BWE

So Dave, under your population dynamics model, roughly how many people were at the tower of Babel incident some 200 years after the flood?

Would you be so kind as to post your formula?

Pop at time interval x+1 = (Growth rate)(Pop at time interval x). Does it look like that?

P_(x+1)=R(P_x)

Because if it does, there are limits to exponential growth even when the whole world is your oyster. You have to have some variables (available calories, competition, infant mortality and a host of other things that provide feedback on every iteration. Even once you've included that population is actually a function dependent on the previous year's population and you've established ways to input carrying capacity with it's own set of functions and you've factored competition with it's own dependent function, you are still looking at something too simplistic to reflect accurately what was possible but at least you'd be on the right track.

Like I said somewhere before, I have to run a growth rate of near 10% to get anywhere near your numbers. And to top it off, Babel was itself quite a feat so I assume you had to have a bunch of people to get that done too. Were they the only people in the world? (the ones at Babel)

I'm curious if there are any actual graphs of your theory. Perhaps we could ask Mike PSS to run some spreadsheets so we could talk about things like loss of topsoil to erosion in the absence of plant cover, sources of calories, competition for those calories from both domestic and wild animals, mortality rates etc.

What do you think?

VoxRat

I request that link. Even though, as Amaleq13 pointed out, it doesn't help your case even if you've accurately represented the exchange, I suspect you have not.

Pappy Jack

Dave, sorry we were so unconvincing....but maybe the fault was not with us, but with the person we were trying to convince.

I was not aware that concavity (of the GP) was an issue. I would be grateful for elucidation of how this impacts at all on either Smyth's fantasies, Petrie's demolition of them or Davidson's eccentric adoption (and extrapolation of them). I am the first to acknowledge Dean has a far greater depth of knowledge about this than I have (and apparently than you also), but I fail to see how this invalidates the criticisms of Smyth (and Davidson) I have offered.

What you choose to call the "rolling ruler" theory was (and is) an entirely plausible explanation for the appearance of a close approximation of the value of pi in the GP's dimensions. It is an entirely more plausible explanation than your and Smyth's entirely evidence-free arguments regarding the (God-endowed?) 'advanced knowledge' of the supposedly non-Egyptian builders of the GP. I would argue that what you call the RRT remains a plausible explanation, but, as Mike pointed out at richarddawkins.net (and I agreed, because the evidence he presented was convincing), the incorporation of pi had another, equally straightforward, non-supernaturalistic explanation that required no 'advanced knowledge' on the part of the (Egyptian) architects and builders. The links he provided and the elucidation of the argument he gave, should have convinced even you of the reasonableness of the explanation. Perhaps you would care to address these arguments directly?

I am not certain which of the websites I provided you links to lacked so much credibility. Perhaps you would care to list them and explain why they are so poorly argued or evidenced? Do you, for example, regard the Martin Gardner link I recently gave you as one of these? I would be very interested in a detailed critique of his arguments against pyramidology.

By the way, I could as easily refute your arguments about the GP simply by saying that they lack credibility, so I will.

Amaleq13

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "a lower deleterious mutational load in their populations". It isn't clear but it doesn't appear to be correct.

Crow offers nothing to suggest that our ancestors' DNA had fewer naturally occurring deleterious mutations than modern DNA but that appears to be what you are trying to contend.

You appear to be confusing the occurrence of deleterious mutations and the reproduction of deleterious mutation in a population. This confusion results in a leap from what Crow actually says (fewer reproduced) to what you prefer to believe (fewer occurring).

Crow offers you no support for your beliefs.

BWE

Sorry about that last post. I'll try to be more content free next time.

Dave? Population formulas?

Mike PSS

BWE,
I'll warm up the Excell program again. Give me a base formulae and lets go over the details on the interactions of the variables. Should be pretty straight forward.

Dave,
You haven't answered my question. You say that non-Egyptians built the GP as a storehouse of knowledge.

"Who were the non-Egyptions intending to pass on this hidden knowledge to?"

Smyth already knew all the facts when he discovered them. There was nothing NEW contributed by the GP. So the obvious follow-on question is...

"What NEW knowledge did humanity acquire from the GP?"

Someone mentioned that the medeival Arabs thought the GP was an astronomy. Did these Arabs discover new stars or astronomic insights from the GP?

If the GP was a storehouse of knowledge it's success was as good as all the other undecipherable writings of the world. List of undeciphered texts, books, languages and writings.

BWE

Mike, that's the whole devil of it. It's a whole series of formulas and they only mean anything in context. For example, to determine carrying capacity you need to know caloric values of available nutrients, their geographic dispersal, the speed and mobility of your species (plural) that compete for those nutrients and it all ties into a GIS system. I couldn't tell you what the heck formulas to use other than that they are differential equations. The only use the models have as predictive tools are their tunability. You have to have real data or they aren't even remotely accurate. If you can't change a variable like mortality or nutrient availability, you can't demontrate a plausible growth scenario. And if it can't be tuned to fit existing data, there is no way to know where you are. It might as well be random.

And, for the record, a population bottleneck of 10 individuals can't survive the simulations without insane numbers, no competition, basically a zoo. You know, big brother bringing your dinner and cleaning up your poop. Also, terrestrial population modeling has soil fertility issues that vary. I can't model that at all. That sounds at first like it might be a fulcrum for a creationist since humans know how to fertilize but it misses the reason we have to fertilize and the source of the fertilizer. The assumption of a system that far out of stasis can't support any kind of numbers like 2% exponential growth.. Anyhoo. I'll try to get some simplified formulas when I get back probably Monday but all they will do is make Dave have to come up with a series of bogus numbers

Pappy Jack

I think this has been a fairly popular theory down the ages, although the arguments in support of it seem very weak and Herschel, amongst others, discounted the idea. Passages through which a particular part of the sky might be observed were plugged during construction and the GP itself scarcely made a suitable viewing platform. Such insights as could be gleaned would seem to me to be retrospective and relate solely to the fact that the GP was aligned astronomically (cf. the many exercises in dating the GP's construction according to the positions of particular stars that may have been used in the process of alignment).

Dave Hawkins

Any responsible analysis of the account of the Global Flood in the Book of Genesis must explain the civilizations which are conventionally dated as beginning earlier than the date inferred from Biblical and non-Biblical statements for the Global Flood. It is obviously impossible for a great civilization to live through a global flood. Either the flood was not global or the civilization had to have been founded after the flood. There are no other alternatives.

Hence my interest in Egyptology and the Pyramids. (Also China, but that would be a separate thread.) I do not think the GP was designed by God or aliens or what have you. I have no idea if it contains any accurate prophecies of anything. I do think that it may contain advanced scientific knowledge, by which I mean that there seems to be a good case for the notion that the builders knew ...

1) the exact length of the solar, sidereal and anomalistic year
2) a very precise value of PI
3) the value for the precession of the equinoxes
4) the polar diameter of the earth
5) a coordinated system of weights and measures

There may be support for other knowledge contained in it also, but these are some of the items that seem clearest to me. And I do think that Smyth's proposed building date for the GP of 2170 BC should be given careful consideration.

Some analysis of objections ...

Dean Anderson ... The diagram I posted shows why there was a disagreement between Petrie and Smyth and illustrates graphically a plausible reconciliation.I brought Smyth up as a reliable authority on things astronomical--he was the Astronomer Royal for Scotland. And he says that the GP was probably built in 2170BC. No, we shouldn't accept his word just on authority, but we should not lightly dismiss him either. This is where I believe many academics have gone wrong. It seems they say, "Bah, Smyth believed the GP contains prophecies ... Smyth was a racist, etc" thus throwing the baby out with the bathwater and not ever bothering to critically analyze his work. Smyth was not the only one who dates the pyramid astronomically to 2170BC. Richard A. Proctor also did (actually 2160) and Tompkins reports that this was at Herschel's suggestion. BTW, I think the 3 deg. 4 min. figure I quoted is Tompkins' figure, not Proctor's. I have not read Proctor's work yet. Tompkins is a reporter of specialists, not a specialist himself.Davidson's diagram is not correct? Petrie said "Ignore the slight concavity of the sides, since this most likely due to a few millenia of slight subsidence"??!! This is incredible. Subsidence caused a perfect concavity on all four sides running from the peak to the center of each side of exactly the same amount with no irregularity whatsoever? See Brig. Groves photo below. This stretches credulity to say the least.

Brigadier P.R.C. Groves' photo of the GP showing concavity (Tompkins, p. 109)


Regarding the implication that Davidson arbitrarily added 34" to Petrie's 36"... this is incorrect. This number was NOT arbitrary. It follows logically from Petrie's measurements. Note Petrie's own measurements near the center (see previously posted diagram). The mean distance between the base edge of casing stones [still existing in situ] on opposite sides near the center of the sides was 9059 P" and the existing core is 8919 P". This yields 140 P" which is added to Petrie's 8991 P" at the corners, yielding Smyth's 9131 P" in the most straightforward manner possible. This is the most logical approach and is further confirmed by the discovery of the base sockets of the Lisht pyramid.Not true. The pyramid was not assumed to have a square design. Again, Davidson just took the difference b/t casing stones and core near the center (Petrie's own measurements) and naturally and logically applied them at the corners ... the only assumption being ALSO a most natural one ... that the casing stones followed the core and that the core is hollowed in by design. Corrections? Davidson makes no corrections except for the initial huge correction of Petrie's strange assumption that the concavity was somehow not by design. Once he corrects that assumption (which leads to two equally strange conclusions on Petrie's part ... oddball corner socket design and tapered casing stones), then his conclusions naturally flow from Petrie's own measurements, thus vindicating Smyth.

CONCLUSION
Smyth's measurements should not be dismissed as modern academics have done. It stands as a testament to his meticulous attention to detail that the great Petrie (who had better equipment) actually confirmed Smyth's earlier measurements (although his strange assumption caused him to not realize this). Smyth's work was accurate and lends strong credence to my numbered points at the beginning of this post, thus elevating his status as a careful researcher and thinker. This in turn should cause us to consider carefully his idea of the building date of the GP. To confirm Smyth's GP date, we would need to examine statements from Proctor and Herschel as well as other data. So my stance on Smyth's GP building date of 2170BC is tentative acceptance.

hyzer

What about the other pyramids – where they too designed by gods or aliens?

You are aware, of course, that there exists a continuum of pyramid design and building prior to and long after the “great pyramid.”