Posted on 02/22/2013 4:36:45 AM PST by koinonia
This is from a blog from a priest which I found original and convincing regarding the age of the human race:
Man's Millions-of-years Mathematical Myth debunked: p*b y = x
Let me propose an argument, rather simple, but which should convincingly indicate that the human race - whether through evolution or as an intact race - cannot date tens or hundreds of thousands of years back (let alone millions and zillions!). The argument is based on population growth and the 7 billion people on earth as of 2012. Seven BILLION people is a LOT of people and so one can readily imagine that it took tens of thousands of years to reach this point. And yet 7 billion is a very finite number...
According to sociological studies (frequently quoted and well documented by those who want to "save" the earth and reduce the human population by 90-95%, if you think I'm kidding take a glance at the "Georgia guidestones" and listen/read what Ted Turner has been saying like a broken record: 350 million ideal number for the entire world population and international 1 child per family policy), the rough average of population growth in the early 1900's (before contraception, legalized abortion, etc.) was 1.4%. We are told that Noah entered the ark with his three sons and their wives; when they exited the ark the world population was eight. Now population growth presumes that the number of births is greater than the number of deaths. God blessed mankind twice with the words: "Increase and multiply" (Gen 1:28; 7:17), the second time was after Noah and his family left the ark.
My dad was an actuary, by the way, so this type of story problem is write up my alley :-) First, let's do the math based on a 1.4% annual increase of the population starting with eight persons and see how many years it would take to arrive at 7 billion. The math would look like this:
p*b y = x p = the starting population, so 8 b = rate of annual growth, we'll start with 1.4% (which means 1.014) y = the years, since the growth would be exponential x = the final population, in our case 7 billion
Drumroll please... yes, eight people with a 1.4% annual growth rate would surpass 7 billion people in a whopping 1481 years. Take a look at the math:
8 people * (1.014 annual growth) 1481 years = 7,003,277,544
That is an eyeopener, is it not? Well, since the human race has obviously been around longer than 1481 years, let's work our way backwards to see what the median growth rate would have had to be for eight persons to arrive at 7 billion over a period of 4600 years (what Scripture scholars tell us would have been the time of the flood).
p*b y = x 8 people*(? growth rate) 4600 years = 7 billion today
And the answer is that for eight people to surpass 7 billion over a period of 4600 years the annual growth rate would only have to be 0.45% (yes, less than half a percent annual growth rate). 4600 years is realistic, then, for arriving at 7 billion people from 4 married couples.
My point here is that to argue that man dates back tens of thousands or more years ago would go completely against all the statistics. Annually there are always more births than deaths, and this even now with world wars, abortions, sterilization, contraception - in a word, in a culture of death. In fact a growth rate of 0.45% from 2 people over a twenty thousand year period comes out to be "infinity" on the exponents calculator (just put 1.0045 in the number slot and 20,000 in the exponent slot and see what happens). I don't deny that there could have been some unlikely years of decrease or stagnancy, but the consistent trend of all creatures has always been growth and increase and this indicates (if not outright proves) that the human race is relatively young compared to the outlandish theories that are proported (dare I say dogmatically) in classrooms today around the globe. Add to that that if we evolved from apes, we probably would not have started from just 4 married couples off of Noah's ark, but be popping out of the jungle in an ever larger numbers and then multiplying from these creatures, etc.
The ignorance (or deliberate deception) is all yours.
Take your assumptions for a long walk.
Please do me a favor and just don't respond to me ever again. I won't respond to you if you do. Life is too short to waste with people who take the path of deliberate, self-enforced ignorance, whether on the left or the right.
Don’t post you crap, and I won’t respond.
The only thing well documented is the assumptions.
You are right. I don't even need to go into how bad the math is at that blog. Here is a more rational, realistic study of this.
I guess someone has to point out the major flaw in the math here. You don’t even need to account for die-offs to see how bad the math is. The forumla they are using accounts for the growth rate among a static population but humans aren’t static in this case, we die so he actually needs to square his result to account for each parent even eventually dying off. His formula accounts for the initial members of the population to always be counted in the population.
In other words, he is accounting for 4 couples having x babies each, etc, etc, all averaging out to 1%+ growth. Which is true in terms of how the amassed population has grown, however, our population doesn’t keep amassing. The 4 initial couples have kids which add to the population, but later those parents die so they are removed from the current population. They still are accounted in the amassed population but not the current population.
It is the old gross versus net game.
Where? Which graph?
Quite the contrary.
It is intellectually, spiritually, and logically invideous rock heads like you that currently run the GOPe, and have snuffed noty only the GOP, but the entire world.
editorsurveyor
Lol
Same one who doesn’t believe in DNA? Can’t remember who that was.
>> “So what would the population be at the time of the flood with that math model?” <<
.
About 6 billion, which fits the inundated cities that have been found quite well.
Now that is delusional.
“A few centuries IS insignificant, if you posit a 100,000 year plus time scale, unless those contractions were extraordinarily severe.”
Again, you are making a raft load of totally wrong assumptions. You assume the birth and survival rate from the average was applicable to the early periods, when they certainly were not. You wrongly assume the pandemics did not affect enough people in the short term of a few centuries or less to have a significant enough effect to preclude a millenia eqrlier exponential population explosion like the one that occurred in the last two or three centuries.
You ignore how reducing a population to zero in the space of only one year has the effect of extinction despite the average population growth which erroneously assumes a continued population growth into the future years of a populaton that no longer exists at all. Likewise, a population that has been severely pruned to 70 perent or 10 percent of its former numbers is going to take considerably longer to return to its former numbers, especially if and when conditions do not permit an annual increase in numbers for most of the following centuries or a number of millenia.
This is especially true in the prehistorical period when natural catastrophes cause all but one of the hominids to become extinct, and the surviving hominid, Homo sapien sapiens was nearly made extinct as well. It doesn’t do much good to have 120,000 years of bare existence and miniscule increases in population when something like an asteroid impact comes along and reduces your population to barely more than a thousand individuals who must eke out a barely sustainable existence for survival for millenia to come as the environmental conditions recover.
“You assume the birth and survival rate from the average was applicable to the early periods, when they certainly were not.”
No, I haven’t assumed that. If you’re going to try to claim I did, then back it up and quote me.
“You wrongly assume the pandemics did not affect enough people in the short term of a few centuries or less to have a significant enough effect to preclude a millenia eqrlier exponential population explosion like the one that occurred in the last two or three centuries.’
Again, quote where I made that claim.
“You ignore how reducing a population to zero in the space of only one year has the effect of extinction despite the average population growth which erroneously assumes a continued population growth into the future years of a populaton that no longer exists at all.”
No, you ignore the words I wrote, specifically: “unless those contractions were extraordinarily severe”. An extinction event is by definition an extraordinarily severe contraction.
“It doesn’t do much good to have 120,000 years of bare existence and miniscule increases in population when something like an asteroid impact comes along and reduces your population to barely more than a thousand individuals who must eke out a barely sustainable existence for survival for millenia to come as the environmental conditions recover.”
It seems like you are probably ignoring the fact that such events kick in a survival response in all sexually reproductive organisms, and a change in their breeding patterns. After any such event, there will be a population growth explosion, so you can’t simply say the graph was reset to zero at all these points and then continued as usual. That doesn’t get you the nearly flat-line growth that you need.
My response was based directly upon what you had written. for example:
“A few centuries IS insignificant, if you posit a 100,000 year plus time scale, unless those contractions were extraordinarily severe.”
You made the exception only for “contractions” and wrongly assumed “A few centuries IS insignificant” in the absence of such contractions, which is manifestly untrue. Expansions of human population were inhibeted by a plethora of circumstances for millenia. Limitations in human technologies kept their ability to expand population to less than a certain number of individuals per square mile or per square kilometer very low on average. Regardless of changes in the birth rate, child mortality and adult mortality rates kept the population relatively static or slowly increasing until the next catastrophe contracted the total population and the growth had to resume all over again.
You wrote, “It seems like you are probably ignoring the fact that such events kick in a survival response in all sexually reproductive organisms,....” On the contrary, the changes in birth rates are implicit in the final composited population numbers. The birth rates though increased were often unable to keep pace with the increased mortality rates or achieved a relative parity with the mortality rates. Under such conditoins, the only way in which the birth rates could exceed the mortality rates was whenever the population was able to expand into new territories formerly uninhabited or when the development of new technologies permitted the population to exploit more food resources in the existing territories.
An example can be found among the Amerindian cultures of the new World. The Amerindian populations were reduced to a small fraction of its former numbers by a series of pandemics and other catastrophes before and after the Columbian colonizations. The peculiarities of the Amerindian circumstances severely inhibited the birth rate and increased the mortality rate. Amerindian women had to sucle the children for a period of years, during which the women were not fertile and unable to give birth. Whereas Old World populations could see one mother give birth to one child per year or a little sooner, the Amerindian mother was unable to give birth to one child in two or more years. This was due to the severe deficiencies in suitable food supplies. The mothers had to suckle their children longer, whereas Old World mothers supplemeted their childrens’ food supplies with bovine milk and goat milk. Prehistoric human populations predating the advent of such animal husbandry and their associated food supplies kept the birth rates limited and the child mortality rates extremely hhigh. It wans’t until the human development of animal husbandry and agriculture on an advanced scale that human populations were able to breakloose from the earlier constraints on populaton growth imposed by the resources of the habitat experienced by the pre-agricultural populations.
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