Bible says flood occurred approximately 4000 years ago. That is about *200 generations of breeding to get to the population on earth now. Keep in mind that the population increase is geometric.
*4000/20=200 generations
Is it mathematically posible for Noah and his sons to have populated the earth?
by Fisherman 51 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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waton
without doing any googling, I suspect it would be theoretically possible. just in my lifetime it has quadruplet, increased by 6 billions. But put in context, would within a century the construction of the massive pyramids been possible? and
animals from an even smaller single pair, single location start? Sloth reaching South America?
If by Geo- metric you mean to take the "measure of the the Earth" and mostly water.
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Jeffro
Population growth is generally exponential, not geometric, but the rate also is not consistent due to various factors.
Because Noah is a fictional character adapted from the Gilgamesh epic, the chance of him and his family populating the planet is exactly zero.
According to the fictional chronology in the Bible, the ‘flood’ occurred about 4535 years ago. This varies from JW chronology mainly due to the erroneous 20 year gap in JW chronology and the incorrect interpretation of Israel (which didn’t exist yet) ‘going into slavery’ because of that one time Isaac was teased by his brother.
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TonusOH
One would also have to take into account the factors that can slow population growth, especially infant mortality rates and disease epidemics. As late as the 1950s, infant mortality rates in the USA were around three percent. Globally today, it's still around 4-5%. In the distant past, it may have been as high as 50%. The Black Death of the mid-1300s may have wiped out more than a quarter of the world's population at the time, and the world population would take some 150 years to recover. And then there's the near-constant state of war the world seems to find itself in for as long as humans have been around.
A minor nitpick would be that we also have to assume a steady ratio of men-to-women to keep up an ideal rate of births. I have no idea if we've ever reached it, or how much that ratio fluctuates, but it could be a factor.
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luckynedpepper
There's a calculator for this-
https://calculator.academy/population-growth-calculator/
Using this calculator i used the following criteria
initial population of 6, assuming Noah and wife are past child bearing
3% growth rate. World population growth has historically been 2%, i boosted it 50%
Span of 200 years. Check me on this.
Yields 2,200 by the time Nimrod appears Doesnt seem like enough for him to be king over multiple "cities".
For today's population, I'm not smart enough to read the number it spits out.
Of course nobody knows. The numbers can be spun many different ways.
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TD
The genetic bottleneck would be discernable today and not just in humans, but all mammals.
We do know, for example that the cheetah nearly went extinct about 10K years ago.
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TonusOH
luckynedpepper: For today's population, I'm not smart enough to read the number it spits out.
It's scientific notation, I think. Starting from a population of six, with a growth percentage of 2% and 6,520 years of time, human population would be this much today:
710,020,908,818,175,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I'd say that mitigating factors account for a whole lot more than I anticipated.
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waton
mitigating factors
Strangely, early males in the bible stories seem to have a slowly developing interest in sex. Adam procrastinating until he could have only imperfect children, others later only having firstborns at the ripe age of 120.
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