Sven

Dave's post #566 is a textbook example of a creationist simply repeating his points some time after they were refuted in detail, pretending that no such refutation ever happened.

Just like a broken record.

1) Rohl's dating was addressed repeatedly. Both by pointing to problems with it and by pointing out that Rohl's dating is entirely irrelevant to the evidence about hundreds of years of predynastic Egypt.
Dave pretends that neither was ever brought up.

2) If not all people were at Babel, Dave got even less than 6000 people to builld the tower! :rolling:

3) Dean Anderson had explained in detail why Smyth is wrong, he did not simply "dismiss" him.

4) The geometry argument was also trashed several times. In detail.
Dave just repeats this, as if no one had said a word about it.

5) Dave acts as if no one has ever mentioned carrying capacity, especially in the light of an ice age. And as if the fact that 1 billiion people living 4000 years ago would not be enitrely ridiculous.
And he promises to start yet another thread, in which sooner or later, he'll post something very similar to #566 here, including the promise to open the next thread.

I really have no idea who Dave thinks he is fooling here.

Calilasseia

Oh yes.

"Propaganda pieces" such as "interlinked Verhulst equations for population don't produce anywhere near the number of people you need for your rebuilding of civilisations anywhere, let alone Ancient Egypt" ... guess the mathematicians are in on the "great conspiracy" now are they?

"Propaganda pieces" such as "years of accumulated archaeological evidence says that there was continued human existence and human civilisation right through the middle of your flood timetable" ... your "answer" being to dismiss the British Museum and its world class expertise on the subject as "unreliable".

"Propaganda pieces" such as "can you point to the 1, 2 or however many miles of 'flood deposited sediment' you claim is extant worldwide, and if not, why not?" Thus far you haven't even attempted to acknowledge the existence of that question.

"Propaganda pieces" such as "Numerous experts with the requisite knowledge have pointed out significant problems with the Rohl Chronology", which thus far you have just hand-waved away.

Those "propaganda pieces" seem to have an awful lot of fact backing them up Dave. While your "answers" seem to lack this. I wonder why that is?

BWE

Ok, here is my main problem. I don't know who has access to the Journal "Fisheries Science" But this guy has done some pretty impressive work on a seriously difficult subject:
Eiji TANAKA (2003) A method for estimating dynamics of carrying capacity using time series of stock and recruitment, Fisheries Science 69 (4), 677–686.

I do not have it in electronic format and I don't have the appropriate keyboard for typing it so I'm not going to try. If you do have access, and know how to read it, you will know some of the state-of the-art details that are causing the audible palpitations that wrack my body every time I see a model like Dave's presented as a plausible scenario. Carrying capacity is a dependent parameter of utilization capacity (itself a separate function- tied to the population number), available nutrients, total energy input and a linked, dependent first order equation that basically performs an iterative statistical regression analysis to isolate the factors that most influence any specific iteration.

You are in an open system when your patch (a GIS tie-in, tough without arcview/soft) allows for emigration/immigration and a closed system when the habitable area has defined geographic boundaries. The reason simple population curves are sigmoid is that carrying capacity limits growth. Malthus figured that out. He was a religious guy you know. With people the biophysical carrying capacity, i.e. the number of people the biosphere can support, is not a simple predator/prey model because we can manipulate output. Still, when you start with zero you can't grow at all. So you have to have a bouncing number with some years getting biosphere growth and some years getting population growth.

Also, getting out of my area of expertise some, human manipulation of carrying capacity absolutely requires at least regional trade. All the necessary resources aren't in one location. Dividing the population through emigration provides a patch model ( several local populations who trade population for resources- i.e. they have to lose members to get the resources to grow the carrying capacity.which radically reduces the available population in any given area, Egypt for example. )

Noah didn't have an internal combustion engine or a large quantity of beasts of burden. The landscape received energy from the sun but microscopic levels of human added energy. Have you ever heard someone talk about how many calories it takes to get a calorie of food to your table? Noah didn't have a lot of available calories, had almost no pliable building materials, hadn't enough available calories of energy to farm very substantially or construct with stone so the carrying capacity had to grow in fitful starts and stops as they saved resources, spent them and saved again. Earth (may we rejoice in her unplanned forethought) stored up a bunch of that energy in the form of various carbon reservoirs. But until Franz Haber, while trying to devise better poison gasses and explosives for Germany discovered how to fix nitrogen by making ammonia from Natural Gas, those reservoirs just lay there, wasted as valuable food energy. On and on and on. The lack of energy input from Noah would have to knock off a significant amount of time from your estimates at the very least.

Patch carrying capacity without significant energy input from humans is very low even in rain forests of the Pacific Northwest where food was abundant. In the middle East, you have to assume a rather large km2 per human ratio. That spread means you have to increase loss by emigration again and it means that individual population centers could not support people for years and years and years. What that means is that, although exact numbers are beyond me and thus infinitely beyond you, you couldn't start accumulating population in Egypt for a substantial period of time and even when you could maybe one or two hundred years later, you still have limits to growth relating to carrying capacity. Disturbances such as a disease epidemic or a war, or a drought have far reaching ripple effects on population. If a disease takes 15% of children up to age 8 in a community, that gap in the age range will reverberate for generations to come.

Think Baby boomers and generation x.

You have maybe 1-300 years in Egypt starting with around a hundred people.

All this is a ridiculous exercise however since there is not one teensy tinecy shred of evidence that the terrestrial biosphere was utterly destroyed just a few thousand years ago. We would be acutely aware if it had.

this is dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

Dave, when is your dendro post going up?

stp2007

afdave, I understand your desire not to go off topic on this thread. Therefore in order to help you out (and make sure no question is forgotten) I've started a new thread called Questions pending for afdave. Please visit and provide answers when you have a moment.

ericmurphy

BWE, you seem to be the closest we have to a population expert here. If you know of some large, slowly-reproducing mammal, that has been reduced to a total effective population of four (assuming Missus Noah wasn't too old to have kids), what would you estimate the probability to be of that population not going extinct within the next two hundred years or so?

I'm guessing that the chances of a population that small not going extinct (especially given the heavily inbred nature of that population) as being in the single digits.

Pappy Jack

As most of my post #495 seems to have passed afdave by completely, I hope no one else will mind if I just repost it again, just to save him the bother of having to follow a link.
and afdave also wrote:
And Dr Kate Spence, using much more up-to-date and accurate astronomical data places the construction of Khufu's Pyramid at around 2467 BC. You can see a BBC account of her work here. What grounds do you have for preferring Herschel/Proctor/Smyth to Spence?

afdave further has the chutzpah to write (emphasis added so all can marvel) And has afdave read anything about Dr Spence's work, or does he just prefer to ignore it entirely? I seem to remember that Dean gave an entirely reasoned and evidentially supported summary of why he believed Smyth's calculations wrong. This is not "dismissing" them.

afdave went on to repeat his canard about the advanced scientific knowledge contained in Khufu's Pyramid.
Smyth's "beautiful theory" is founded on a house of cards constructed of uncertain measurements, fudged figures, bizarre theories and a massive dose of wish-fulfilling data manipulation. Do you recall my referring to Martin Gardner's "proof" that the Washington Monument's measurements can be manipulated to "reveal" a close approximation to the speed of light?
and finally afdave wrote
If you can produce one single shred of evidence for any of the mind-bogglingly inane projections of population numbers for 2700-2100 BC that you keep littering this thread with then I for one will stop hooting with derision every time you keep posting them. Garbage in - garbage out. Baseless assumptions result in useless conclusions. Get real.

Constant Mews

This raises another excellent point: pre-industrial human society relied very heavily on 'animal labor'. Consider the usual creationist contention - which I am certain Dave accepts - that the various animal 'kinds' on the ark were at best young adults; and given that many of the beasts of burden human civilization required have fairly long periods of development - how is it possible to even manage agriculture during the critical period immediately post-flood? After all, we've a minimum number of humans and animals working to establish any carrying capacity.

Of course, this is all fantasy, since it didn't happen - but what about the 'animal' numbers? Consider koalas: they need to migrate to Australia; leave no dead bodies along the way; and must be kept fed on a specialized diet until such time as eucalyptus trees were re-established. Who was handling all this stock-keeping? The may-flies?

BWE

The terrestrial world is a lot different than the marine world but with fish, the likelihood is basically zero. The biggest question is how dense the population can be.

Even without extinction though, any local human population couldn't grow much until a substantial support infrastructure was built. Calorie/Land requirements are too big. IOW, Egypt doesn't even start getting population for a long time. Absolutely zero chance of his hypothesis reflecting reality.

It's so wrong that I can only laugh.

You can't model population without software. I mean, I can't. Which means Dave can't. This is just creo crap.

When will I see the dendro post Dave?

Calilasseia

Since STP's "Questions Pending" thread is now closed for some reason, I'll put this one here, as it's relevant and has been asked repeatedly here.

So, turning to this "2 mile thick layer of sediment worldwide" ...

Care to tell me which of this list of representative sample rock formations around the world constitutes your "2 miles of worldwide flood sediment" Dave? Any? All? Just some? Which ones?

Here's your little list ...

Laramie Formation
Cedar Mountain Formation
Naturita Formation
Morrison Formation
Paris Basin
Mount Kirkpatrick Formation
Flaming Cliffs
Emu Bay Shale
Lyme Regis
Mazon Creek
Joggins, Nova Scotia
Bone Cabin Quarry
Glen Rose Formation
Coon Creek Formation
Hunsrück Slates
Guimarota
Atapuerca
Lightning Ridge
Lake Mungo
Ediacara Hills
Cuddie Springs
Alcoota
Yixian Formation
Tabun
Nemegt Formation
Lake Nojiri
Deccan Traps
Daohugou Beds
Vega Island
Anacleto Formation
Sterkfontein
Koobi Fora
Jebel Qatrani Formation
Afar Depression
Horseshoe Bay
Clamo Formation
Tinguirinica
La Venta
Bajo de la Carpa Formation

shirley knott

Well, credit where credit is due -- Dave did admit to "careless use of language" and suggested that the layer is 'only' 1+ mile thick.
Unfortunately, that is going to have quite the opposite effect of winnowing the list of candidate layers...
So, dave, it does give you more to choose from.
But it does not render the requirement to choose moot.

And Dave, I'm eagerly awaiting your discussion of how it could be that some of the children and grandchildren of Noah, fresh from the total destruction of the world by an angry and vengeful god, managed to forget all about Yahweh and monotheism, and instead instituted the massive polytheisms of the Egypt of the Great Pyramid. [intentional plural -- we know a fair bit about the developmental path of Egyptian polytheisms as they eventually trended towards merger]

no hugs for thugs,
Shirley Knott