I hope that if you currently believe that the world is divided into races, you will do so no longer, and if you do not but aren't sure why you don't, this book will help supply a reason for your conviction. My prayer for this book is that God can use it to "prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:12-13).

    In recent decades, there has been a great deal of shame in the United States over the racist parts of our history, and one outcome of this has been for many whites to ignore the past, even the recent past, and the effects centuries of bigotry have had on a shared way of thinking. For example, during my childhood, restaurants, movie theaters, buses, and even drinking fountains in many states still maintained openly, and with the full force of the law, separate facilities for anyone with even a portion of African ancestry. To most of us today, this sounds like conditions in Nazi Germany, when signs were posted restricting or isolating Jewish Germans from the rest of their society. This, however, was a system maintained not by a police state but by a people committed to democracy, by people who were often otherwise decent yet truly believed that African ancestry, even a small amount, made a person belong to a different and lower category of humanity, perhaps not even human. Black Christian writers such as Tony Evans or Jefferson Edwards identify the need to take apart this myth that has affected all of us. Although we may be ashamed of events long past as well as the recent past, we have to face up to it to move on.

    We can see one example of how short the history of this change of perspective is when we consider science fiction plots from Hollywood. In 1966 the casting of Nichelle Nicols as Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek was considered daring for American television, although she was virtually the only black crew member ever seen on this ship of the twenty-third century. For the first year of the show she was also the only cast member without a contract (Infusino, 56).

    In contrast, in 1993 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered with Avery Brooks, an African American, in the role of commander of a troubled space station in the twenty-fourth century, attempting to broker peace following a situation in which there had been generations of oppression of one people by another. If ever science fiction could be seen as a barometer of its time, this was it. In one of the most powerful episodes, "Far Beyond the Stars," Brooks was yanked back to New York City in the 1950s, where he found himself working as a science fiction writer for a pulp magazine. The plot developed around his struggle to get a white publisher or fellow writers—and even other African Americans in Harlem—to accept the Deep Space Nine plot, especially the idea of a black space commander.

    Although there are many excellent books on particular aspects of this topic, I am not aware of any one book that pulls together insights from history and genetics with the truth of the Bible. I write from an evangelical Christian perspective, and I will make a case that the Bible presents the revelation of God and Jesus Christ that we need to rise above our natural inclination toward division and violence. This book is not intended to be exhaustive in any of these areas. My desire is that this book will give a Christian perspective fitting together understanding from diverse disciplines into a coherent whole and will help to change ways of thinking but also ways of feeling. I know that it is impossible to fully incorporate all the research ongoing in genetics, but I believe a sound understanding of the emerging scientific picture concerning human genetic diversity based on research from the last twenty years is possible. I hope this will not be the last book you read on the topic of races but rather that it proves to be a good source for further reading or for reference.

INSIGHTS FROM HISTORY

One could say there were no races before 1400, because the concept of race as it is commonly used in our time did not exist. Or, if it did exist, the idea occurred mainly among Muslim Arab slavetraders, who during the Middle Ages seem to have developed a theology of African inferiority. By the 1400s, through Spanish and Portuguese contact with Arab slavetraders in Africa, the institution of slavery was returning to Europe. The need to justify slavery to a Christian culture first opened the door to the concept that Africans were a different type of people, intended by nature to serve others.

    By the 1500s the Spanish were wrestling with the question of the origin of the Native Americans and their human rights under both church and royal law. The enormous plunder and profits at hand for the conquistadores spawned the theology that the Native Americans were a different kind of human, perhaps not even descended from Adam, and not subject to the same legal protection. This was quickly extended to include the Africans being brought as slaves to replace the Native Americans who were dying from Old World diseases. As the slave trade and colonial empire building spread among the European countries, so also seems to have spread the concept of races, which were generally perceived as being four: black, red, white, and yellow, corresponding to the peoples originally of Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, and East Asia. Where the boundaries among these races were to be drawn was a problem that racists have never resolved.

    As a skeptical approach to the Bible became increasingly popular during the Enlightenment, the scriptural teaching of the common origin of humanity was widely rejected, and scientific support for racial differences was claimed. For example, humanity was broken into four distinct species by Linneaus, the originator of scientific taxonomy. The idea of races fit well with the mystical idea of the Great Chain of Being that was popular among European academics, particularly if white Europeans were placed in some type of leadership caste. Races were also easily incorporated into evolutionary theory.

    But where did the boundaries lie? At various times, skin color, skull volume, skull shape, and, finally, test scores such as the intelligence quotient (IQ), were proposed as demonstrating clear racial differences, with the white race believed to be superior, higher on a mystical Chain of Being or better fit to rule by evolutionary selection. This remained the prevailing perspective among many scientists and policy makers associated with major universities and government institutions through World War II, when Nazi Germany provoked a moral revulsion against these ideas taken to a logical conclusion.

    Not everyone was silent about the idea of race and the exploitation it justified. For example, Bartolomé de las Casas was a Dominican priest, sent to the Americas in the 1500s, who made his life's work developing a Christian case against the concept of races. Although he was only partly successful in seeing his academic battles result in sweeping social changes, today his memory is honored in many Latin American countries for the lives he did save and the foundation he laid for the end of slavery. In the 1700s John Woolman was a Quaker evangelist from New Jersey who likewise devoted a large portion of his effort against slavery and the concepts behind it. Eventually the Quakers became the first Christian denomination to break with the institution of slavery since its return to Europe, and Woolman was one of the influences in this change. We will also draw from examples of contemporary Christians seeking to be peacemakers.

INSIGHTS FROM GENETICS

My graduate training was in genetics, the scientific study of how heredity works. To discuss the way science was used to support racism, I'll review some of the basic concepts of genetics and evolution, as well as examples of how the scientific culture became associated with racism.

    We now understand that characteristics passed from one generation to the next are controlled by one to many genes, each made of the molecule DNA. Some traits seem to be controlled by only a single gene, with various versions of that gene available within a species. Eye color in humans is like this—whether one has blue or brown eyes is the result of a single gene. But even eye color is not that simple: some people have green or hazel eyes; and think of the varying shades of blue or brown eyes.

    Human skin colors combine varying amounts of melanin, the dark-colored molecule that accumulates as a defense response to intense sunlight (tanning); carotene, the Vitamin A precursor, stored in fat just under the skin, closer to the surface in some people, adds yellow and golden hues; and small blood vessels which in some people are closer to the surface of the skin add pink and red hues. For inherited differences in melanin, the chemical that produces skin color differences from black to white, at least five genes are involved. The "positive" form of each of these genes is believed to signal the skin to produce one more "dose" of melanin, whereas the "negative" form of the gene provides no such signal. Since we have two parents, each giving us one copy of each of those genes, there are at least eleven shades of black to white in human skin color. Since it is common to find several to many forms of a gene within a species, this model of only eleven shades is probably far too simple.

    We carry an estimated eighty thousand genes, for many different kinds of traits (Human Genome Project). Only a very small number of these would be inherited consistently linked to any of the genes for melanin; that is, different shades of skin tone could not predict the other genes any individual carries. Further, the number of genetic combinations staggers the mind. Each human sperm or egg cell contains one out of more than eight million new genetic combinations of the person it came from. Since each conception is the result of two parents, each new individual is one combination out of a minimum of some eight million times eight million possibilities just for that particular mother and father. In addition, each new person then grows up with all the influences of his or her native language and culture, the personalities of the people around him or her, and the impact of any nutritional deficiencies or diseases. Attributing a simple genetic cause to predict any complex behavior or lifestyle is absurd.

    This is the essential deception of racism and other types of bigotry: that some simple key will reliably predict the behavior of others. A sound realization of the many factors interacting to make a human personality should help us to realize the danger of oversimplification: attributing a human behavior to a single gene (e.g., the criminal gene or the gay gene).

    In only the most recent decades has it been possible to compare populations based on DNA differences in many genes, most of which do not even produce effects visible to the eye. As we shall see from a survey of some of this work, at the level of the eighty thousand genes of humanity, there are no racial frontiers or even clear ethnic frontiers among nationalities. Genetically, we all belong to highly smudged categories within the one human race, which, at the level of DNA, seems to reflect a geologically recent origin from a narrow population base. That is scientific terminology to say that there is good evidence to say that we are one human family, not four, fairly recently spread out across the earth.

INSIGHTS FROM THE BIBLE

As we survey the Bible, we find an absence of anything suggesting or supporting the concept of race as the term has been used in the past five hundred years. Compared with our contemporary literature, the Bible displays a remarkable lack of physical descriptions of any kind. There is a message in Scripture through what is not said.

    In the Bible there has never been a rigid ethnic boundary to the people of God; the issue always has been one of faith and not of DNA. In the revelation given to the apostle John, before the throne of God there was an uncountable multitude (Revelation 7:9). These were of every ethnic group ("nation"), tribe, people, and language. This is a fascinating concept, suggesting that our cultural backgrounds will somehow still be identifiable in heaven, but as even the most extravagant achievements become irrelevant and are cast before the throne of God in worship (Revelation 4:10), they won't seem important anymore. Absent from John's revelation is any remaining identification on the basis of a human political entity or anything suggesting our word race. There are no tears in heaven—or races. Instead the Bible has much to say about the image of God in humanity and about his revelation for us. In the final chapters of the book I will discuss these, as well as reconciliation and peacemaking.

Chapter One

Changing the Script

Why a new book addressing the issue of race? From my experience, and probably from yours also, racial identity has been such an established part of culture in the United States and many other countries that it can't be ignored. During times of social strife, race has sometimes dwarfed all other issues. Many people are surprised, then, to learn that the idea of three or four races of humanity is a relatively new one in history, and not an established fact, like the tides or the rotation of the earth.

    But are there any real differences that justify an ethnic bias, differences rooted in our nature, profound chasms existing before the development of our cultural boundaries and perhaps even directing their development? Are there biological cues that genuinely break the human race into several races or subspecies and tell us in advance how someone is going to behave and think? If there are, that is the essence of the concept of race. If there are not, are we deceiving ourselves on a daily basis? In the United States, when we refer to someone in everyday conversation as "black" or "white," what does that mean? Are we talking about biology or culture?

    Part of the triumph of Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeal to the conscience of Americans, black and white, was to nourish doubts about the existence of the term race. Since the 1960s, for many people in our country, the old racist framework has been rejected, but language to replace the old terms has not yet arisen. Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, taking moviegoers as close as we can go to experiencing the reality of a slave ship, has also aided the nation by giving us all a vivid insight into how the idea of race began in this country. As time moves on, new chapters in this story will be written: their content rests with us.

THE DECEPTIVE DRAMA

The central idea of this book, as the title states, is that race is a myth. There is only the human race, from every perspective: biological, historical, and in God's Word, the Bible. For the past five hundred years, Western society has been playing out a role in a drama written by the Enemy of our souls, the myth of the master race, and every act has been a tragedy. It's time to change the script.

    Although politics in the United States does not today involve open campaign calls for segregation, such as commonly occurred in the American South, our culture continues to simmer with racial tensions, perhaps more openly now than in the past as expectations for the country have been raised.

    Dinesh D'Souza devotes a chapter of The End of Racism to current episodes of bigotry and related brutality in the United States (D'Souza, 387-429). Ugly incidents originating in bigotry continue to plague us as a nation; violence of all types, often drug- or gang-related, occurs daily, and it's hard to sort out motivations after the fact. Often skin color or a different face is excuse enough: blacks and whites brawl outside a bar; a black family's home is destroyed by whites; a white college student is badly beaten by blacks; a Korean store owner is intimidated; a crowd chases teenage Puerto Ricans; and on and on. In Philadelphia, one incident in 1997 in a predominantly white neighborhood led the Roman Catholic cardinal, Anthony Bevilacqua, to write a pastoral letter to all the area's Catholics regarding the sin of racism (Bevilacqua). The country was sickened by the kidnapping of a black man and his brutal death at the hands of white supremacists in Texas in June 1998. There is evidence from the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the man sentenced for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, that he was following the ideas in a white supremacist novel, hoping to provoke a civil war along racial lines.

    In our recent past are the reminders of regimes built around a racial or an ethnic identity. In June 1998, for example, a South African scientist, Daan Goosen, described for the South African Commission on Truth and Reconciliation how a secret bacterial warfare lab under the apartheid system had tried to find or develop disease strains or vaccines that would selectively kill or sterilize people with dark skins (PBS).

    In the late 1990s, some Americans still hold elaborate racial myths. For example, some members of white militias hold the idea of Kingdom Identity or Christian Identity, which says that Adam and Eve were the first white people, a separate and superior species from "beasts of the field," defined as Africans and Asians (Abanes, 162-63; Kingdom Identity website). In this theology Jews are the offspring of sex between Eve and Satan (Abanes, 162; Kingdom Identity website). The motivation for a number of mass murders in the late 1990s has been connected to Kingdom Identity theology (Lessner).

    The reverse of this view has been shown by the Nation of Islam, whose founder, Elijah Muhammad, preached that "the original man, Allah, is none other than the black man. The black man is the first and last, maker and owner of the universe.... The white race is not, and never will be, the chosen people of God" (quoted in D'Souza, 427). In this theology, all nonblack peoples were bred from the original blacks by an evil scientist, Yacub, with whites being the last and most dangerous. Exiled to Europe, whites allegedly mated with animals, thus producing the Jews.

    A common theme in these racial theologies is hatred of the Jews, a hatred that suggests the hidden, demonic origin of these theologies.

A WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD

By the time you have finished this book, I hope that if you currently believe that the world is divided into races, you will do so no longer, and if you do not but aren't sure why you don't, this book will help supply a reason for your conviction. My prayer for this book is that God can use it to "prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:12-13).

    In recent decades, there has been a great deal of shame in the United States over the racist parts of our history, and one outcome of this has been for many whites to ignore the past, even the recent past, and the effects centuries of bigotry have had on a shared way of thinking. For example, during my childhood, restaurants, movie theaters, buses, and even drinking fountains in many states still maintained openly, and with the full force of the law, separate facilities for anyone with even a portion of African ancestry. To most of us today, this sounds like conditions in Nazi Germany, when signs were posted restricting or isolating Jewish Germans from the rest of their society. This, however, was a system maintained not by a police state but by a people committed to democracy, by people who were often otherwise decent yet truly believed that African ancestry, even a small amount, made a person belong to a different and lower category of humanity, perhaps not even human. Black Christian writers such as Tony Evans or Jefferson Edwards identify the need to take apart this myth that has affected all of us. Although we may be ashamed of events long past as well as the recent past, we have to face up to it to move on.

    We can see one example of how short the history of this change of perspective is when we consider science fiction plots from Hollywood. In 1966 the casting of Nichelle Nicols as Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek was considered daring for American television, although she was virtually the only black crew member ever seen on this ship of the twenty-third century. For the first year of the show she was also the only cast member without a contract (Infusino, 56).

    In contrast, in 1993 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered with Avery Brooks, an African American, in the role of commander of a troubled space station in the twenty-fourth century, attempting to broker peace following a situation in which there had been generations of oppression of one people by another. If ever science fiction could be seen as a barometer of its time, this was it. In one of the most powerful episodes, "Far Beyond the Stars," Brooks was yanked back to New York City in the 1950s, where he found himself working as a science fiction writer for a pulp magazine. The plot developed around his struggle to get a white publisher or fellow writers—and even other African Americans in Harlem—to accept the Deep Space Nine plot, especially the idea of a black space commander.

    Although there are many excellent books on particular aspects of this topic, I am not aware of any one book that pulls together insights from history and genetics with the truth of the Bible. I write from an evangelical Christian perspective, and I will make a case that the Bible presents the revelation of God and Jesus Christ that we need to rise above our natural inclination toward division and violence. This book is not intended to be exhaustive in any of these areas. My desire is that this book will give a Christian perspective fitting together understanding from diverse disciplines into a coherent whole and will help to change ways of thinking but also ways of feeling. I know that it is impossible to fully incorporate all the research ongoing in genetics, but I believe a sound understanding of the emerging scientific picture concerning human genetic diversity based on research from the last twenty years is possible. I hope this will not be the last book you read on the topic of races but rather that it proves to be a good source for further reading or for reference.

INSIGHTS FROM HISTORY

One could say there were no races before 1400, because the concept of race as it is commonly used in our time did not exist. Or, if it did exist, the idea occurred mainly among Muslim Arab slavetraders, who during the Middle Ages seem to have developed a theology of African inferiority. By the 1400s, through Spanish and Portuguese contact with Arab slavetraders in Africa, the institution of slavery was returning to Europe. The need to justify slavery to a Christian culture first opened the door to the concept that Africans were a different type of people, intended by nature to serve others.

    By the 1500s the Spanish were wrestling with the question of the origin of the Native Americans and their human rights under both church and royal law. The enormous plunder and profits at hand for the conquistadores spawned the theology that the Native Americans were a different kind of human, perhaps not even descended from Adam, and not subject to the same legal protection. This was quickly extended to include the Africans being brought as slaves to replace the Native Americans who were dying from Old World diseases. As the slave trade and colonial empire building spread among the European countries, so also seems to have spread the concept of races, which were generally perceived as being four: black, red, white, and yellow, corresponding to the peoples originally of Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, and East Asia. Where the boundaries among these races were to be drawn was a problem that racists have never resolved.

    As a skeptical approach to the Bible became increasingly popular during the Enlightenment, the scriptural teaching of the common origin of humanity was widely rejected, and scientific support for racial differences was claimed. For example, humanity was broken into four distinct species by Linneaus, the originator of scientific taxonomy. The idea of races fit well with the mystical idea of the Great Chain of Being that was popular among European academics, particularly if white Europeans were placed in some type of leadership caste. Races were also easily incorporated into evolutionary theory.

    But where did the boundaries lie? At various times, skin color, skull volume, skull shape, and, finally, test scores such as the intelligence quotient (IQ), were proposed as demonstrating clear racial differences, with the white race believed to be superior, higher on a mystical Chain of Being or better fit to rule by evolutionary selection. This remained the prevailing perspective among many scientists and policy makers associated with major universities and government institutions through World War II, when Nazi Germany provoked a moral revulsion against these ideas taken to a logical conclusion.

    Not everyone was silent about the idea of race and the exploitation it justified. For example, Bartolomé de las Casas was a Dominican priest, sent to the Americas in the 1500s, who made his life's work developing a Christian case against the concept of races. Although he was only partly successful in seeing his academic battles result in sweeping social changes, today his memory is honored in many Latin American countries for the lives he did save and the foundation he laid for the end of slavery. In the 1700s John Woolman was a Quaker evangelist from New Jersey who likewise devoted a large portion of his effort against slavery and the concepts behind it. Eventually the Quakers became the first Christian denomination to break with the institution of slavery since its return to Europe, and Woolman was one of the influences in this change. We will also draw from examples of contemporary Christians seeking to be peacemakers.

INSIGHTS FROM GENETICS

My graduate training was in genetics, the scientific study of how heredity works. To discuss the way science was used to support racism, I'll review some of the basic concepts of genetics and evolution, as well as examples of how the scientific culture became associated with racism.

    We now understand that characteristics passed from one generation to the next are controlled by one to many genes, each made of the molecule DNA. Some traits seem to be controlled by only a single gene, with various versions of that gene available within a species. Eye color in humans is like this—whether one has blue or brown eyes is the result of a single gene. But even eye color is not that simple: some people have green or hazel eyes; and think of the varying shades of blue or brown eyes.

    Human skin colors combine varying amounts of melanin, the dark-colored molecule that accumulates as a defense response to intense sunlight (tanning); carotene, the Vitamin A precursor, stored in fat just under the skin, closer to the surface in some people, adds yellow and golden hues; and small blood vessels which in some people are closer to the surface of the skin add pink and red hues. For inherited differences in melanin, the chemical that produces skin color differences from black to white, at least five genes are involved. The "positive" form of each of these genes is believed to signal the skin to produce one more "dose" of melanin, whereas the "negative" form of the gene provides no such signal. Since we have two parents, each giving us one copy of each of those genes, there are at least eleven shades of black to white in human skin color. Since it is common to find several to many forms of a gene within a species, this model of only eleven shades is probably far too simple.

    We carry an estimated eighty thousand genes, for many different kinds of traits (Human Genome Project). Only a very small number of these would be inherited consistently linked to any of the genes for melanin; that is, different shades of skin tone could not predict the other genes any individual carries. Further, the number of genetic combinations staggers the mind. Each human sperm or egg cell contains one out of more than eight million new genetic combinations of the person it came from. Since each conception is the result of two parents, each new individual is one combination out of a minimum of some eight million times eight million possibilities just for that particular mother and father. In addition, each new person then grows up with all the influences of his or her native language and culture, the personalities of the people around him or her, and the impact of any nutritional deficiencies or diseases. Attributing a simple genetic cause to predict any complex behavior or lifestyle is absurd.

    This is the essential deception of racism and other types of bigotry: that some simple key will reliably predict the behavior of others. A sound realization of the many factors interacting to make a human personality should help us to realize the danger of oversimplification: attributing a human behavior to a single gene (e.g., the criminal gene or the gay gene).

    In only the most recent decades has it been possible to compare populations based on DNA differences in many genes, most of which do not even produce effects visible to the eye. As we shall see from a survey of some of this work, at the level of the eighty thousand genes of humanity, there are no racial frontiers or even clear ethnic frontiers among nationalities. Genetically, we all belong to highly smudged categories within the one human race, which, at the level of DNA, seems to reflect a geologically recent origin from a narrow population base. That is scientific terminology to say that there is good evidence to say that we are one human family, not four, fairly recently spread out across the earth.

INSIGHTS FROM THE BIBLE

As we survey the Bible, we find an absence of anything suggesting or supporting the concept of race as the term has been used in the past five hundred years. Compared with our contemporary literature, the Bible displays a remarkable lack of physical descriptions of any kind. There is a message in Scripture through what is not said.

    In the Bible there has never been a rigid ethnic boundary to the people of God; the issue always has been one of faith and not of DNA. In the revelation given to the apostle John, before the throne of God there was an uncountable multitude (Revelation 7:9). These were of every ethnic group ("nation"), tribe, people, and language. This is a fascinating concept, suggesting that our cultural backgrounds will somehow still be identifiable in heaven, but as even the most extravagant achievements become irrelevant and are cast before the throne of God in worship (Revelation 4:10), they won't seem important anymore. Absent from John's revelation is any remaining identification on the basis of a human political entity or anything suggesting our word race. There are no tears in heaven—or races. Instead the Bible has much to say about the image of God in humanity and about his revelation for us. In the final chapters of the book I will discuss these, as well as reconciliation and peacemaking.