How do young-Earth Creationists account for the growth in human population after the flood? Starting with a population of 8 people in 4000BC, population grew to 170-200M in early-AD (In China alone the Han Dynasty kept tax records indicating about 60M.) That’s a growth factor of 25 Million in 4000 years. But world population is known to have only grown by a factor of 6 or 7 from then until 1800 (after which growth took off).
That’s not really a problem with YEC (there are, of course, many others).
If generation time is about 25 years, 4000 years is 160 generations. If each person had just over 1.1 children, compounding that over 160 generations grows the population by the required factor of 25 million.
Steady compounding over long periods gives astonishing and counterintuitive results. If you had the equivalent of $1 in Ancient Rome and achieved a real return of just 2% per annum every year since then, you would have more than 100 times the $400 trillion wealth of the entire world.
I suppose there may be a factual answer like ‘young-Earth Creationists counter that argument with X and Y’, but the short answer is that if you’re willing to believe in a young-Earth version of prehistory / history, you’re either ignoring or actively hostile to all science. Presenting arguments like ‘growth factors’ to a young-Earther is like explaining to a little kid why Santa could not physically visit every Christian kids’ house overnight.
Ninjaed!
I worked with the same starting point, but got slightly larger numbers:
8 people in Year 1, Generation 1
8.8 people in Year 26, Gen. 2
9.68 people in Year 51, Gen 3
etc etc etc
over 30.5 million in year 3976, Gen 160
over 33.5 million in year 4001, Gen 161
Oops, I think I misunderstood what you meant by “growth factor”. Now I realize that you meant 25 million for EACH of those first eight, to reach the 200 million figure.
No problem. My original calculation was based on 10% per generation. Bump that up slightly to 12%, and I end up with 599,754,837 in Year 4001.
Well, they ignore the fact that genetics alone doesn’t point to every human being descended from a group of 8 people from Turkey (or any indication that all animals came from that same place and spread out across the world)…or the fact that there are a ton of archeological sites that date to before 4000 BC for that matter.
However, as others have said, I think the math on this one actually works out. There are a bunch of population growth calculators out there, and doing so with a starting population of 8 and a rate of growth of 1.5…or even 1.1…and just 4k years it seems to pan out pretty well. But I doubt the YEC types have even bothered to do the math, since they are convinced it happened and the messy details aren’t their problem…those were/are Gods problem.
I think the OP’s question is not so much, or at least only, how, in YEC, global population could grow so fast. It’s rather how it could first grow so fast and then see population growth slow down so abruptly: After a 25million-fold increase over the first 4,000 years (from 8 in 4000 BC to 200mn in zero/1 BC), population would then have increased only 5-fold over the next 1,800 years (to approximately a billion in 1800).
I suppose that problem could be explained away by an adherent of YEC. You could postulate that the billion of 1800 is about the natural maximum the Earth could sustain in a pre-industrial, pre-artificial fertiliser economy. As global population was approaching that maximum, its growth rate decreased as a plateau effect. It was only after the advent of mechanisation and artificial fertilisers that global population began to spike again. Such an explanation would not be incompatible with the tenets of YEC.
Yes, it’s not uncommon to see very rapid exponential growth like this when resources are not constrained. The recent mouse plague in Australia, for example. But exponential growth cannot continue forever - it slows abruptly when you encounter a resource constraint - not enough food, say.
Don’t Old Testament types live for hundreds of years and remain fertile enough to impregnate their own offspring? The Bible has lots of life hacks for stuff like this.
Right: logistic growth is a pretty standard population growth model.
There’s a lesson here for your retirement fund. You cannot expect economic growth or the value of investments to just continue to compound indefinitely at 10% or even 5%. It’s literally impossible. There are always phases of wealth destruction, so take that into account in your planning.
Sometimes you’ll see them assume such a growth rate, but not take into account that that means that the population in ancient times would have been ridiculously small and the Pyramids must have been built by a few dozen people
That was pre-flood. God limited human lifespan after as apparently super long life caused all humanity to turn evil (think Trump, or any such ruler, living for centuries and how society would be under him). And today it is not unheard of for people to impregnate their own offspring, though in preflood times I don’t recall any such impregnating going on, that was mostly after, at least as written.
The Dow-Jones Industrial Average grew by an average of 5.42% from 1896 (when it began) to 2018. So just by keeping your money in a fund that tracks the Dow-Jones Industrial Average you can expect to do a little better than 5%. I’ve been told that 10% growth over a long period of someone’s stocks when they move their money occasionally between stocks is considered very good. In 1995, a 101-year-old woman named Anne Schreiber died whose stocks were worth a total around $22,000,000. She had put $5,000 into her stock account when she retired at 51. She lived on her pension for the rest of her life and didn’t put any additional money into her stock account or take any out, although she moved the money occasionally. This means her account increased by an average of 18.27% per year. This is extraordinarily good.
Past performance is no guarantee of future gains. The period in question includes the early industrial era, where things grew exceedingly fast, and an era in which the United States was a collossus and the rest of the world developing rapidly. Also, you need to correct for inflation.
The timing really matters as well. Considering inflation:
If you bought into the market on January 1916 and held it until 1982, you would have lost money.
If you bought into the market in June of 1929, you wouldn’t hit breakeven on your stocks again until October of 1955.
If you bought into the market in 1966, you wouldn’t break even until 1995. By 1982, you would have lost more than two thirds of your investment.
If you bought in just before the dot-com crash of 1999, you wouldn’t get back to even until June of 2014.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart
The stock market contains long periods of no growth, punctuated by periods of explosive growth or fast losses. How well you do in the market depends on when you bought in and when you sold. There are absolutely no guarantees of gains over any period shorter than a couple of decades. For people nearing retirement, that’s a huge risk.
Real Estate is the same. There can be long periods of flat or negative growth. We bought our first house in 1991 for $143,000. We then put about $30,000 into the house finishing the basement, landscaping the yard, etc. A decade later we sold it for… $139,000. We lost money to inflation and interest and realtor fees. Then we bought a new house, and its value doubled in five years. Timing is everything.
Right now, all assets look extremely overvalued to me. There are other inflation hedges available. Commodity funds, inflation-protected bonds, etc. They are also more liquid which is important to retirees.
If you buy into the market as a retiree and it collapses like it did in 1929, 1936, 1946, 1966, 1972, 1999 or 2008, you might not get back to even while still alive. The Dow could easily drop back to 16,000 or even lower if it crashes. And we are currently at all-time highs and haven’t had a major downturn since 2008. Maybe the party will go on another few years, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Exactly. Focusing on ‘growth factor’ when there are so many more lines of evidence disproving a global flood that it almost seems like cherry-picking: finding a weak argument against the flood and disproving it to ‘prove’ something while ignoring much more difficult arguments, such as the fact that no other extant civilizations seem to have noticed it, or that its whole basis in young-Earth creationism requires ignoring much of what we know about geology, cosmology, archaology, physics, anthropology, genetics…
Which is why it’s necessary to start accumulating money in a fund that tracks the stock market over your entire career, not for just a few years.
Fundamentally, they don’t have to explain it.
Once you postulate that God exists, Noah existed, and The Flood actually happened, you’re in the realm of miracles.
Need an unusually high growth rate to explain historically recorded populations? Goddidit.
Need those growth rates to disappear, so as to not predict populations higher than what was recorded? Goddidit again.
Need to overcome the genetic bottle neck of hundreds of millions to billions of humans being descended from a small, family-related group? Goddidit.
Don’t go bringing science to a miracle fight.
I’ve seen them answer this. They pick a growth factor from the recent past that works to provide the right number of people today, and in fact claim that they flood must have happened because that same growth factor would have led to a population of 100 billion or more today if it started pre-Flood.
Of course they are picking a factor after improvements in medicine and hygiene increased life expectancy through fewer dying babies, ignore the impact of plagues and famines, and don’t explain how there were enough people to build the pyramids and other ancient monuments as mentioned already.
BTW the Museum of Natural History has an interesting map showing world population since a long time ago with population concentrations, and includes a graph of population growth. Nearly flat until quite recently.
I suspect that the graph has a linear Y axis. Constant exponential growth (and I’m not claiming the word’s population did that) always looks flat at the beginning even though the growth rate is constant.