“How could you ‘like it’ and not understand that periodic population declines for ‘war, crime, plagues, etc’ are factored in the .5% growth factor?”
—Nothing is “factored in” to that number, it’s made up. The rate of growth has changed drastically from generation to generation. In many places today the population is even shrinking. It’s absolutely silly to estimate the age of any population from its size.
In nonagricultural societies, populations are just as likely to grow as to shrink or to remain steady.
The link that the page uses as a source says that the australian aborigines couldn’t have been there for 60k years because the population was only 300k, as if there’s any reason to believe that the population had been growing.
Here’s a chart showing human population growth - it’s hardly analagous to an hourglass, and one can pull out any “growth rate” they want from that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg
It's not 'made up'. It is an example of the low rate of population growth over time needed to reach present levels from 8 humans after the Flood.
"Here’s a chart showing human population growth - it’s hardly analagous to an hourglass, and one can pull out any “growth rate” they want from that:"
You just said it was silly to estimate the age of a population from it's size and then post a link to a chart that purports to do exactly that? What's up?
