Y.B

I'd put a lot of zeros after that 200.

Calilasseia

And unlike Michael Behe, you'd probably be right to do so.

Sven

Just to remind everyone of the story behind this thread:

Several people expressed their doubt (well, their amusement) that the flood had happened; one argument against it was that the world could not have been repopulated fast enough. Dave claimed that given the long life spans of people at this time, it would have been possible. To demonstrate that these life spans are true, he started this thread. Now we're at the point that Dave invokes the flood to "explain" the long life spans.

In sum: Dave tries to prove the possibility that the flood possibly happened by assuming that it happened.

Looks like a perfect example for a dictionary entry on "circular reasoning".

purple_kathryn

I don't see how long life spans would be an advantage....presumably women must have been fertile for longer, given birth more regularily to more children who survived to have children themselves and not died from child birth.

Calilasseia

Trouble is, even when we run the numbers through Excel, we need outlandish population growth parameters to achieve Dave's end result. Just as we need outlandish physical conditions to validate the global flood itself that no real scientist would consider to be remotely possible on Earth. So Dave's entire house of cards is blown away by real science once again. He is, of course, the only individual posting in this thread who doesn't recognise this, or, more properly, posts as if he doesn't recognise it. Without an inside look at his mind, it's impossible to deduce directly from posts alone whether his posts are:

[1] A genuine product of inability to understand;

[2] Deliberate refusal to understand due to commitment to a preconceived notion at all costs;

[3] Actual outright mendacity in pursuit of said preconceived notion.

A combination of all three is a distinct possibility. Bear in mind that that the observed aetiology matches well with that of the committed ideological warrior, for whom victory at all costs is the only outcome that matters. Therefore if one happens to be a committed ideological warrior, determined relentlessly to pursue a doctrine and to enforce the imposition of that doctrine upon others, all measures are justified in the pursuit of that doctrine and pursuit of said enforced imposition. The precedents from history are not exactly scarce, and the interested student can readily alight upon examples from a range of sources that prove highly informative once dissected forensically. The Wedge Strategy Document provides a suitably informative insight into the mindset involved - the authors apparently consider it perfectly legitimate to burrow away subverting science and logic in pursuit of doctrine whilst ascribing to their own notions (I won't dignify them with the title of "ideas" because "ideas" are usually thought out within a robust intellectual framework, whilst creationism is the very antithesis of this) a privileged, untouchable status, whereby their dogma is to be accepted uncritically and elevated to a level that is, in the eyes of genuine critical analysis, way in excess of its intrinsic worth. It's a variation on the worthless canard that "The bible is true because the bible says so".

BWE

I really try not to respond when I see population projections (or more accurately, population graphs) made by laypeople. Population modeling is so goddam complex that it means nothing to postulate a graph without a bunch of differential feedback loops.

I am very familiar with software that models population and I must reiterate, it takes math people combined with science people combined with programmers and a physical feedback loop (checking against real data over and over) to make any kind of accurate model and then it is still quite simple and useless if it can't be tuned (the results adjustable to fit real data) using a variety of parameters. And even then it's only partly useful, mostly to policy makers as a justification for doing what they want to do anyway.

Ghhhaaaa!

Lucretius

BUT ... BUT .... BUT it must be true that they lived for so long as that famous "biologist" Quintus Horatius Flaccus said in ONE LINE in ONE POEM that people prior to his time used to live longer


Sorry just couldn't resist

Pappy Jack

More information on lifespans 4000+ years BP.....

In an article on older women in Ancient Egypt, Dr Deborah Sweeney of the Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv University cites average lifespans for men surviving into adulthood as 34 years; for women the average was 30 years (evidence from Tel el Daba site). Further, by the age of 30 only half of those who had survived into adulthood were still living; by age 43 this proportion had dropped to one-quarter. The full article can be read here.

In archaeological work undertaken in Burren in Ireland, 22 skeletons interred over 600 years discovered in a portal tomb dated to c. 5800 BP showed "high levels of stress and physical attrition due to diet and work". Early death was common and analysis of the remains indicated an age at death of less than 30 for adults.

Finally, in a paper on the effect of warmer climates on human life spans, Thomas Gale Moore, Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, provides a table which suggests the following average life spans for humans:

• Mesolithic Europe - 32
• Neolithic Near East - 38
• Bronze Age Central Europe - 38
• Classical Greece - 35
• Classical Rome - 32

Again, the full text of the paper can be found here.

Stephen T-B

A question for Dave and/or Roger:
How did Noah and his immediate kin have such long lives considering everything was covered by a mile-deep sediment when they got off the Ark and if they'd killed any of the animals, they'd have wiped out entire species?

Stephen T-B

Just an observation here, but the spectacle of gullibility spiraling out of control is alarming, because it shows how slight can be a person's grip on reality, and fascinating because it shows how wishful thinking can completely overwhelm reason, while reason is employed to make its being overwhlemed seem sensible.