Discussion tpics with DCL and anyone else interested

[Bobtoad777]

This is an excerpt out a book i am readin i was wondering what your{and anyone elses} thoughts were on the subject.

Population

Let us consider the growth rate of our human population to determine whether the Bible's account of man'screation only 6000 years ago, or the evolutionary scientists account of man's evolution over one million is consistent with known scientific data. According to the Scriptures, eight people comprising four couples survived the great Flood approximately 4300 years ago as described in biblical chronology. To be conservative, we will make these calculations assuming that mankind started 4300 years ago with only one surviving couple and that all families produced only 2.5 children on average over the centuires. this rate of population growth is much slower than we experinced this century. If families produced only 2 chiuldrem on average then the conservative assumption of an average of 2.5 children per family will account for nautral depletion caused by war, famine, and disease. throughout history the average life span has last only 43 yers per generation . Using these assumptions, during the last 4300 years, there would have been one hundred generations lasting 43 years each. The calculations reveal that our population would have growm from the time of the flood till today to reach approxiamately 5 billion people.. it is fascinating to note that the earths population today 5.5 billion worlds wide is almost identical with what we would expect if mankind began repopulating the earth after the Flood 4300 years ago.

 

[Patryn]

Just wondering...what's your obsession with Dixon lately? It's a little creepy actually. Not to mention you annoyed the shit out of him last time.

[Edited by Patryn on 09-03-2000 at 02:55 PM]

 

[Bobtoad777]

because dixon discusses theorys and theologies in a civil and well mannered method rather than a "i told you so thats why' or 'unuh' or 'you suck' method. and what he says in reponse to topics of my general larger interst usuall challenge me to look deeper into what i belive.

i once read, and i paraphrase 'only the completely brainwashed believer does not question what he has been taught to believe'.

i question everything i hold as a belief so that i can become stronger in that belief or take apart the parts that do not stand up under serious scrutiny. and DCL provides that objective view from the opposite side of the looking glass

answer to never - i dont take things on pure faith i need facts its a balacneing act

[Edited by bobtoad777 on 09-03-2000 at 08:39 PM]

 

[Never]

Bobtoad: "i once read, and i paraphrase 'only the completely brainwashed believer does not question what he has been taught to believe'."
Which is why I often question the belief that only the brainwashed take beliefs on faith.

 

[RonG]

A fairly ardent Christian once brought me a copy of the population argument similar to Bobtoad's and asked me to look it over. I have some math ability and I suppose some sympathy for her position so I tried to follow the logic. In the first chapter alone, were a number of oopses that, without reading the same book as Bob, sound like they are being repeated.

1) Using a single regression variable (2.5 kids) to model the population for each and every generation is really sloppy. This smacks of working backwards from the endpoint, which the treatise I looked at indirectly acknowledged. The logic I saw would have used 3 kids if that fit better.
2) Ignore the half a kid for a second and suppose two people have two children. Will the net population grow over the long term? No, because all you did was replicate. You will get the short term feeling of growth depending on life spans but eventually you will hit steady state and people will die at the same rate that births occur so the population becomes static until one of two things happen: Death without replication or larger families. With life spans so short and unpredictable, the early generations of hominids had to have as large a family as possible to grow the population. Which is how most population models work that are well developed, as a series of models (the fancy term these days is wavelet theory) with different estimates of family sizes over different times (eg, have 6 kids for 20 generations, 2.5 for the next 30, etc., taking into account some good data to derive those assumptions). The best models normally only base their estimates on female population because men are cheap and easy to find (some things never change) and women and their lifespans are really the gatekeepers on this. There is another sidebar to this known as pedigree collapse which explains the illusion of population growth under these conditions (two people having two kids) but that is too damn long.

In summary, this cottage industry that has sprung up to use science and math to support creationist theology only cheapens the precious commodity of faith. It really is like rasslin' with a pig in the mud.

You can take this as "i told you so that's why" or "you suck" response. I personally am always surprised by how many well-reasoned arguments show up on here.

 

[Flagg]

Yo baby yo

You suck you stupid, naive, disillusioned moron

(Should I put a wink in here somewhere?)

 

[KillerMuffin]

Heheheheheh Flagg, you are the man. *snicker*

BLANKET PARTY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Blanket Party at bobfrog's place, bibtode is the guest of honor. YEEEEEEEHHHAAAAAAWWWW. I am so excited!

Yo babtrode, you might just find that people might just reply in intelligent ways to your threads simply because you may have posed an interesting thought or question. You do not have to resort to begging for DCL's attention. We all already know you are in lust with the man. Not that I blame ya, Dixon is one helluva hunk. But really, don't you think you should check to see if he is interested in you that way before you fanatically chase him?

 

[Naked Hunny]

NO NO Muff dont you realize now that Mr. Toad is disillusioned!! He thinks the people that hate him love him and the people that love him are out to get him!!

 

[KillerMuffin]

Nekkie, darlin, thats what makes the Blanket Party soooo purrrrrfect. Even you could get into a Blanket Party starring Blabtod.

 

[Bobtoad777]

ignoreing flagg, killermuffin.

I want to thank you RonG for you response. do you have any formulas that you could share with me that would arrive at the current population stating with a one million year span of human growth. I liked what you said. It is true that some stagnation of the population would occur. with the one family and 2.5 kids formula. but remember that is a conservative number because instead of just one family starting it with 2.5 kids per generation we do have 4 families producing that amount, would that then be enough to over come the stagnation?

no i do not feel your answer is an i told you so or a you suck answer. I is very challengeing and thats what I was looking for.

as for naked hunny, no body here that i know loves me nor do they even like me it is merely a case of tolerence, waiting for a chance to get me.

 

[RonG]

Well, population growth is going to follow the basic model of Total = Principal x (1+Interest Rate)^^number of periods. For your example, if the original 8 people have 2.5 kids, the interest rate is 0.25 (they are replicating once plus 25%) so for the first generation, you would have 8 x 1.25 or 10 kids. If they do it again, each of these theoretical 5 couples have 2.5 kids you get 8 x 1.25^^2 = 12.5 kids (half a kid is a messy concept to deal with but you can alternately round up or down). You do this for 100 replicates and you get the 4.9 Billion number that your text has. In addition to that the previous two generations alive right now need to be added so that gives you a presumable total of 11 Billion people! So in reality, we haven't averaged 2.5 kids over 100 perfectly aligned generations.

Back to the chase, there are too many discontinuities in population growth to have a really good model. Famines, war, crusades (a wonderful way to kill off a bunch of young men), disease, etc., sharply alter any probabilistic model. The best model for any static generation would be a model that includes a Poisson-type distribution of number of children that reach adulthood with likelihoods of reproduction. Intergenerational reproduction (someone from Grandpa's generation fathers kids with someone from Britney Spear's age) creates pedigree collapse and a lot of models fall apart. This is why some efforts are made at just looking at females and projecting a 51/49% split of females to males when you are finished. There are also a lot more reasons that men replicate in smaller percentages than women (one reason is that women have higher standards than men)

There were some awfully good models based on specific situations (Victorian England) where you had a relatively predictable span of childbirth. But the wide span of recent generations certainly make these simplistic models fall apart. The best models in use today are non-parametric, they really don't pick a number like 2.5 kids or 3 kids. What they do is project trends based on use of simple calculus tools and series convergences and hope that nothing unplanned occurs. Like a big flood.

Hope that helps explain some. The reality is that there isn't a math model to explain 1 million years or 10 million years any more than this model explains 4300 years.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Warning! Long ass post ahead.

This is just one of several scientifically based arguments Creationists have come up with (earnestly, not deceptively) to challenge the theories of evolution and natural selection. All of them sound plausible and well thought out, but each one contains a fatal flaw, a mistake in reasoning or mathematics, that tears the argument to shreds.

For example, there’s the University of Texas proof that the Earth is about 10,000 years old according to measurements of the half life of Earth’s magnetic field. But if you study the data, as scientists have, you’ll see the the argument assumes that the decay of the magnetic field is linear (or decaying in a constant direction), when in fact it fluctuates, meaning that any measurement made from the linear model is meaningless. Just another example of bad science brought to light by good science (like the cold fusion debacle a while back).

Ghost Writer (a.k.a. Fallen Angel) earlier touched on the “Life is too complex to come together at random” model, which is another example of an old Creationist chestnut that has been around for years, disproven time and time again by science, but, like Jefferson’s fabled westward American river or giant stone faces on Mars, people continue to think “there must be something to it.” I didn’t really go into it in before, but I will now since Bob seems so interested in these arguments. I’m going to expand a bit what Fallen stated, but the basic Creation Science argument is this:

Life is too complex to have come together by chance. The basic proof: Take an organism of only 100 parts, extremely simple compared to humans. Now, for that organism to have some together by chance would require nature trying every possible combination of those 100 parts until it comes out right. That works out to about 10 to the power of 158 permutations. That’s 10 to the power of 158 different organisms that nature could create. But there aren’t even that many creatures in the world! So, if nature hasn’t had time to create all the possible permutations to create a simple 100 part animal, how can something as complex as a human being ever come together randomly? No, it can’t be chance. Someone had to “create” a human.

Here’s the fault in the reasoning: The argument assumes that Life evolves randomly, which it doesn’t. It assumes that nature doesn’t “remember” when it gets a part in the wrong place, making all those different possible permutations likely. But that’s not how evolution works.

If you say that when nature gets one of the 100 parts in the right place it can then eliminate all the permutations that don’t allow for that sequence, (which is not exactly how it works biologically, but for the sake of this model it is much more accurate) the number of permutations gets substantially smaller than 10 to the 158th power.

In other words, Nature does not try out every permutation (or, in the case of Fallen’s “pulling the coins out of the pocket” model, nature does not pull out 100 coins, get it “wrong” and then put all coins back int he pocket for another try, it keeps the “right” coins and never again takes out the “wrong” coins).

Nature builds upon what works, keeping what’s “right” and eliminating what’s “wrong”, so the evolution of a 100 part creature or a human being is entirely within the realm of computational possibility.

Another way to look at this more clearly is to image the odds of a computer, putting letters together at random, coming up with the phrase “To be or not to be”. If you allow for every permutation there would be 26 to the 13th combinations. Not very good odds. But, if you tell the computer to keep all the letters that it guesses “right” and eliminate from future consideration every letter it tries that is “wrong” the whole thing goes a hell of a lot faster. In fact, a computer in 1988 produced TOBEORNOTTOBE in 335 tries using this method (which, again, better mirrors evolution than any “random” model). To produce the entire play “Hamlet” you’d only need four or five days.

Nature will try a wing shape. If it’s wrong, the species will die out, or will perhaps evolve the wing shape into a piece of flesh used for ventilation. In any event, nature doesn’t take the bad wing and go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. (The coins don’t all go back in the pocket). It builds on what has come before.

Now, as for the topic at hand, another old chestnut, the “Population Computation” , ron G. covered it fairly well.

Here’s the classic argument:

If you compute backwards using the current rate of population growth you’ll find that there were only two people living in 4300 B.C. (Adam and Eve, perhaps?) The argument also says that, again, using the current rate of population growth, if you say that the earth is one million years old (making 25,000 generations each having an average of 2.5 kids) there should be more humans on earth than there are electrons in the universe. Therefore, civilizations and humans are not that old.

This is an old one, and a good example of how easy it is to find any answer you want using mathematics, particularly if you don’t pay attention to actual given data. The real ludicrous nature of the population argument becomes apparent if you accept the numbers the Creationist use and realize that, according to their counting method, there were only about 600 people alive during the time of the flourishing civilizations of Egypt, China and elsewhere. If you give Egypt half the world’s population, that means 300 people built the pyramids. That, alone, should tell you that there is a major flaw in the Creationist’s mathematics. And here it is:

The fault of the argument lies in the phrase “current rate of population growth”. (bob, at least, allows for something most Creationist do not, somefluctutaion in that rate. But as you’ll see, even the word some is seriously flawed.)

The argument assumes that human population growth has always grown exponentially since the beginning of time exactly as it is growing now, and that’s not only wrong it’s really, really wrong. The rate of human population growth has fluctuated up and down with the growth and decline of civilizations, disease (the plagues of the sixth and fourteenth centuries), environmental changes (like ice ages and drought), the success of trade routes and agriculture, and other likewise catastrophic and/or beneficial events. In fact, the current rate of population growth, which shows a steady statistical increase, has only existed for the last 100 years.

Flucutation does not account for a small derivation in computation, it acounts for a monumental derviation in computation.

In fact, it’s interesting to note that in human pre-history there was an event which nearly wiped out homo sapiens (us) for good. It could have been disease, but most scientists theorize extreme environmental changes (and, no, it didn’t rain for forty days and forty nights). In any event, the entire population of humans was nearly wiped out, and had to, for all intents and purposes, start over. This was fairly recent in our evolution, and it is for this reason that humans have a very small percentage of genetic variation (meaning, cousins, that we are all more closely related than we think). Chimpanzees, on the other hand, have tremendous genetic diversity, which makes their species stronger against disease and more able adaptable to change. (It’s a good thing we got the brains, or we probably wouldn’t be here.)

So, you see, any Creationist argument based on reversing the steady rate of population growth backwards, and doesn’t allow for fluctuation, is flawed six ways to Sunday.

There are many Creationist arguments like these, and they crop up from time to time. But they’re all flawed at some fundamental level (except at the level of “faith”, which does not require or ask for scientific sanction).

It’s important to remember that “Creation Science” is a science in name only.

---------------------------------------

And, for the record, I may not always answer personal questions, but anyone can ask me anything they want.

 

[Bobtoad777]

Thank you I am going to get some further information on the issue. That is why I like this conversation always growing and challenging my center of focus.

 

[Never]

as for naked hunny, no body here that i know loves me nor do they even like me it is merely a case of tolerence, waiting for a chance to get me.

Someone's looking for love in all the wrong places.
You have an interesting view of aggressive behavior, no one is 'waiting to get you' they grumble to themselves about you until someone strikes at you then hop on the wagon and start voicing complaints. It's part of the communal nerve by striking one part the entire nerve reacts. That's why you get times when everyone is happy and others when everyone is griping.
The question you need to ask yourself is, what am I doing to the nerve? You're wallowing and dragging your resentment across every thread. You need to put what happened behind you and get back to whatever you did before. If you notice people have stopped criticizing you - they are now just responding to your martyring.
You're getting attentions both from those that feel sorry for you and from those that are defending themselves from your cries of 'victim'. You're also giving me the chance to study group mechanics but I'd much rather observe the rounds of sexual expression common to this community.