# Evidence of a Global Flood? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 12, 2006, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425 "2006-09-12T16:07:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Bobotheoptimist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/919ad9/32.png) [@Bobotheoptimist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bobotheoptimist)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/81 "2006-09-12T22:05:24Z")
> [@Der Trihs](#): > > It’s entertaining; the Creationist version of Whack-a-mole. > > “Fossils on mountains” \< WHACK \> > "Floodwater ordered the fossils \< WHACK \> > “The Earth’s crust was changed” \< WHACK \> > “Super genetic Adam and Eve” \< WHACK \> > “Buoyancy !” \< WHACK \> > “Waterworld” \< WHACK \> I might have missed 'em - has the speed of light changed yet? Thermodynamics been mentioned? Human footprints and dinosaur tracks together? Someone wake me up for the speed of light changing, that’s my favorite. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/82 "2006-09-12T22:10:18Z")
I’m waiting for him to ask how man came from chimps. It can’t be much longer, can it? ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/83 "2006-09-12T22:12:25Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > \ \*f we go by the Noah account we get a whole NEW crop of problems. For instance, lets say that Noah did in fact manage to somehow get all those plants, animals, etc onto a big boat…and somehow have the logistics to keep them all alive for as long as the flood event (and its after math) transpired. Impossible Is NOT. I don’t understand why you insist on ignoring the FAIRY SUBCONTRACTORS. According to the archives, 6.023\*10^23 winged fairies were put at Noah’s disposal to handle the care & feeding of the animals, as well as waste removal. (Cooking was left up to the the wives.) Not only was it possible, but it was easy; for Noah and the boys, the Deluge was a year-long vacation. > [@](#): > > Unless Noah went around the world on his arc, dropping off species hither and yon, we would see a central point from which all the current species on earth radiated from…presumably Mt Ararat. Um, excuse me? Have you never heard of the transporter? 😕 > [@](#): > > In addition, unless Noah, undocumented in the bible, managed somehow to gather an incredible diversity of HUMAN genetic material, we would expect to see much less diversity today. Nanites. > [@](#): > > We also see…fish. Why? How did the fish all survive? The whales? Crabs? Crustations? Coral? How did all this stuff live through such an event? No place to put killer whales or manatees on the arc after all…how did they live? Did I not mention the mole of fairies? ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/84 "2006-09-12T22:25:46Z")
> [@mstay](#): > > I’m waiting for him to ask how man came from chimps. It can’t be much longer, can it? Isn’t the latest suggestion that chimps are descended from humans? That sounds more likely to me: chimps are the end products of evolution, and we are just the missing link (or intermediate form). ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/85 "2006-09-12T22:31:17Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > Isn’t the latest suggestion that chimps are descended from humans? That sounds more likely to me: chimps are the end products of evolution, and we are just the missing link (or intermediate form). I assume you’re kidding, but I’ll comment anywhistle. Neither chimps nor humans are the end product of evolution, because evolution has no end product; it is not telelogical. We are neither higher or lower on the ladder than any other extant species. ---
**Author:** ![Interest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ebca7d/32.png) [@Interest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Interest)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/86 "2006-09-12T22:31:37Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > It would REALLY help this discussion if you had the slightest grasp of the information you are attempting to throw about. > > Humanity has the same number of genes that it has always had since it became human. Genetic diversity refers to the ways in which the same genes in different people have slightly different compositions, how alleles are expressed. Understanding this provides a basic understanding of evolutionary theory, genetics, and a whole host of issues with which you appear to be unfamiliar. (Much like your other thread in which you erroneously claimed that inbreeding leads to more diversity.) > > Noah and family could not have had a “super supply” of genes and remained human. All the changes and diversity among humans since the beginning (whether it was Noah and family 5400 years ago or the real development of humanity several hundred thousand years previously) are the result of small changes–mutations–that occur during meiosis at the fertilization of the human egg. The new critter has to match DNA from the paternal donor and the maternal donor, giving something slightly different than either the father or mother, and during that process, some changes creep into the process (which is why all siblings are not identical). Over time, those tiny changes are passed down from one generation to another, spreading increased diversity. Really strange changes result in people who cannot survive or cannot reproduce and are lost, but most simply add to the range of differences among people. > > No. Geologists have done a pretty solid job of mapping the Earth and we do know that the only locations where earlier forms are found above later forms (and they are rare) have occurred in locations where folding has occurred. That is not bias; that is evidence. I agree that humanity still has the same number of genes that it always has…since the Creation. However, I disagree with the supposedly introduced changes into the gene pool. That has never been demonstrated scientifically, and they never worry about it in the genetic engineering or breeding fields–why? Because it doesn’t happen. All the anomalies in the gene pool can be explained by either sub/dom genes or mutations. However, while some people try to explain evolution by pointing to mutuations, I should emphasive that mutations have never been shown to be beneficial to the gene pool, or even “adding” anything to the gene pool. Rather, mutations are simply odd combinations of genes passed on from the parents. All we know of human genes does not stand contrary to the Biblical account of Creation. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/87 "2006-09-12T22:32:59Z")
Sorry to baclktrack a bit, but I would just like to point out that to argue hydrologic sorting to be responsible for the highh degree of ordering observed in the fossil record is fundamentally incompatible with watchmaker arguments to the effect that _order cannot arise spontaneously out of chaos_. Nobody has mentioned the watchmaker arguments in this thread yet (and indeed, they would be off-topic), but I just thought I’d mention it - you can’t have it both ways. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/88 "2006-09-12T22:38:57Z")
> [@Skald the Rhymer](#): > > I assume you’re kidding, but I’ll comment anywhistle. Neither chimps nor humans are the end product of evolution, because evolution has no end product; it is not telelogical. We are neither higher or lower on the ladder than any other extant species. Well – half-kidding. I read recently about some evidence that after hominids had split between the Pan genus and the Homo genus, there was still some inter-generic interbreeding, so that we have chimps up in our family tree, and chimps have humans up somewhere in their family trees. But these labels and distinctions are all pretty arbitrary, including dividing closely related animals between two genera. And yes, the smallest bacterium in my gut is just as much the end product of evolution as I am – well more, in fact, because I have had children, so those children must be closer to the end than I am. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/89 "2006-09-12T22:39:29Z")
> [@Interest](#): > > All the anomalies in the gene pool can be explained by either sub/dom genes or mutations. However, while some people try to explain evolution by pointing to mutuations, I should emphasive that mutations have never been shown to be beneficial to the gene pool, or even “adding” anything to the gene pool. Rather, mutations are simply odd combinations of genes passed on from the parents. Oooh! ooh! Did you see that? - A _ **falsifiable assertion** _! You don’t see many of those in creationist’s arguments. Ok, if the entire human gene pool consists of nothing more than various recombinations of the genes of a single breeding pair of ancestors (A&E), then it should not be possible to ever find more than four possible viable alleles for any given locus in the genome. Is that what we find? I don’t even have to bother looking to know it won’t be. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/90 "2006-09-12T22:51:50Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > Well – half-kidding. I read recently about some evidence that after hominids had split between the Pan genus and the Homo genus, there was still some inter-generic interbreeding, so that we have chimps up in our family tree, and chimps have humans up somewhere in their family trees. But these labels and distinctions are all pretty arbitrary, including dividing closely related animals between two genera. > > And yes, the smallest bacterium in my gut is just as much the end product of evolution as I am – well more, in fact, because I have had children,\*\* so those children must be closer to the end than I am\*\*. Ahem. _There is no end for them to be closer to, in the sense of evolution having some goal that it is aiming for or that could be predicted ahead of time._ This is not Star Trek: Voyager. Which is unfortunate, because Torres was hot. I could tolerate living in a intelligent design universe if it included her. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/91 "2006-09-12T22:54:12Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Could you please cite the verse in the Bible that makes this assertion? > > Two people can have at most four alleles at any one genetic locus. Since some human genes can have a dozen or more alleles, it would be completely impossible for Adam and Eve to have contained the genetic diversity of all present human populations. Actually, I love this concept. Can you imagine how big a sperm would be that could hold all this genetic information? It would be practically able to walk itself! That must be how Adam and Eve had sex - Adam ejaculated on one side of the garden, and the sperm walked over and impregnated Eve on the other side! (Just like fish etc.) Sex by remote control - what a concept! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/92 "2006-09-12T23:06:12Z")
> [@Interest](#): > > However, I disagree with the supposedly introduced changes into the gene pool. That has never been demonstrated scientifically, and they never worry about it in the genetic engineering or breeding fields–why? Because it doesn’t happen. Once again, you know nothing. Genes grow out of control, like Huntington’s. Cancer cells evolve whole new genes, even chromosomes. Genes and chromosomes are duplicated, and the duplicate evolves in a new direction. > [@Interest](#): > > However, while some people try to explain evolution by pointing to mutuations, I should emphasive that mutations have never been shown to be beneficial to the gene pool, or even “adding” anything to the gene pool. Many groups have mutant versions of normal genes that provide resistance to diseases. > [@Interest](#): > > All we know of human genes does not stand contrary to the Biblical account of Creation. Given that it’s sponge-brained nonsense, the only parts of science that don’t stand contrary to your bronze age fairy tale are the parts that say nothing at all on the subject. ---
**Author:** ![Mapache](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/58956e/32.png) [@Mapache](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mapache)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/93 "2006-09-12T23:28:54Z")
My favorite, a Noah’s Ark thread. I posted a lot of this stuff a long time ago, but I can’t seem to find the thread. Anyway: the Ark is an impossibility, for a lot of reasons. For example: just to start Noah and his boys would have to find, cut, saw into lumber, and carefully sticker and dry about THIRTY THOUSAND TONS of “gopher wood”, which nobody knows what it was. Among other things they would have needed a keel, preferably of teak but maybe oak, three hundred feet long by five or six feet square, along with several hundred grown ribs, each with the proper curve, at least 36" x 36" x fifty feet long. Then they would have had to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for over two thousand years to put in the fifty million manhours they needed (unless of course the same fairies that Skald the R mentions showed up to help). And then it would have sunk as soon as it got wet. (If anyone cares, I can repeat the calculations I made in that long ago thread, unless someone else can find it.) An aside: Interest said > [@](#): > > The eruption of Mount Saint Helens produced many layers in one quick mud slide. Orderly layers are produced quickly in a catastrophic flood. He’s parroting an argument made by John Morris of the ICRS in a debate that’s somewhere on the TOA site, which always annoyed me that his opponent didn’t catch. LAYERS ARE NOT VARVES (excuse the shouting) unless they show the typical summer/winter layers, repeated over and over TWO HUNDRED SIXTY THOUSAND TIMES (there I go again)at some sites; see [http://www.ibri.org/Tracts/varvetct.htm](http://www.ibri.org/Tracts/varvetct.htm) for a discussion. Another bit: I have held in my hand, at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, core samples from Eniwetok that show more or less continuous growth, with various interruptions, for well over 100,000 years. See [News, Politics, Sports, Mail & Latest Headlines - AOL.com](http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/geology.html). Lots of other good stuff there too. One other thing: I believe a lot of the heat-from-rain problems mentioned comes from the fact that every gram of water changing state from vapor to liquid, which is how you get rain, releases 600 Joules of heat, more than enough to boil the world and everything in it if we’re talking about enough water to cover the Himalayas. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/94 "2006-09-12T23:45:45Z")
> [@Mapache](#): > > My favorite, a Noah’s Ark thread. I posted a lot of this stuff a long time ago, but I can’t seem to find the thread. Anyway: the Ark is an impossibility, for a lot of reasons. For example: just to start Noah and his boys would have to find, cut, saw into lumber, and carefully sticker and dry about THIRTY THOUSAND TONS of “gopher wood”, which nobody knows what it was. Sez you. Again, it wasn’t my part of the project, but I’ve seen the specs. Gopher wood is a mistranslation; it was actually a super-secret metal alloy not replicated until the late 1930s, and even then under such hush-hush conditions that only a small disc was fabricated. Here’s the [specs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America%27s_Shield), if you’re interested. > [@](#): > > Among other things they would have needed a keel, preferably of teak but maybe oak, three hundred feet long by five or six feet square, along with several hundred grown ribs, each with the proper curve, at least 36" x 36" x fifty feet long. Then they would have had to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for over two thousand years to put in the fifty million manhours they needed (unless of course the same fairies that Skald the R mentions showed up to help). Please read my posts more carefully. The fairies were only involved in animal husbadnry. Materiel and construction were handled by [these guys](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarves#Tolkien.27s_dwarves) > [@](#): > > One other thing: I believe a lot of the heat-from-rain problems mentioned comes from the fact that every gram of water changing state from vapor to liquid, which is how you get rain, releases 600 Joules of heat, more than enough to boil the world and everything in it if we’re talking about enough water to cover the Himalayas. Didn’t I mention the 31,415,926,536 hamsters in cages we had detailed to power the thermal resequencers? Really, if you’re not going to listen to somebody who was THERE, I don’t know how we can have a rational discussion. Ciao, Raphael ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/95 "2006-09-12T23:48:26Z")
> [@Interest](#): > > And if you can’t provide a “pebble” of it, you’re willfully bluffing… [Here you go.](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html) Once you’ve satifactorily rebutted all the points discussed there, perhaps it might be worthwhile responding to you again. But not until then. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/96 "2006-09-12T23:49:27Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > Well – half-kidding. I read recently about some evidence that after hominids had split between the Pan genus and the Homo genus, there was still some inter-generic interbreeding, so that we have chimps up in our family tree, and chimps have humans up somewhere in their family trees. But these labels and distinctions are all pretty arbitrary, including dividing closely related animals between two genera. I’m going to steal this from Dawkins. Think of it this way. If we went back in a time machine and plucked a human specimen a thousand years ago and then went back another thousand years into the past our specimen could interbreed with anyone without difficulty. Every thousand years we could pick a new person up and make a family from the previous thousand year period. We could do this over and over all the way back to 6-7 million years ago, to the ancestors of all chimps and humans today. Then we could take this common ancestor and go in reverse, go forward towards today, a thousand years and this species could breed with the ancestors of the chimp line. Eventually, we’d be back to modern times, breeding a modern day chimp with one from a thousand years ago. It would be a large, unbroken chain between man and chimp – well, more like a Y, with the base of the Y being our ancestor, one path going to chimps and one to us. As for \*\*Interest,\*\*the only way you can take the Bible literally and have it jive with what we know of the world is if God worked his Jesus magic and made all the evidence up, to fool us. Or maybe Satan did, since he’s the great deceiver, right? Regardless, technology and the modern world work best when we pretend the earth was is 4+ billion years old and homo sapiens is thousands upon thousands of years old. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/97 "2006-09-12T23:55:44Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Sorry to baclktrack a bit, but I would just like to point out that to argue hydrologic sorting to be responsible for the highh degree of ordering observed in the fossil record is fundamentally incompatible with watchmaker arguments to the effect that _order cannot arise spontaneously out of chaos_. Nobody has mentioned the watchmaker arguments in this thread yet (and indeed, they would be off-topic), but I just thought I’d mention it - you can’t have it both ways. That’s a good one, I’ll have to remember it. I still want him to explain why trilobites are heavier than dinosaurs though. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Mapache](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/58956e/32.png) [@Mapache](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mapache)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/98 "2006-09-12T23:59:14Z")
That’s more or less continuous growth of coral reef building organisms, which I forgot to put in. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/99 "2006-09-13T00:06:55Z")
> [@Interest](#): > > I agree that humanity still has the same number of genes that it always has…since the Creation. However, I disagree with the supposedly introduced changes into the gene pool. That has never been demonstrated scientifically, and they never worry about it in the genetic engineering or breeding fields–why? Because it doesn’t happen. > > All the anomalies in the gene pool can be explained by either sub/dom genes or mutations. However, while some people try to explain evolution by pointing to mutuations, I should emphasive that mutations have never been shown to be beneficial to the gene pool, or even “adding” anything to the gene pool. Rather, mutations are simply odd combinations of genes passed on from the parents. > > All we know of human genes does not stand contrary to the Biblical account of Creation. You probably mean we have the same number of chromsomes - though I believe some people have an extra Y, so that’s not even true. [Here](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15725073) is the abstract of what looks like an interesting paper that shows that genes we share with the zebrafish (indicating common descent) have been duplicated and are now expressed differently. I’d have to get my wife to translate this into English ( 🙂 ) but before you make claims like that above you should take some time to search for contradictory findings. BTW, the sickle cell anemia gene is a counter-example to your claim. Flu viruses mutate all the time - not too helpful to us, but good for them. It’s true that the majority of mutations are not favorable (they’re neutral, I believe) but some are. Isn’t it disturbing to you that nearly everything your creationist sources tell you is wrong? Don’t you think you should draw a conclusion from that? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2006, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425/100 "2006-09-13T00:10:30Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > No: natural selection would predict that those with bad arguments would die out, and only those with good arguments would survive and produce progeny. The problem is that the process is very slow, and takes many generations. You should remember that creatures survive who are well adapted to their environment. That creationist arguments survive shows that there must be an environment with no trace of critical thinking, a total lack of understanding of science, and where willful blindness to evidence is rewarded. I wonder where that could be. 😉 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/evidence-of-a-global-flood/372425.md?page=6)