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What were Adam’s and Eve’s blood types?
Terry T revisits the issue of how different blood groups could have arisen if we all came from Adam and Eve. Dr Jonathan Sarfati responds.
I just saw your commercial claiming that Adam and Eve would only need to have the blood types A and B between them. If Eve was taken from Adam’s rib wouldn’t she have the same blood type he did?
I am so glad I found your website. I am eager to consider your point of view.
Dear Terry
This would depend on how God created Eve from Adam.
One possible model is that Eve was a clone of Adam, except of course her sex chromosomes, since women are XX and men are XY. So the proposal, going back to the late Dr A.E. Wilder-Smith and defended in my commentary The Genesis Account, is that God eliminated the Y, and doubled the X. This proposal was arrived at independently by geneticist Dr Robert Carter (see his paper The Non-Mythical Adam and Eve! Refuting errors by Francis Collins and BioLogos).
In this case, Eve would indeed have had the same blood type as Adam. If so, then the most likely scenario is that they both had type AB. So how do we explain the O blood type? As documented over 20 years ago in my paper Blood types and their origin, the O group probably arose from an information-losing mutation of A. Because it is so common around the world, it must have arisen before the population breakup at Babel, perhaps even before the Flood.
More recently, Dr Carter and Dr John Sanford have proposed that Eve was a haploid clone. That is, God didn’t just eliminate the Y chromosome, but half of all Adam’s genome, then duplicated the entire other half. So where Adam was heterozygous, not just in sex chromosomes but everywhere, Eve was homozygous.
In this case, it’s most likely that the A gene was duplicated from Adam’s heterozygous AB, to make Eve AA. This would explain why A is much more common than B today. Here also, the O is an early mutation of A; there is general agreement about this among both creationists and evolutionists.
In case you are worried that total homozygosity would have similar problems to modern inbreeding, don’t. The main problem with inbreeding is mutations, or genetic copying errors, and in particular, being homozygous in a mutant allele (see The dangers of inbreeding, in ‘Parade of mutants’—pedigree dogs and artificial selection). But since God created everything “very good”, and He doesn’t make mistakes, Adam and Eve would not have had any mutations. So this problem would not have arisen—same with Cain marrying his sister.
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