Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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Oh, boy.
Have a look at this page, which takes up a YEC argument that human population sizes and doubling times argue for a young earth. Here are some of the conclusions:
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Now that we have verified that making inferences as to intermediate population values is an activity engaged in by even those people who forward these arguments, we can proceed to showing what the population argument implies about the human population size at various points in history. The following follows from Williams set of population parameters: 5,177 years prior to 1925 for an initial population of 2, and a doubling time of 168.3 years.
World Population Date Event
17 2566 BC Construction of Great Pyramid
2,729 1332 BC Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten dies
5,000 1185 BC Trojan War
~1200 BC Hebrew exodus, # of males = 603,550 (excluding Levites)
32,971 776 BC First Olympic games
87,507 490 BC Greek wars with Persia
133,744 387 BC Brennus' Sack of Rome
586,678 28 BC Augustus' census of Rome (70 to 100 million counted)
655,683 1 AD Nice date
While I worked from Williams' example, any similar argument will produce a similar set of counter-factual intermediate values. What the real values tell us is that human population does not always increase exponentially, and thus current population cannot tell us an initial population time.
Third, the argument ignores what is known about population dynamics from other species. Various other species can be observed to sometimes reproduce exponentially, but we observe that such populations fluctuate, stabilize, or crash. In no case do exponentially reproducing populations "take over the world" as SciCre'ists assure us would be the case if evolution were true. In recent times, human population growth has been exponential, but this does not mean that the human population has been growing exponentially for all its residence time. Just as the number of E. coli present in your gut will not tell us your birthday or the time of your last use of an antibiotic, so human population size is decoupled from when Homo sapiens arose, or even when a bottleneck may have occurred.
Fourth, final population size is an unreliable indicator of initial population time. This is really a reiteration of the last point. There is no general means of inferring a history of population sizes from a current population size. Attempting to do so coupled with the claim that such attempts disprove evolution shows both ignorance and hubris.
I will add a fifth point, really a corollary to the first point. The SciCre argument is self-contained, and deliberately ignores all other sources of information. Human history does not record a global flood. Human history is continuous through the times proposed for a global flood. Geological evidence shows no sign of a global flood. Fossil evidence indicates that mankind is far more ancient than SciCre'ists would admit. None of this evidence goes away or is addressed by the population argument.
In short, the SciCre population argument fails on many different criteria. Honest creationists should eschew its use.
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Edited by Wesley R. Elsberry on Aug. 02 2007,05:15
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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