mung bean

Out of curiosity has anyone run Dave's basic compound growth formula with corrections to disallow fractional people? It might be interesting to see how this affects the population growth over time and the maths should be fairly simple.

Calilasseia

Actually, the worst part of this is that the behaviour of interlinked Verhulst Equations can be seriously unpredictable, given certain parameter settings at the outset, even if one ignores potential catastrophic factors such as the appearance of a virulent outbreak of disease. Factor those into the model, and quite literally all hell can break loose with your population figures. With just 8 people as your starting population, it would only take one cholera outbreak to wipe them all out. Malaria is more insidious in this respect, as it may not kill immediately, but unless you happen to possess a resistance to Plasmodium falciparum, it's seriously debilitating. Certainly debilitating enough to slow down your reproductive rate, and furthermore hamper all the rebuilding of civilisations that Dave claims happened in such a short time frame after this mythical flood of his, which means that Dean Anderson's estimates of there being not enough people to do the job in the time allowed is if anything generous.

However, the mere fact that archaeology has determined continuous human existence without any mass die-off on at least three continents, should make such speculation academic among anyone who applies some functioning brain cells to the matter of whether or not a global flood was anything other than a camp fire yarn that's long passed its sell by date. The simple fact is that we do NOT have any sign whatsoever of the sudden disappearance of large numbers of human beings between 2000 BC and 3000 BC on a global scale, instead we have every confidence that continuity of human existence has been unbroken in Egypt for something like 13,000 years, regardless of any summary dismissal of the expertise and veracity of the assorted eminent persons at institutions such as the British Museum. To state otherwise is to engage in wilful disregarding of manifest fact.

Liverpool Museum is just a 25 minute bus ride from my home, and there I can find enough Egyptian artefacts to keep the most ardent Egyptophile happy for a decade, and what is more, these artefacts are all dated. One or two of those artefacts may have some doubts give or take 10-20 years either side, but some of them have been dated to an accuracy of plus or minus two years either side by multiple cross-referenced dating techniques, the robustness of said techniques being accepted by the scientific community as a result of a lot of hard labour expended toward making those techniques robust. It's a while since I visited the Egyptology rooms at Liverpool Musuem, but I would hazard a guess that if I went tomorrow, I could find a chain of artefacts spanning a good 3,000 years of ancient history, and this collection isn't even the most comprehensive of its kind. The British Museum, on the other hand, is one of the world's foremost repositories of such material, its experts are regarded as world class in their field, and consequently, the weight that is given to their scholarship is considerable because they have put in the hard work to earn that. I contend that summary dismissal of that institiution and its world-class scholarship, simply because it happens to clash with a worn-out, threadbare and frankly ludicrous piece of literary invention - one that would be flatly rejected by every fiction publisher on the planet today if it were penned anew on the basis that it would require an absurd level of suspension of reality - is not even worthy of a point of view. It doesn't even manage to rise to the level of 'wrong'. I find it utterly amazing that here and now, in the 21st century, grown adults are giving such notions even the slightest atom of credence. I knew better than this at five years of age, and I'm pretty sure that a goodly percentage of the other critical thinkers here did too.

Continuity of various civilisations over specific eras of time is an established fact. An established fact that dovetails with the thousands of other established facts, pouring in from dozens of fields of human intellectual endeavour, which taken together, leave no room for any other view than that the 'global flood' is a farcical inanity, a peculiar species of the comedy of the absurd that is only elevated to a status far in excess of its intrinsic worth courtesy of vested interest. The discarding of this and other like specious fabrications of superstition-addled minds is long overdue, and the continued promulgation of weird cognitive aberrations of this kind is frankly an embarrassment to any species that wishes to call itself 'intelligent'.

deadman_932

I'm not sure Dave would give it any more creedence if it was a more robust model, anyway. He'd just hand-wave it away, as he does with everything he finds strange and incomprehensible (insert your own joke here).

It'd be like 40 pages of utter futility trying to teach someone math over a point that they'd just goggle at like a stunned goldfish, then swim away.

This has happened with many major points -- from cosmology to logic and radiometrics and -- gah, I can't even count the topics.

hyzer

What a game. Since in the face of the world’s Egyptoligists, geologists, and scientists of all stripes and faiths, Dave still clings to his fairytail views, the Infidels are reduced to trying to find a math formula based on the population growth of 8 people, IOW, trying to find the “holy grail” – an argument so basic that not even the most hard core Bible-believer can possibly disagree.

ericmurphy

Or any other organisms, for that matter. Where are all the genetic bottlenecks, Dave?

Pappy Jack

Ain't a-gonna happen, I suspect. I think AFD is firmly wedded to the idea that the annual compound 2% population growth rate he has conjured out of thin air is both realistic and reasonable as he can fudge it to produce the sort of figures that he thinks reasonable to explain how 'about' 600 years was long enough to get from 8 Flud survivors to the dynamic population of Great Pyramid builders (who may or may not have been Egyptians - I'm still not sure about AFD's take on this), regardless of the fact that the generally accepted date for the GP puts its construction less than 200 years after Smyth/AFD's Flud date. Given that there are at least six pyramids that unequivocally pre-date the GP, AFD's pyramid workforce looks increasingly hard-pressed. AFD will either ignore demographic models that cast doubt on his 2% figure or else invoke genetically-superior Flud-survivors and descendants to explain the validity of his model (iow a miracle).

BWE

My point noting his error in population modeling was that even one limiting factor that creates a feedback loop so that the iterative nature of the equation will jump around and your population goes extinct. CARRYING CAPACITY WAS ZERO!!! Dave, your formula is stupid. Your use of that formula once you were informed of it's inadequacy promotes guilt by association. Your use of stupidity as a debating tactic casts a pall over your entire argument.

Pappy Jack

Absolutely, but Noah & Co. weren't ordinary folk like what you and I is. Oh no, they were a superior sort all round, with lots of disease-resistant, longevity-enhancing, progeny-boosting genes to make sure that the race prospered and grew. And even if something did go really, really badly for them (which it evidently didn't, at least until Babbel anyway, 'cause it would tell us in the Go(o)d Book if it did, wouldn't it?), well the Big Guy with the beard was always there to send along an angel or two to help out, or maybe even conjure up a miracle as required.

Calilasseia

Problem being of course Pappy Jack, that if Dave wishes to go down this route, then he has to explain how he can assert that our genomes are unravelling at the seams and self-destructing like 1970s British Leyland or Fiat cars as a result of the Curse and the Fall, yet Noah and his ilk were somehow über-über-humans after the very same Curse and Fall.

BWE

Meaning, nothing to eat. Carrying capacity is the top part of the S. Ooooh I can't tell you how bad I want to use insulting terms right now. 600 years, 10 people, nothing to hold the soil down, rivers draining at huge velocities for decades to get rid of all that ground water, no fungi to provide nitrogen to the .....Aaaaaahhhhhggggghhhh!

The tard! The tard!

Aaaaahhhhhhggggghhhhhh!!!!! [this way sir, stop struggling]

is this the landscape after the flood?



[Relax relax. It's just a little pinprick. There'll be no more.....]