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7 Billion People in 6000 Years


roddma

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If the world is only 6000 yrs old as some Fundies claim, is it possoble for 8 people(Noah)to have multiplied into 7 billion in that time? In 1850s or there abouts, the population was 1 billion and now 7 billion less than 200 yrs later. But Im talking just starting with 8 people.

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If the world is only 6000 yrs old as some Fundies claim, is it possoble for 8 people(Noah)to have multiplied into 7 billion in that time? In 1850s or there abouts, the population was 1 billion and now 7 billion less than 200 yrs later. But Im talking just starting with 8 people.

Not even 6000 years. More like 4000, since the flood took place quite a while after creation.

I'm not sure about possible, but definitely highly unlikely. Inbreeding would have destroyed the population within a few generations.

ETA: the world population at that time was apparently about 7 to 14 million.

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Yeah- it's mathematically possible. If you decide an average generation is 30 years (probably a bit longer than reality), that's 200 generations. A population starting with 2 that doubles every 30 years for 6000 years is 2^200. We probably wouldn't all fit on the planet if it were that simple. If you introduce factors like disease, inbreeding, injury, famine, etc... it's much less clear. That said- the world population was about 3 billion in 1960 and was about 6 billion in 2000, and you only need 33 generations to get to 8.6 billion by simple doubling.

Now... is there any scientific evidence supporting this whatsoever? Nope- rather the opposite: genographic.nationalgeographic.com/v/#Hominin

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Not even 6000 years. More like 4000, since the flood took place quite a while after creation.

I'm not sure about possible, but definitely highly unlikely. Inbreeding would have destroyed the population within a few generations.

ETA: the world population at that time was apparently about 7 to 14 million.

Technically starting with 6 people, where 3 are brothers. Inbreeding from such a small stock would be a problem today. It's a problem because of birth defects caused by mutations. The mutational load in the population would have been less back then, assuming the 6000 year age is accompanied by the Creationist model of the first humans being genetically perfect, and mutations gradually building up in every generation since.
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Do creationists even believe in mutations? This is probably just my narrow-minded science teacher's point of view but how can you accept coincidental mutation and still ignore evolution? Doesn't make sense.

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I find this interesting.

My kids and I were talking about this yesterday. They are young, but it was an interesting conversation. I thought it was nice to hear their exchange. It wasn't heated and no one tried hitting the other over the head with their beliefs. They have the exact same schooling and religious background.

Daughter wants to be a scientist. She believes that the Bible is a collection of stories. She believes in evolution. The thought of the creationist museum cracks her up. She was upset about Adam and Eve and how all of the people on the earth came from 2 people. She asked how Noah would have built an arc that big.

Son is a creationist. He wants to be a Deacon at church and a Dad. He thinks the Bible is 100% true. He has no problem with Adam and Eve.

Like I said, it was neat to hear their discussion. I did like that they each respected the other's beliefs.

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I have zero justification for creationism as I believe it is a religious theory and not a scientific one.

However the human population did undergo a genetic bottleneck (at least one we know of). About 50 000 - 100 000 years ago. The genetic evidence points to some event (?a super volcano) that lead to a dramatic decline in the human population (to near extinction levels actually). The surviving population of 1000 - 10 000 breeding pairs gave rise to all modern humans.

As to how the population could increase so quickly - the dramatic change is recent and exponential. Don't believe how much an exponential increase is: try this thought experiment - double a penny every day for a month and by the end of the month you'll have >5 million.

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Population growth was close to static for a very very very long time, due to high mortality. I think it was only a couple of hundred years ago that the developed world started developing and reducing mortality. Then the lag between drop in mortality and drop in fecundity caused this boom in population. Luckily the lag is way smaller these days in developing countries because along with life saving medicine people get contraceptive medicine.

I find this interesting.

My kids and I were talking about this yesterday. They are young, but it was an interesting conversation. I thought it was nice to hear their exchange. It wasn't heated and no one tried hitting the other over the head with their beliefs. They have the exact same schooling and religious background.

Daughter wants to be a scientist. She believes that the Bible is a collection of stories. She believes in evolution. The thought of the creationist museum cracks her up. She was upset about Adam and Eve and how all of the people on the earth came from 2 people. She asked how Noah would have built an arc that big.

Son is a creationist. He wants to be a Deacon at church and a Dad. He thinks the Bible is 100% true. He has no problem with Adam and Eve.

Like I said, it was neat to hear their discussion. I did like that they each respected the other's beliefs.

How old is your son?

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Well old enough to understand, then. I thought he might be a toddler, which makes it amusing to listen to his naivete. But a tween is just not OK. It's your responsibility as a parent to be teaching your child about the world. You explain how the plastic card you swipe at the store works, you explain why you refuel your car and have the oil changed, you explain why a cake needs baking powder and why certain oven temperatures do different things, you explain why sometimes water collects in lakes and sometimes in rivers and sometimesit just disappears into the soil, you tell him that people in different places speak different languages and how culture works, and how new clothes tend to run, but an old faded Tshirt can probably going n with the whites, so why have you left him ignorant about biology?

By the time my children were five or six they could give a simplified explanation of life (babies take a bit from each parent, if a creature doesn't live to have babies or is not strong enough to have lots of babies then fewer of the next gen have its features), but by middle school they should be able to understand quite nuanced explanations of pressure and drift and gene frequency. What they learn in school is barely the tip of the iceberg with regard to all the things you teach them in life, so why have you neglected this one thing?

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Wow. Just wow.

What about bringing up kids who are tolerant of others beliefs? I take it that it isn't that important to you.

I like that they both feel free to talk about their beliefs. It was a nice discussion. No yelling, no belittling, no saying the other person was WRONG and only their beliefs were rights.

The world could use more true examples of tolerance.

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What about bringing up kids who are tolerant of others beliefs?

Totally with you on that one but I, personally, would start explaning the difference between a belief (all things religious, including creationism) and a scientific theory (evolution) soon. They are old enough and the difference is a significant one.

Edited to clarify: I really mean "I would...", not "You have to...".

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The things we believe as kids usually change. It did for me when I started thinking for myself and questioned what I had been taught in church and tolerance isnt the topic of the thread.

Technically, you could only count 6 people since Noah and his wife had likely stopped reproducing.

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Wow. Just wow.

What about bringing up kids who are tolerant of others beliefs? I take it that it isn't that important to you.

I like that they both feel free to talk about their beliefs. It was a nice discussion. No yelling, no belittling, no saying the other person was WRONG and only their beliefs were rights.

The world could use more true examples of tolerance.

The other day my kid decided that dead whales just lie hundreds deep on the sea floor because at that depth the pressure is too great for anything to live. Should I respect his belief and let them go out into the world like that? My other kid told me that the bank just gives me money out of the ATM out of the goodness of its heart. Should I respect that belief and send them out into the world thinking that? What about when one told me that their friends wouldn't want them to get a sore hand writing thank you cards. Kids have all sorts of crazy, magical, funny and whimsical ideas. Some we smile at, some we encourage (Santa!), and some we disabuse them of. No, your friends parents will think you and I are selfish people if we don't write cards, I have an agreement with the bank to store my money and let me show you this video of a black smoker and a whale fall on you tube.

We respect children as people, but they do not know even a fraction of what we know about the world and all the things in it. You are actively harming your children and neglecting your role as parent if you do not teach them about the world. You don't need to be disrespectful, just like you're not being disrespectful when you show them that 1+1 always equals 2, even if you're counting bananas and not books. Don't you explain a hundred things a day to your kids in a kind and gentle way?

PS don't even get me started on the strong belief that clothes are perfectly fine stored on the floor and then reworn day and day out until they fall apart. Respect it my ass.

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Do creationists even believe in mutations? This is probably just my narrow-minded science teacher's point of view but how can you accept coincidental mutation and still ignore evolution? Doesn't make sense.
Creationists believe in mutations. And in natural selection. And in the formation of new species. And in lifeforms adapting to their environments.

Okay there's probably plenty of kooky people who do deny such obvious facts (though how such people think 'genetic disorders' and 'selective breeding' work, I have no idea). But none of those things are at odds with a creationist model of biology. Creationism isn't "fixity of species".

Creation says that the original created lifeforms were genetically perfect with high capacity for variability (i.e. heterozygosity). (I suppose the animals picked to go on Noah's Ark would have been selected for suitable genetic variability too: they wouldn't have been purebreds, obviously.) Natural selection over many generations has bred these into various sub-varieties, suited to various environments. You could call it the "creationist orchard" vs. the "evolutionary tree". Mutations are seen as being mostly degenerative or neutral, with natural selection weeding out the worst of the problems, but unable to completely prevent the gradual decay...

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Creationists believe in mutations. And in natural selection. And in the formation of new species. And in lifeforms adapting to their environments.

Okay there's probably plenty of kooky people who do deny such obvious facts (though how such people think 'genetic disorders' and 'selective breeding' work, I have no idea). But none of those things are at odds with a creationist model of biology. Creationism isn't "fixity of species".

Creation says that the original created lifeforms were genetically perfect with high capacity for variability (i.e. heterozygosity). (I suppose the animals picked to go on Noah's Ark would have been selected for suitable genetic variability too: they wouldn't have been purebreds, obviously.) Natural selection over many generations has bred these into various sub-varieties, suited to various environments. You could call it the "creationist orchard" vs. the "evolutionary tree". Mutations are seen as being mostly degenerative or neutral, with natural selection weeding out the worst of the problems, but unable to completely prevent the gradual decay...

They didn't used to. In the early 90s the Answers in Genesis party line was that mutation could never be beneficial and that natural selection was impossible. Then they realised they were losing the argument as the evidence became more accessible (thanks to the internet), until they slid all the wau to now when they accept pretty much all of biology except speciation. Although how they think that's a more defensible position I have no idea.

ETA well, looky there! Went to check and they do agree that speciation happens now. So what's left?

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ETA well, looky there! Went to check and they do agree that speciation happens now. So what's left?
Mutations being able to fashion eyes or feathers or blood clotting in creatures with ancestors lacking eyes or feathers or blood clotting? Humans and apes having a common ancestor? Human intelligence being a total fluke? Dogs and cats living together?
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Thanks for the explanation CyborgKin. Sounds a little bit like they actually believe in everything science found out but they don't like the common term for it: "evolution". If this is that "microevolution is possible but macroevolution is not" thing, I stand by what I said earlier: It does not make sense. The only thing that's between what creationists seem to believe nowadays what what scientits find to be the best explanation for what we can observe with our very own eyes seems to be the time gap. The thing that prevents modern creationists from believing that feathers and blood clotting are a product of evolution and that apes and humans have common ancestors (for which there is a lot of evidence around the word, btw!) is the fact that some very old, probably never meant to be literal time designations in a book with many unknown authors add up to 6000 years and not billions of years? I will restrain myself from commenting on that.

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The other day my kid decided that dead whales just lie hundreds deep on the sea floor because at that depth the pressure is too great for anything to live. Should I respect his belief and let them go out into the world like that? My other kid told me that the bank just gives me money out of the ATM out of the goodness of its heart. Should I respect that belief and send them out into the world thinking that? What about when one told me that their friends wouldn't want them to get a sore hand writing thank you cards. Kids have all sorts of crazy, magical, funny and whimsical ideas. Some we smile at, some we encourage (Santa!), and some we disabuse them of. No, your friends parents will think you and I are selfish people if we don't write cards, I have an agreement with the bank to store my money and let me show you this video of a black smoker and a whale fall on you tube.

We respect children as people, but they do not know even a fraction of what we know about the world and all the things in it. You are actively harming your children and neglecting your role as parent if you do not teach them about the world. You don't need to be disrespectful, just like you're not being disrespectful when you show them that 1+1 always equals 2, even if you're counting bananas and not books. Don't you explain a hundred things a day to your kids in a kind and gentle way?

PS don't even get me started on the strong belief that clothes are perfectly fine stored on the floor and then reworn day and day out until they fall apart. Respect it my ass.

The whole post is very well put, but the bolded is the whole point.

Respect for belief never means treating fiction as fact. That does such a disservice to kids. One of the main jobs in being a parent is reality checking our kids.

Of course we encourage critical thinking and good parents don't demand their kids parrot their beliefs on matters of opinion - and there are many topics in which reasonable people can review the same facts and draw different conclusions. But what facts aren't fluid.

If one kid believes we have 50 states and another believes we have 60 those aren't equally valid beliefs. Ditto for the earth being 6000 years old. It's not an equally valid belief, it's empirically wrong.

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prayawaythefundie:

Yes, it's the 'microevolution is possible but macroevolution is not' thing. Creationists prefer to call the observable and testable things (variation, mutation, natural selection) 'adaptation' to differentiate it from 'evolution', which they reserve to mean "single-celled animals changed by mutation and natural selection into reptiles, birds, mammals and people, over millions of years".

How do they differentiate microevolution from macroevolution? With statements such as:

"Variation and natural selection do not produce new genetic information; they only rearrange or remove the existing information."

and "Mutations do not generate new genetic information; they destroy some of the existing information."

Or a longer passage:

Evolutionists teach that one-celled organisms (e.g. protozoa) have given rise to pelicans, pomegranates, people and ponies. In each case, the DNA ‘recipe’ has had to undergo a massive net increase of information during the alleged millions of years. A one-celled organism does not have the instructions for how to manufacture eyes, ears, blood, skin, hooves, brains, etc. which ponies need. So for protozoa to have given rise to ponies, there would have to be some mechanism that gives rise to new information.

Evolutionists hail natural selection as if it were a creative goddess, but the reality (which they invariably concede when pressed) is that selection on its own always gets rid of information, never the opposite. To have a way to add information, the ‘only game in town’ for evolution’s true believers is genetic copying mistakes or accidents, i.e. random mutations (which can then be ‘filtered’ by selection). However, the problem is that if mutations were capable of adding the information required, we should see hundreds of examples all around us, considering that there are many thousands of mutations happening continually. But whenever we study mutations, they invariably turn out to have lost or degraded the information. This is so even in those rare instances when the mutational defect gives a survival advantage—e.g. the loss of wings on beetles on windy islands.

As creatures diversify, gene pools become increasingly thinned out. The more organisms adapt to their surroundings by selection, i.e. the more specialized they become, the smaller the fraction they carry of the original storehouse of created information for their kind. Thus, there is less information available on which natural selection can act in the future to ‘readapt’ the population should circumstances change. Less flexible, less adaptable populations are obviously heading closer to extinction, not evolving.

We see that, just like with the train pulling out from Miami and headed south, if the sorts of changes we see today are extrapolated over time, they lead to extinction, not onwards evolution.

Remember, evolutionary belief teaches that once upon a time, there were living things, but no lungs—lungs had not evolved yet, so there was no DNA information coding for lung manufacture. Somehow this program had to be written. New information had to arise that did not previously exist, anywhere.

Later, there were lungs, but no feathers anywhere in the world, thus no genetic information for feathers. Real-world observation has overwhelmingly shown mutation to be totally unable to feed the required new information into the system. In fact, mutations overall hasten the downward trend by adding genetic load in the form of harmful mutations, of which we have all accumulated hundreds over the generations of our ancestry.

In other words, populations can change and adapt because they have a lot of information (variety) in their DNA ‘recipe’. But unless mutations can feed in new information, each time there is variation/adaptation, the total information decreases (as selection gets rid of the unadapted portions of the population, some information is lost in that population). Thus, given a fixed amount of information, the more adaptation we see, the less the potential for future adaptation. The train is definitely headed downhill, destined to fall off the jetty of extinction.

borrowed from creation.com/the-evolution-trains-a-comin

TL;DR the creationist view is that the biological processes that we actually observe are the opposite of what is needed by 'universal common decent' evolution.

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They didn't used to. In the early 90s the Answers in Genesis party line was that mutation could never be beneficial and that natural selection was impossible. Then they realised they were losing the argument as the evidence became more accessible (thanks to the internet), until they slid all the wau to now when they accept pretty much all of biology except speciation. Although how they think that's a more defensible position I have no idea.

ETA well, looky there! Went to check and they do agree that speciation happens now. So what's left?

Exactly. What is being taught now as Creationism is totally different than what I learned as a child. Creationism has evolved to fit facts that they can no longer deny. It would be nice if they would admit they fucked up and had to change their beliefs to match new information, but they aren't going to do that.

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It would be fun to go through archives and summarise. I'll bet there's a bible college near some free jingerite which has back copies of the AiG magazine in the library. Or the alt.atheism archive (although it doesn't go all the way back to the very early days).

If I had a penny for every time an atheist declared breeding to be artificial selection...

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I think that the Ray Comfort banana video was a result of him going off what was originally taught and forgetting the new teachings. I was told growing up that all the plants and animals we see were created by God when he created the world, so the bananas we are eating today were just like the bananas Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. Everything we see is an example of God's perfect design.

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I found a quote from dear old Duane T Gish from the 80s

The critics think they know the source of all the trouble. Darwinism is no genuine scientific theory because it rests on a bogus mechanism: natural selection. Far from being an empirically testable, putative cause of evolutionary change, natural selection is no scientific claim at all: it is a vacuous tautology
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