We need the facepalm guy.
I'm putting my money on there having been many instances of higher death rates than birthrates ~
What other species have exponential growth rates? What makes you think humans always had?
Does Hugh Ross agree?
Making Christianity look bad one post at a time.
5.56mm
So what would the population be at the time of the flood with that math model?
Here I always thought the Nika Revolt of 532 AD was a big deal. According to this brilliant mathmateer there must have been less the 10 people involved in this riot.
I would argue that human population is logistic, not exponential. In that case, math cannot answer this question. God can though - it’s a question of faith, as God intended.
Unfortunately, this equation assumes that the original 8 people are still alive after 1481 years and that all eight of them, as well as every other human born, is having more babies every year they’re alive. I don’t think that’s the case.
Stupidity with formulas is still stupidity. The earth is about 4.6 billion years old and none of your nonsensical “reasoning” affects that at all.
He lost me at “write up my alley”.
What an incredibly weak argument.
That the writer has to resort to it says something about the strength of his case.
“Annually there are always more births than deaths...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....”
Such a notion is pure ignorance and nonsense. The occurrence of more deaths than births in an annual time period is very common in human history and in non-human populations. In the non-human populations such a greater number of deaths than births is what results in the extinction of the population, and we have innumerable examples of non-human population extinctions. We also have numerous examples of various human populations, meaning different sub-groups of humans.
Up to somewhere between 75 percent to around 90 percent of the Amerindian populations in the New World succumbed to diseases before and after the Columbian colonizations. In the pre-Columbian period a number of Amerindian populations were seriously diminished by recurrent hemorrhagic fever pandemics. Inter-tribal warfare resulted in the massacre and extinction of enemy tribes down to the last man, woman, and child. Thriving Amerindian communities in such widely separated locales as Illinois, the Yucatan, and the Amazon were so depopulated by disease, economic collapse, and other events, Nature reclaimed the cultivated and urbanized landscapes and restored them to primeval conditions.
The Black Death destroyed something on the order of one-third of Europe’s entire population. Many European communities reverted to forest and prarie following this great pandemic. China’s population suffered even greater death tolls from the black plague and a number of other plagues. The Mongols depopulated Iran by exterminating every man, woman, child, dog, and other beast in the cities and communities resisting their conquests. Those few populations that survived were reduced even further by famine and disease when the Mongols destroyed the irrigations systems and the agriculture of Iran.
Cities were by and large great death traps. Without a constant influx of population from the rural communities to provide a replacement population to offset population loss from higher rates of disease, the population of the city dropped dramatically until the city was abandoned and fell into ruin. The population of Rome always fell to a fraction of its former size during periods in which the lack of economic opportunity in the city discouraged the larger influx of people from the healthier rural communities.
When the Han people of China tried to expand their population in to the tropical region south of the Yellow River, their colonies were repeatedly destroyed by the disease pool of the new environment they encountered. The Han rulers resorted to ordering repeated colonization attempts over a period of around 500 years before the colonial populations developed enough immunities to survive and expand the colonies south of the Yellow River.Until then, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births in these tropical colonies.
The bottomline is the reality that your mathematical exercise is based upon blatantly false assumptions about the rates of birth and death in the population. Until the most recent century or centuries, the death toll of humans often exceeded the birth rate to such a degree as to reduce the total humand population by greater and lesser fractions at varoius times in human history and human pre-history.
You equation is as meaningless and full of assumptions as the Drake Equation - a simplistic mathematical exercise in what-ifs that proves nothing and bears no similarity to anything that has actually been observed in nature.
Dear Koin,
Consider that before man had learned farming, he was a wandering predator. Basic ecology and population dynamics will tell you why a large population of predators can’t be supported by any ecosystem.
While I am on this subject, have you considered applying the above to the Urban Feral habitats, AKA “Big Shitty” habitats like New York City, Detoilet, Michigan, ad nauseam?
First, I’m a Christian.
Second, the math here is ludicrous.
The population growth rates on bacteria are such that at any given time a small culture could be expected to equal the mass of the Earth within a month. Yet, that doesn’t happen. Have rabbits been around as long as humans? What do their birth rates look like in comparison?
Take a look at how many rabbits there are in Australia, where they were relatively recently introduced compared to Germany, where they have existed forever.
“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).”
This is the wrong formula to calculate the total growth rate, because the growth is geometric, not exponential. You need to use an iterative formula, like for x=1-20,000, y[x] = y[x-1] +(y[x-1]*.045)
An easy way to calculate something like that is to just use a compound interest calculator. The starting population is your starting balance, the growth rate is the interest rate, and the number of years is the number of compounding periods.
Young Earth nonsense makes us all look foolish. I applaud the efforts of the more reasonable evangelicals to talk some sense into these 6,000 year old Earth people, but unfortunately you just can’t fix stupid.