Just curious. If there are people that beleive the earth is only 6000 years old and that humans have been around for 4000 years how do they explain the size of human population?
If humans ‘began’ four thousand years ago or 200 generations ago (assuming 20 years is one generation) then wouldn’t each human being have to have had thirty million offspring in their lifetime?
I would be the first to admit this is a very naive question, but I must be a very naive person because I’ve never seen the answer to this question.
edit: as an aside. Improve my mathematical reasoning… Assuming humans began 4000 years ago and that the average age to begin reproducin is 20 then how many offspring would each person have to have to reach six billion after 4000 years?
If each generation increased the population by 15%. (this is less than 1% growth a year) the population would be around 1.4 trillion times what it was in the beginning. 1.15 ^ 200 = 1.379 * 10^12
Unless I’m figuring this incorrectly (which I may very well be :)), each generation would need to increase a bit under 12% the generation before. In other words, Adam and Eve would have 2.25 kids, 2.5 grandkids, 2.8 great-grandkids etc. Then the 200th generation would be around six billion people.
That’s sort of simplifying the fact that all the people currently alive don’t comprise the same generation. Many of them are parents of some of the others etc.
If population doubled each generation that would give a 200th generation of 1.60e+60 people.
Many early societies, and less advanced societies had more children per couple then a modern day society, so I don’t think a doubling of population per generation is unreasonable, and that 4000 years is based on the Bible, which has in it that lots (most?) people listed had more then 4 children in OT times.
The question becomes what happened to them all, which is also answered in the Bible: war, famine, disease, murder, flood, human sacrifice, execution by civil authority, disgruntled angels and a occasionally wrathful God.
You might be surprised to learn this is an argument that is presented *in favor * of a young earth, as explained in this article from the Secular Web Library:
If the population grows continuously at 1% per year for 4,000 years, then it will be (1 + 1%) ^4000 times the starting population, say, the eight people that a Young Earth Creationist claims survived the Flood. That means that the human population today should be about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000.
From the same article:
As others have noted, 6000 years is enough time to get the population up to its present level with reasonable assumptions. There are many many excellent reasons to laugh at how silly and ignorant young-earth-creationists are but I don’t think this is one of them.
That infidels.org article really protests too much. Populations don’t grow at a consistently regulated standard rate. They explode at whatever rate the species can reproduce until reaching environmental resistance.
Environmental resistance for humans includes food supply, predation by “monsters” (bears, lions, grendels ;), etc), human-on-human violence, & pestilence.
On a planet with few humans already existing, a lot of food supply & pestilence issues can be avoided by relocation. As the population in an area grows, the resistance in that area, & thus the perceived growth rate, tends to shrink.
The flip side is that there is a period of adaptation to a new area, where survival can be uncertain until the migrants learn how to manage a new climate. The question becomes, how long does it take to learn to live in a totally different climate?
6000 years may be enough to get a population up to present day sizes (actually, you get less than that because of the flood reboot thing), but can you get that growth curve to fit the reported population sizes for other Biblical events such as the exodus? Would there have been enough people to build the Egyptian pyramids, etc?
Just to throw in some more numbers to crunch- assuming a 4000 BC creation of Adam & Eve, the Flood occurred IIRC 1656 years later (2344 BC), and left eight people to grow to six billion in 4350 years.
Humans built the Egyptian pyramids? What do you think the Bene’ Elohim were doing when they weren’t shagging our women & breeding Nephilim?!?
It might jive ok with the CURRENT population, but does it fit with historical populations? How many nations do we know existed, historical events do we know took place say 100 years after the flood? Can the population estimate at that time be accounted for?
I’m guessing no. In which case this DOES seem like another point against young earth belief, no?
Good point. Starting with 8 people in 2000 BC, I get a growth rate of about 10%/year to get to 6 billion in AD 2000 (with 20-year generations, as assumed above, so 8 * 1.1^200 ~ 6B). But that growth rate leaves only about 110,000 people in the whole Roman Empire at the time of Jesus’ birth (8 * 1.1^100 ~ 110K). Anybody have an estimate for the number of people in the Roman Empire in AD 1?
That’s the real killer. Given that we know the whole world has been populated for thousands of years, we can compute the size of various countries under the 1% assumption. Rome wouldn’t be too populated. As you said, the Exodus would have consisted of five Hebrews and a goat.
Since we know that Europe in the Middle Ages didn’t grow consistently by 1% a year, the whole notion is idiotic.
But it brings up an interesting point - that is YECs, and many very religious people or other true believers, aren’t very good at computing data that would be expected if their beliefs were true. Here they just plugged in current population and population after the flood into the equation, assuming linear growth, and got a growth rate, without bothering to check data points in between for plausibility.
I see this as a model of many beliefs that assume an active god. Holy books say God acts in one way, the world doesn’t look like that, and excuses are made (esp. God works in mysterious ways.)
Don’t you have to account for larger families back in the old days? I think it would be a hard thing to pin down. Used to be, the only people who could help around the home were your own kids. You needed plenty. Also, slaves were bred for profit. And on the other side, plagues. And wars. I mean, without these kinds of adjustments, shouldn’t 20,000 years or more leave us standing on each other’s heads or something?
You’re forgetting that life was nasty, brutish and short. Even in fairly modern times we had population crashes. (We might be seeing one now in Africa). The earth could have been easily reached the population we see today given a Flood, but not the population seen in David’s time, for example.
But, given that Cain found a city to go to, you can say the writers of the Bible were poetic, but not particularly logical. I can see them doing an Ed Wood as played by Depp shtick - “No one will notice!”
First that is not 10% per year that is 10% per generation which is 0.478% growth per year. We know from history that populations of people can grow much faster than that if the people have access to food. You can more than double the population every 40 years if each on average couple has 3 children survive to have have children. This would put the world population at 3.25 *10^18. If instead they have on average 2.4 children survive instead of 3. That is 5 billion people. Human growth rate is not limited by the number of children that women can have. It is limited by food available, war, famine etc.
Andy Farmer
The founders didn’t have mattresses to sleep on. They slept on the floor.Elizabeth Farmer
And they lived to an average age of twenty-nine, Andy.
