ABO Blood and Human Origins

by Daniel Criswell on January 14, 2009



Keywords: ABO blood, human origins, blood type, protein, lipid, antigen, antibodies, Adam and Eve, allele frequencies, global Flood

This article is reprinted here by gracious permission of ICR. Dr. Daniel Criswell has a PhD in molecular biology and is a biology professor at the ICR Graduate School.

The original article is located here: http://www.icr.org/article/3647/


What Determines Blood Type?

ABO antigen specificity

Figure 1. ABO antigen specificity. The ABO antigens differ by just one sugar at the antigen terminus. Only the carbohydrate portion of the antigen is illustrated.


These sugar arrangements are part of an antigen capable of stimulating an immune response that produces antibodies to identify and destroy foreign antigens. People with blood type A produce antibody B when exposed to antigen B, and those with blood type B produce antibody A when exposed to antigen A. Blood type AB, however, produces no antibodies because both antigens present on the cells are recognized as “self.” Blood type O produces antibodies A and B, because neither antigen A nor B is present on the cells of type O individuals (Table 1). Antibodies A and B belong to the “M” class of immunoglobins and are expressed from the immunoglobin genes of B-cell lymphocytes upon exposure to foreign antigens. Immunoglobin genes are capable of producing an essentially infinite number of antibodies through a complex editing and selective process.1 Consequently, there isn’t a specific “antibody A” gene or “antibody B” gene inherited with a complementary A or B antigen.

Blood TypeCell AntigenSerum AntibodiesDonor
ONoneA and BO

Table 1. ABO Blood Groups


Blood Types and Human Origins

Possible inheritance of four blood types

Figure 2. The possible inheritance of four blood types from Adam and Eve. Alleles for blood type IA = A, IB = B, i = O



Modern Allele Frequencies


PopulationNumberAllelle Frequency
American 20,000 67 26 7
French 10,433 64 30 6
Japanese 29,799 55 28 17
African 1,538 57 22 21
Hindu 2,357 55 18 26

Table 2. The allele frequencies for several populations.3, 4



Origin Implications of Blood Type O



It is possible to achieve the current O allele frequency via a mutation if it occurred at the time of Noah’s Flood and was passed on by one of Noah’s family members. Noah or Mrs. Noah could have had the O allele and passed it on to each one of their sons, or the alleles could have mutated in one son’s offspring. The population of the human race at the time of the Flood and immediately afterward certainly qualifies as a population size that would enable a mutated allele to become common as the population grew. With a starting population of only eight people, the O allele could easily have increased in frequency through random genetic drift in the post-Flood population, reflecting the present levels that are observed today and consistent with computer simulations modeling fixation.12



Answers in Depth

2009 Volume 4


  1. R.A. Goldsby et al., Kuby Immunology, 4th ed. (New York: W.H. Freeman, 2000).
  2. F. Yamamoto et al., “Molecular Genetic Basis of the Histoblood Group ABO System,” Nature 345 no. 6272 (1990):229–33.
  3. E.C. Minkoff, Evolutionary Biology (Menlo Park, CA: Addison Wesley, 1983).
  4. E.W. Sinnot et al., Principles of Genetics, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958).
  5. NCBI, Blood Group Antigen Gene Mutation Database.
  6. B. Hosseini-Maaf et al., “ABO Exon and Intron Analysis in Individuals with the AweakB Phenotype Reveals a Novel O1v-A2 Hybrid Allele that Causes Four Missense Mutations in the A Transferase,” BMC Genetics 4 (2003):17.
  7. C. Patterson, Evolution (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Associates, 1999).
  8. J.C. Sanford, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, 2nd ed. (Lima, NY: Elim, 2005).
  9. R.L. Cann et al., “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution,” Nature 325 no. 6099 (1987):31–6.
  10. T. Kitano et al., “Gene Diversity of Chimpanzee ABO Blood Group Genes Elucidated from Intron 6 Sequences,” The Journal of Heredity 91 no. 3 (2000):211–4.
  11. N. Kermarrec et al., “Comparison of Allele O Sequences of the Human and Non-human Primate ABO System,” Immunogenetics 49 no. 6 (1999):517–26.
  12. D.L. Hartl and A.G. Clark, Principles of Population Genetics, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 1989).



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