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[_ Old Earth _] Today's World Population Debunks Evolution/Darwinism

J

John

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From Dr. Carl Baugh's show "Creation in the 21st Century", Baugh and career mathematician, Professor John Heffner crunches the numbers to prove how today's estimated 6.5 billion world population is too low for the human race to have began 500,000 years ago.

"Creation in the 21st Century" can be seen on the Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) at 6 p.m. Central Time, on Tuesdays.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHngS9Rlb8w

BOOM!
 
JohnMuise said:
From Dr. Carl Baugh's show "Creation in the 21st Century", Baugh and career mathematician, Professor John Heffner crunches the numbers to prove how today's estimated 6.5 billion world population is too low for the human race to have began 500,000 years ago.

"Creation in the 21st Century" can be seen on the Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) at 6 p.m. Central Time, on Tuesdays.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHngS9Rlb8w

BOOM!
Click to expand...

Ridiculous nonsense. Par for the course, John.

1) At no point does any theory regarding the development of h. s. sapiens does it state that we came from one man and one woman. That is entirely impossible. Evolution deals with the growth and development of populations.

2) He assumes a constant growth rate without citing where he gets this figure from, without talking about the avg. life span, the introduction of agriculture, etc.

The human population remained relatively low until the Industrial Revolution in which our population has exponentially grown.

3) He doesn't assume any bottlenecking from events like the ice age or other catastrophes.

In short, it appears this man has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
 
Yes, as PC says, this is ridiculous nonsense. John, you may want to do some research on human population bottlenecks:

This is consistent with the Toba catastrophe theory which suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to c.15,000 individuals[5] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change, and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[6] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans.[5]

On the other hand, in 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[7] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age[8].
Click to expand...

Source: Wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans

When Baugh and Heffner were busy crunching numbers, they ignored bottlenecks such as that above, avoided any discussion of factors that might limit populations, assumed a constant growth rate with no evidence at all in order to allow them to reach their misleading conclusions, and spewed a number of misleading assertions about archaeological findings. It is also wholly absurd to create a situation in which fractions of a percentage population growth are applied to a starting population of two persons. They might also have considered looking at data about minimum viable populations.
 
They assumed a population growth rate of less than 1% in some of their calculations, to me that is taking in the consideration of "bottlenecks" and catastrophes.
 
caromurp said:
They assumed a population growth rate of less than 1% in some of their calculations, to me that is taking in the consideration of "bottlenecks" and catastrophes.
Click to expand...
What factors may have limited

1. Pre-agrarian populations, and
2. Pre-industrial populations?

Baugh and Heffner ignore completely the concept of carrying capacity. They also make some unwarranted assumptions about how population growth can be calculated across millennia using a figure that bears no relation to any evidence available from palaeontology, archaeology or history. Best estimates suggest that global population remained relatively stable from 70,000 to 10,000 years ago, increasing tenfold in the next 4000 years. From what they say, Baugh and Heffner seem to want to apply an undeviating 'gradient' to human population - which is simplistic to the point of uselessness - whereas a more accurate picture is presented by a J-curve. Check out this article:

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html
 
caromurp said:
to me that is taking in the consideration of "bottlenecks" and catastrophes.
Click to expand...

Only if you are completely unaware of human history.
 
I understand that it isn't a constant, but isn't giving the formula a 1% growth rate accounting for that? It is rare in human history that the growth rate has been that low, so I think he was being generous by making an extremely low growth rate the constant, because if he had figured in the growth explosions it would have been an even greater population.
lordkalvan said:
caromurp said:
They assumed a population growth rate of less than 1% in some of their calculations, to me that is taking in the consideration of "bottlenecks" and catastrophes.
Click to expand...
What factors may have limited

1. Pre-agrarian populations, and
2. Pre-industrial populations?

Baugh and Heffner ignore completely the concept of carrying capacity. They also make some unwarranted assumptions about how population growth can be calculated across millennia using a figure that bears no relation to any evidence available from palaeontology, archaeology or history. Best estimates suggest that global population remained relatively stable from 70,000 to 10,000 years ago, increasing tenfold in the next 4000 years. From what they say, Baugh and Heffner seem to want to apply an undeviating 'gradient' to human population - which is simplistic to the point of uselessness - whereas a more accurate picture is presented by a J-curve. Check out this article:

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html
Click to expand...
I understand all that, but the site you linked doesn't give any calculations of what the population should be if humans had been around for millions of years. I understand that you don't agree with Heffner's calculations, do you know of any figure that has been reached that includes every known "bottleneck" and growth explosion so we could compare the two?
 
caromurp said:
I understand that it isn't a constant, but isn't giving the formula a 1% growth rate accounting for that? It is rare in human history that the growth rate has been that low, so I think he was being generous by making an extremely low growth rate the constant, because if he had figured in the growth explosions it would have been an even greater population.
Click to expand...

You're making some large assumptions, because the growth rate has been very low in the past. The period of time from 0 AD to 1000 AD showed a rise in population from 300 million to 310 million. The time period from the 1800's to 1927 showed a rise in population from 1 billion people to 2 billion people. The population doubled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 5 billion in the 1990.

How is giving a simple growth rate of 1% even remotely coinciding with what the actual evidence shows. The baby boom in the 1960's had a growth rate of about 2%. The current growth rate is about 1.3%.

I don't know how you can say that with our exponential growths since the 1800s that the world population growth has rarely dropped below 1%...

I understand all that, but the site you linked doesn't give any calculations of what the population should be if humans had been around for millions of years. I understand that you don't agree with Heffner's calculations, do you know of any figure that has been reached that includes every known "bottleneck" and growth explosion so we could compare the two?
Click to expand...

Humans haven't been around for millions of years. H. s. sapiens developed approximately 200,000 years ago according to current estimates.
 
caromurp said:
....I understand all that, but the site you linked doesn't give any calculations of what the population should be if humans had been around for millions of years. I understand that you don't agree with Heffner's calculations, do you know of any figure that has been reached that includes every known "bottleneck" and growth explosion so we could compare the two?
Click to expand...
I don't know how you can determine what 'should' should be. If we lived in Rome in the 1st Century BC, what 'should' we have expected the population to be 2000 years in the future? What factors might influence our calculations and why?

It's not that I don't agree with Heffner's calculations, it's just that they are entirely meaningless as even a hypothetical exercise in analysing the dynamics of human populations. The article I referred you to had a graphic of human population that demonstrates exactly how misleading it is to apply an arbitrarily chosen constant to population growth simply to try and make an argument that is little more than ideological point scoring.

If you apply an average population growth rate arbitrarily across the entire supposed existence of humanity, inevitably you will distort the end result by creating a wholly unreasonable scenario for the likely size of early populations which will have a knock-on effect to produce wholly ludicrous numbers for later populations. It is also the case that, as I and PC have pointed out, arguing for an average growth rate over tens of thousands of years is fruitless because it ignores far too many variables that impose limits on what that growth rate might realistically (as opposed to hypothetically) be. You might want to check out what happened on Easter Island:

http://www.physorg.com/news121959198.html

If you refer to this website -

http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/people/index.html

- you will find an instructive article on the population of Dynastic Egypt that draws on archaeological findings for its conclusions. Here you will see that in this culture, one of the most scientifically and medically advanced for its time, a reasonable estimate for the growth in Egypt's population was from 1 million to 5 million in the space of 3,000 years, reflecting an actual annual population growth rate of around 0.05-0.06%. Applying Heffner's expected 'reasonable' average growth rate of 'less than 1%' - let's just say 0.1% to reflect the low end of this 'reasonable' figure and plugging it into the basic formula for population growth - Px=Po(1+y)^x, where Px is the end population, Po the starting population, y the rate of increase and x the period of time over which the rate of increase is applied - in 3,000 years this starting population of 1 million should have increased to over 20 million. If Heffner's 'reasonable' growth rate was in fact only double this at 0.2%, this would increase the expected end population to over 400 million. Increase Heffner's 'reasonable' growth rate to 0.5% to see how utterly absurd and, if he really is an experienced mathematician, seemingly intentionally misleading a scenario his simplistic calculations are intended to produce.
 
To demonstrate further the self-serving deception inherent in Heffner's figures, he uses what he argues is a historically supportable average annual population growth rate of 0.456% to the starting population of Flood survivors to 'prove' that today's global population concords so closely with the biblical model that it makes that model wholly persuasive. Elsewhere in his talk, he claims that this growth rate entirely supports a population capable of taking on the work of Egyptian civilization in constructing the 3rd and 4th Dynasty pyramids. Is this statement supportable?

Conceding Heffner's controversial and unsupported claim that the date for the building of the pyramids can reliably be shifted to around 2200 BC, i.e. about 2,300 years after the date he mentions for the Flood, let's apply his growth rate to the post-Flood survivors:

Px=8*(1+0.00456)^2300 = 280,296

Bear in mind this is a global population that has to be spread throughout the many cultures that we know to be coincident with that of Dynastic Egypt, and that around half of this figure would comprise women (140,000). If Heffner is wrong and the Egyptologists right about the date of the great age of construction of the pyramids (c.2680-2500 BC), the population figures based on the model he has chosen to use shows how ludicrous his argument actually is:

World population in 2680 BC = 31,564 (approx. 15,000 women)
World population in 2500 BC = 71,590 (approx. 35,000 women)

No wonder he is desperate to shift the date of the pyramids to 200 years later than Egyptologists understand them to have been constructed.
 
lordkalvan said:
To demonstrate further the self-serving deception inherent in Heffner's figures, he uses what he argues is a historically supportable average annual population growth rate of 0.456% to the starting population of Flood survivors to 'prove' that today's global population concords so closely with the biblical model that it makes that model wholly persuasive. Elsewhere in his talk, he claims that this growth rate entirely supports a population capable of taking on the work of Egyptian civilization in constructing the 3rd and 4th Dynasty pyramids. Is this statement supportable?

Conceding Heffner's controversial and unsupported claim that the date for the building of the pyramids can reliably be shifted to around 2200 BC, i.e. about 2,300 years after the date he mentions for the Flood, let's apply his growth rate to the post-Flood survivors:

Px=8*(1+0.00456)^2300 = 280,296

Bear in mind this is a global population that has to be spread throughout the many cultures that we know to be coincident with that of Dynastic Egypt, and that around half of this figure would comprise women (140,000). If Heffner is wrong and the Egyptologists right about the date of the great age of construction of the pyramids (c.2680-2500 BC), the population figures based on the model he has chosen to use shows how ludicrous his argument actually is:

World population in 2680 BC = 31,564 (approx. 15,000 women)
World population in 2500 BC = 71,590 (approx. 35,000 women)

No wonder he is desperate to shift the date of the pyramids to 200 years later than Egyptologists understand them to have been constructed.
Click to expand...

Is that even ignoring the Chinese Dynasties that were also in existence around that time?

I dont' remember when humans were supposed to have begun population of North and South America, I'm pretty sure it was during the last Ice Age...so what happened to those people post-flood?
 
^ PC, the figures I have used are calculations for the entire global population - all dynasties, kingdoms, nomadic tribes, clans and what-not - for the indicated dates using the growth rate espoused by Heffner, the post-Flood population of 8 persons (arguably generous as there is no biblical evidence I am aware of that Noah and Mrs Noah had children after the Flood), and the population growth-rate formula indicated. It may well be that projections using more sophisticated analytical techniques would return significantly different results; for example, a population of 8 (or 6) individuals would not be considered to be anywhere near large enough to be viable, i.e. 'the population size necessary to ensure between 90 and 95 percent probability of survival between 100 to 1000 years into the future.' Source: Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population.

Obviously different species result in different projections for this figure, but as a rough guide estimates of the effective population needed to oversome such undesirable effects as those indicated are '50 to avoid inbreeding depression, 500-5000 to retain evolutionary potential, and 12 to 1000 to avoid the accumulation of deleterious mutations.' Source: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Minimum_viable_population_size.

Further information can be found at the indicated links.
 
When looking at historical projections of human populations it is also worth considering the findings of scientists like Robert H. McArthur and Edward O. Wilson who pretty much founded the field of population biology in the 1950s. Their research led them to the conclusion that, if left alone, populations in the 'wild' (which is a reasonable description of human populations in pre-agrarian societies) tend to maintain equilibrium, or something pretty close to equilibrium with, for the most part, minor fluctuations around the equlibrium point.

As early as the 19th Century Pierre François Velhurst introduced the idea of carrying capacity as a limitation on the ability of any population (human or otherwise) to grow steadily and without impediment. Put simply, there is a maximum limit of population which the resources of an area can support and, as that limit is approached, the ability of population growth to be sustained is reached, that growth slows down and may even become negative.

A further complication is added when age structure dependencies are considered, i.e. the fact that not every member of a population is reproductive. This makes the projection of populations even more difficult as growth is a function both of the structure of the current population and of the population in preceding years.

Assumptions about competition, either from other species or groups within the same species, for the same resources also modifies any estimates that can be reasonably made about population growth.

The article at this site http://www.arcytech.org/java/population/facts_math.html repays careful study and demonstrates exactly how wayward and ill-informed Heffner and Baugh's comments on population projections are, to the extent that I am almost tempted to accuse them of wilful ignorance in the matter.
 
If you consider the reproductive rate of fruit flies, this guy's calculations would have them being created less than two years ago.

Historically, there have been periods when human populations declined sharply. And most have been relatively stable for millenia, until recent technological advances made larger populations possible.
 
I love how once real facts are produced, John suddenly disappears... :lol
 
platos_cave said:
I love how once real facts are produced, John suddenly disappears... :lol
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And the sad fact is that it is trivially easy to demonstrate how selective, misleading and inept Heffner and Baugh's use and presentation of data is. It is evident from the start of their argument that it is entirely conclusion-driven and throughout they demonstrate an ignorance of population biology that is quite remarkable given the point they are trying to make.
 
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