Human population growth indicates a young earth
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Claim
A reasonable assumption of population growth rate (0.5%) fits with a population which began with two people about 4000 years ago, not with a human history of millions of years.
Source
Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Master Books, Arkansas, pp. 167-169.
Responses
- This is hardly a "reasonable assumption". The fact is that growth only follows an approximately exponential curve when there are exactly sufficient or surplus resources. Populations will oscillate about a stable equilibrium value after they have grown to a certain point. There is good reason to believe that recent trends in population growth are due primarily to advances in agricultural technology and that extrapolating this growth rate indefinitely into the past is completely unjustified.
- If Morris' assumptions about human population are correct, it is possible to determine how many people lived on Earth at any given time in the past. Starting with two people in the year 4,000 BCE, and applying Morris' constant growth rate of 0.05% per year, we find that the Earth's entire population at 1 CE should be 42,755. Since the Old Testament mentions a number of five-digit -body-count battles which (being in the Old Testmament) must have occured before 1 CE, it is difficult to see how a Bible-believing man such as Morris could regard his population model as a "reasonable assumption".
- Human population growth indicates a young human species, if anything, not a young Earth. Also, it is quite impossible for only two humans to balloon to a population of 6.5 billion, due to the fact that there would have to be incest in every generation. The relatedness between Adam and his second-generation descendants would have to be at least equal to, and potentially greater than his relatedness to his first-generation descendants. The relatedness between Adam and any generation of his offspring could never be less than 0.5, and with Adam's continued participation would actually converge on (but never reach) 1. That's all a fancy way of saying that "a population of two is below the extinction threshold". The third generation would have been mentally retarded, the fourth generation would have all been still-born.
- If this growth curve was accurate, there were only 13 people in Egypt during the construction of the pyramids.
Fallacies contained in this claim
- Composition (young humanity means young earth because humanity is part of earth)
- Unwarranted Extrapolation (extrapolating that far backward is unjustified)
External Links
- Mark Isaak's page for this claim [1]
- Elsberry, Wesley R., 1998. Population size and time of creation or Flood. http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/elsberry/evobio/evc/argresp/populate.html
