Another example of WTS anthropology - The Flood and racial differences

by Pole 51 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  XQsThaiPoes

  Well depends on what you mean a race which is a social concept at best. You have flat hair, round hair, eye fold, sans fold, high melanin, low melanin, thin nose, thick nose alleles (there are ear shapes too, but oddly nobody counts them as part of your racial Identity short of vulcans and elves). This is a genetic Mr. potato head.

  Anyone in the sun cancer belt will eventually get darker skin. Because skin cancer will kill you relatively quickly. The rest are just luck of the draw from when ever humans split. None of them are linked to each other. You can be black with blond hair, Asian with green eyes. If you don't have a culture behind it to say "we are the green eyed Asian people" people assume it is a novelty and move on. Remember humans are smart and can make anything part of sexual attraction. People with these traits are gobbled up quickly, taken care of better, and live better. Who thought small feet were sexy enough to break women?s feet in foot binding, or small waist sexy enough to push your ribs into your liver and make child birth impossible. It also works in reverse by making something obnoxious a cultural trait to keep outsiders from mixing with you.

  You said the process magically stopped 1 AD. I know there are a bunch of Mexicans that will disagree with you. Almost 500 years ago lil white guys in boats met some Indians and now you have a whole new "race".
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  seattleniceguy

  I realized as a Witness that I had to accept evolution in order to accept the Flood. At the time, I was able to rationalize it into a two-for-one faith-builder, because I knew there was evidence for evolution, and I wanted to believe the Bible acount of the Flood. So I was able to say, "Ah, now it all makes sense. The Flood account works, and I can believe what I think is probably true about evolution." Some very nice Witness reasoning there, eh?

  Too bad the evolution required for the Flood account to be true works about a million times faster than in real life!

  SNG
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  Pole

  XQ,

  Well depends on what you mean a race which is a social concept at best. You have flat hair, round hair, eye fold, sans fold, high melanin, low melanin, thin nose, thick nose alleles (there are ear shapes too, but oddly nobody counts them as part of your racial Identity short of vulcans and elves). This is a genetic Mr. potato head.

  Yup. All clear. ALthough to get a statistically significant pattern you need some time.

  Anyone in the sun cancer belt will eventually get darker skin. Because skin cancer will kill you relatively quickly. The rest are just luck of the draw from when ever humans split. None of them are linked to each other. You can be black with blond hair, Asian with green eyes. If you don't have a culture behind it to say "we are the green eyed Asian people" people assume it is a novelty and move on. Remember humans are smart and can make anything part of sexual attraction. People with these traits are gobbled up quickly, taken care of better, and live better. Who thought small feet were sexy enough to break women?s feet in foot binding, or small waist sexy enough to push your ribs into your liver and make child birth impossible. It also works in reverse by making something obnoxious a cultural trait to keep outsiders from mixing with you.

  Yep. But it all takes time, especially when we're talking about regular racial differences between societies and not just chance variations, or "deviations from the norm" (sorry for my politically -incorrect language). This kind of time scale is missing from the Genesis chronology.

  You said the process magically stopped 1 AD. I know there are a bunch of Mexicans that will disagree with you. Almost 500 years ago lil white guys in boats met some Indians and now you have a whole new "race".

  You've made a nice distinction between social and environmental factors which I liked and now you're lumping them together! Of course a "new sociologically-conditioned race" can get created within a few generations if you already have a few "ready-made environmentally-conditioned races" which you can mix. That's simple. The problem is that African-Americans and white Europeans haven't become more similar to Native Americans during the same 500 years than to Africans or Europeans respectively. Besides, what I had in mind was the WT picture of the Ethiopian eunuch.
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  Leolaia

  Just to add to what XQs was saying, race is a biologically invalid concept. It is real in a social sense, that laws and attitudes and prejudices involve concepts of race, but it exists only as an imaginary social construct. Genetic diveristy does not fall into neat dichotomous categories; it is fluid, complex, and far more nuanced, and the differences on a genetic scale are infinitesimal compared to the overall similarities. The so-called physical determinants of race are arbitrary and superficial and do not reflect more important genetic differences. If you tried to count all the genetic markers that distinguish, say, a population of whites from Sweden from a population of blacks in Kenya, you would still find a greater number of genetic differences inside each respective population. I learned this in a lecture by a geneticist who also noted that it takes about 7,000 years for melanin production in a population to go from one extreme to another; thus the whitest white Australian will be as black as those in equtaorial Africa in about 9000 AD. She also discussed interestingly how sickle-cell anemia, which we think of as a terrible disease, is actually an advantageous adaptation to the blight of malaria. This is a good example of natural selection working within the human body. Here is a webpage on the subject:

  http://sickle.bwh.harvard.edu/malaria_sickle.html
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  Nosferatu

  the Flood is more central to the end-times hysteria than most of us rationalists believe. That is why it is so important to debunk it.

  Here's something else to add to the pile, and it's pure common sense. Unless all religion believes that the earth once had only one supercontinent (all continents were one, eventually broke away, and drifted apart), how the hell did all these species of animals spread out all over the earth? I highly doubt a Koala bear (or a few hundred of them) would swim across an ocean to get to Australia. Who had the boat and the breeding farm to distribute all these animals all over the earth after the flood?
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  VM44

  I highly doubt a Koala bear (or a few hundred of them) would swim across an ocean to get to Australia

  The Watchtower (or it might have been an Awake!) had an answer for this....land bridges, which have since sunk below the sea waters.

  Ah, it is so easy to speculate about biological/geological/physical matters when they just sit at their desks and write about what they know not.

  No wonder the WT once wrote that "it is not necessary for one to do heavy research, there are brothers at Bethel who do the research for you"!

  Yeah, who wants to trust one-sided, incomplete, inaccurate research done only with a view to promote Watchtower propaganda?

  --VM44
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  Pole

  Leolaia,

  Just to add to what XQs was saying, race is a biologically invalid concept.

  Thank you. Although I don't think that the concept of "biological" human races has been suggested on this thread. We made a distinction between racial differences as a sociological phenomenon, and the development of different species of elephants for instance from the pair of elephants which Noah took on his ark. The latter would qualify as a rapid biological phenomenon, wouldn't it? That's what I mean by "Hyper-speed biological evolution".

  My point about racial differences was that 2000 years wasn't engouh for such differences to develop, especially if you take into account the scarcity of the post-deluvial population (Noah + family).

  I learned this in a lecture by a geneticist who also noted that it takes about 7,000 years for melanin production in a population to go from one extreme to another; thus the whitest white Australian will be as black as those in equtaorial Africa in about 9000 AD.

  Just a silly question here: Is the geographic location of a population the only factor involved? Especially in modern societies?
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  TheOldHippie

  leoleia - why don't you think the Black sea "hypothesis" holds any water? After having read the book, it stands out 100 % clear that there WAS a flood in that area and a resulting diaspora of the peoples of the region. So why do you use the word "hypothesis"? Because you do not believe in the Black sea flooding, or because you do not believe that fllod was the basis for the Noachian flood story?

  The micro evolution question is a very good one. Insight and other books state that because the sun radiation was high because of the water having fallen down and the resulting lacking of a protective shield, gentic variations and mutations took place at a very rapid speed, within a very short time, and that this according to "some" (I wonder who?) would result in all the variaties of the "cat species" apeearing within few years. Hmmm, sound very much like the punctuation theory to me ...... but since that one is ridiculed, it cannot be ..... And don't foget we ridicule the Young-Earthers also .... although the Flood was very recently and the species distribution as well ..... so although very similar, we cannot be Young-Earthers after all .....
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  funkyderek

  Insight and other books state that because the sun radiation was high because of the water having fallen down and the resulting lacking of a protective shield, gentic variations and mutations took place at a very rapid speed, within a very short time, and that this according to "some" (I wonder who?) would result in all the variaties of the "cat species" apeearing within few years.

  The problem with this is that, if mutations occur randomly (as they must be in the Watchtower scenario, with Jehovah "resting") then harmful mutations will outweigh beneficial ones by a huge factor. (This is in fact the argument the Watchtower uses against evolution) If the mutation rate is very high, then so will the death rate. If you start with one breeding pair and expose them to excess radiation, you're not going to get lots of new and interesting varieties. You'll get inbred barely fertile monsters who won't survive more than a few generations if that.
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  RunningMan

  The other problem with this theory is that if mutations began occurring rapidly due to the absense of the water canopy, then they should still be occurring rapidly. New species should be popping up all over.

  and:

  this according to "some"

  I love it when they say this. It usually means no one, or possibly themselves or another crackpot. Their attributed quotes are often inaccurate. Their unattributed quotes are usually just fraud. The phrase is on par with "in the sense that" - it is usually followed by a whopper.