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.
Only problem with that hunter/gatherer stuff is that is not science but conjecture. There is little real evidence to back the claims of 100-200k year hunting/gathering. Also you must assume a very stupid hominoid that can hunt and gather but not deduce farming for a very great length of time.
Here’s a hint for you - it stops being science when their experiments can not replicate thousand let alone millions or billions of years - just pure conjecture with too many logical errors included to even bother counting.
Abel, not Able.
Sure, the sharp declines from extraordinary events will have a significant effect, but I’m still not convinced about minor declines, even for centuries, being very significant. Firstly, most of them are local, not global, and they may well be compensated for by increased growth in other areas when you look at the global scale. Second, even if you have a century of decline, and it takes two centuries to make up for that, you are talking about a fraction of a percent of your timescale. That’s not going to be more that the slightest hiccup in your trend line.
A high enough quantity of “slight hiccups” in your trend line give you a new trend line.
Check out the various estimates here (many have been done):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates
You can start to see how trend lines get messed with by events. Even with all the different estimates there are significant period of no growth and negative growth. It become pretty obvious when you understand how small the pre-modern average growth rate really was. You’re really talking most of the time at somewhere around 1/10 of 1% until medicine starts getting modern. And a lot of your things that can effect it are global.
Look at global temperatures, we just finished an unusually low solar storm cycle, winters for the last 3 or 4 years have been colder, and will stay colder for at least 3 or 4 more as the next storm cycle revs up. This will effect crops all over the world, of course with modern techniques it won’t effect them very much. But you put the whether we’ve been having lately on a society using pre-industrial revolution farming methods and what you have is global famine. And the solar storm cycle is highly predictable, it’s 11 years, every 11 years you’ll have at least a bit of a cold snap, reduction in food production, people starving, probably no population growth, maybe even decline. Possibly for a couple years in a row. That right there changes your trend line dramatically.
Then you add plagues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic
every couple hundred years 5 to 25% of the population just goes away. Even if the plague itself stays relatively local, when 50% of Europe’s population evaporates in 150 years that’s going to change your trend line.
It’s important to keep in mind that pre-industrial life was hard and fragile, subject to many whims and easy to snuff out on a fairly massive level.
Anybody remember his name?
“You’re really talking most of the time at somewhere around 1/10 of 1% until medicine starts getting modern”
This is really the meat of the matter, so I hope you don’t mind if I cut right to it. In order to have a human population that is hundreds of thousands of years old arrive at our present population levels, you need a nearly flat growth rate, when you look at it as a long-term average. Now, you can cite many reasons why the normal non-flat growth rates that we observe since historical times could be transformed into a nearly flat line on a long timescale, but that is still based on estimates and speculations, and we must keep in mind that those estimates and speculations do not happen in a vacuum.
The scientists who are making those subjective approximations are well aware of the estimated age of man, and I don’t believe they make their estimates outside of that context. Are their estimates experimental science which supports the prevailing theory? Or is the data cherry picked in order to conform to the prevailing theory?
I don’t know that they are cherry picking, but Climategate proves that some scientists are not above it, which is why I think we should always be skeptical about “estimates”, “models”, and “extrapolations” which just conveniently happen to perfectly fit a speculative theory that can’t be verified experimentally.
You got some beef with the meat of the argument?
A lot of it depends on what time frame they’re estimating in. There’s a lot of recorded human history, and you can work estimates in that span from what is recorded, estimates on city sizes and battle sizes tend to be in the record. Pre-history things get a little hairier because you no longer have records to work with, but you do have archeological footprints for a lot of that, and of course you have the recorded history as a target for your graph.
Nothing about history can be verified experimentally, that’s just how it goes, it’s history, not experiments.
Gee, thanks for curing my fingering dyslexia. Good to have people like you to help us.
Please do not "REPLY" to my comments unless you are actually going to make a "reply" instead of a "Lookie here dummie"
Amazing true facts! ;)
Estimates for world population in the year 0 range from 150M to 330M. This guy’s formula would give less than a million.
Estimates for the year 1000 range from 250M to 350M. This guy’s formula gives about 85M.
If he’s that far off for periods for which we have historical records to study, doesn’t that suggest there’s something wrong with his assumptions?
Yes, you have recorded history as the target on one end, but there is also a target in the other direction. By that I mean, if the current dating for the appearance of homo sapiens, or the most recent bottleneck event, were to change, then the population growth estimates would of course be updated to aim back to that new date. So, if you know the end point, and you take the starting point as a given, then your estimated progression is nothing more than exposition based on your assumptions.
Exactly. Ever walk through an old cemetery, one that dates back to the early to mid 1800’s? I have and many times and find it interesting to read the grave stones - so many infants, young children and so many young adults, many of them women, a number of them it can reasonably be presumed died during child birth as this was not uncommon. There were many good reasons for having a lot of children prior to the 20th century, one being that it was almost a given that many of these children would not live to adulthood due to deaths from what are now preventable and treatable diseases and infections or even accidents considering that children often worked either on the family farm or after the industrial revolution, in workshops and factories where the conditions were often dangerous. And this is fairly recent history; life some 5 to 10 thousand years ago was much harder, bare subsistence living for most at best.
And you don’t have to go back to the great bubonic plagues that decimated pre-industrial populations in medieval Europe; the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed an estimated 30 and 40 million worldwide, 675,000 in America alone. That flu pandemic killed more people than were killed in battle during all of WWI and more people died in one year from the Spanish Flu than it is estimated died during the four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351.
http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
And during the Great Potato Famine in Ireland (1845 and 1852) approximately 1 million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%. We today are not accustomed to even thinking about death on such a large scale.
And migration is something that tends to skew population estimates as census records in urban areas tend to be more accurate than in rural areas – and when you have mass migrations to urban centers such as what happened after the Black Death Bubonic Plague (BTW, the huge decrease in population created a lack of skilled workers which created a demand for them and higher wages and the growth of a “middle working class” and higher paid tradesmen which eventually led to the “Enlightenment” the industrial revolution and the elimination of the serfdom class), during the industrial revolution and during events like the Great Potato Famine, populations in cities rise but the offsetting decrease of populations in rural areas were not necessarily accounted for, causing a somewhat over estimate of population overall.
The author of this blog and the person who posted it have little understanding of human population growths and declines over the last 10,000 years, the reasons for them and falsely assumes a steady increase based only on recent populations trends; in other words, both a historical and mathematical fail.
There was point in that poorly written and grammatically nonsensical word salad? And his assumptions about population growth are completely false and not supported even by birth and death rates as recorded over the last several hundred years live alone over several thousand and I would add that he demonstrates a complete ignorance of not only general, but also of exponential mathematics and statistics which he conflates without understanding the difference (not withstanding his claims that his father was an actuary and therefore this sort of thing is “write up his alley”).
This post is not about Christianity. It’s about common sense. His equation is no different than what an investor would use for an interesting bearing investment. Each year it bears interest and that interest bears interest. Start with $8 and with a 0.5% yield of interest annually you arrive at $7 billion after 1481 years. Plug and chug.
Human population growth (and historically well documented population declines for that matter), do not work at all in same way as compounding interest.
Not based on assumptions, based on data. If the current dating for appearance of homo sapiens were to change it would be because we found some evidence indication a new start time, so then all the estimates have to be adjusted for the new data.
One thing that needs to be remembered is that is it not sensible to only look at the detrimental effect of plagues and other mass death events. Yes, the death rate increases, but the birth rate also naturally increases in response to such events, often leading to population explosions in the subsequent generation. It’s a natural survival mechanism.
“Not based on assumptions, based on data.”
Of course they are based on assumptions. If they weren’t, then they would be facts and not estimates.
They can’t be facts because we have no way of knowing exactly how many people were on the planet back then. But they build the estimates on facts. You take the existing data, facts, and extrapolate them to estimates.
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