2370-2180 population increase from10? to 8,000

by badboy 24 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  dh

  i don't think anyone has mentioned this, but if that were the case, 10 people to 8,000, the gene pool would be strangled, wouldn't it? the kids of noah's kids would be cousins, and though you can have healthy kids with your cousin (this is normal in some parts of the world) if you only ever keep within that same bloodline, after a couple of generations you would start to see throwbacks and deaths from all kinds of weirdness that happens if you only breed within the same blood.

  do jw's argue that they were 'closer to perfection' so that is how they managed it?
• 

  badboy

  Ezekiel3,please explain, does that mean that the 50/200 heads of houses would had have to produce possibly hundreds of children over 5 years?

  Leololia(sp?),does that mean a similiar thing to the above?

  I calcatute that perhaps 40 children on average a year would have to have been born over 190 years.
• 

  XQsThaiPoes

  i know nobody brought this up but any time you have a mass extinction (or foriegn speacis) there is a boom afterward with slighly unrealistic population expansion some individuals even start maturing faster. I know this usually works on animals with faster birth rates than humans.

  Anyway the story of noah conflicts with the bible cannon and science. I think it is alot harder to figure out what really did happen than matching the noah account to bible based history.

  From the story it seems that Noah packed his farm on to a boat in aticipation of some type of monsoon (packing a farm onto a boat is probally as old as farming and boating). I wonder cant you find any type of genetic bottle neck in livestock in the middle east. They have done in with some dogs it is just a problem of where to look. It would be really great if those guys that discovered that the nile drying up destroyed the old kingdom could do the reverse and figure out when it was abnormally wet.
• 

  TheOldHippie

  Nigeria - up from 88,5 to 128,8 million from 91 to 00, is 5.0 % levelled out annually. But again, my point was that these high figures only are valid when you already have a high population, as it does not make much sense to talk about a 5 % increase if you have 8 people; that would mean 0,4 children the first year, and you cannot give birth to half a child. I would like to produce a spreadsheet once I get the time, to see what is possible and what is not. The Awake - article recently also quoted Kenyan increase, but again in my eyes that falls into this trap, that present-day rates of countries with an alreadyhigh population cannot be compared to ancied growth in small populations.

  ThatPoses raises a very interesting point, increased births after a catastrophe. In France, after the French revolution, as in many countires after the 30 years war, you had an immense growth in the number of twin births. Strange, but seemingly some sort of compensation.
• 

  Pole

  OldHippie,
  
  

  As you said: it only makes sense to speculate about rapid population growth if you have a much wider "genetic bottle neck" than that in the Flood story. Or, if you assume constant divine intervention.

  Here is an interesting comment made by DH:

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/77620/1257769/post.ashx#1257769

  Anyway, my point is this:
  
  

  ::I would like to produce a spreadsheet once I get the time, to see what is possible and what is not.

  Actually, I've just finished writing a computer program which can simulate population growth .

  Here are the initial parameters. I'm not sure if they make sense, so if they don't make sense, and anyone is interested in modifying them just let me know, and I'll generate new results.
  ---

  1) I'm starting with 3 fertile couples.

  2) Average life expectancy (in terms of natural death): 99 (both men and women)

  3) Average number of children per woman (their fertility period is 20-50, and the child infant rate is 0.25 - to balance the asumption that all men/women are fertile) Anyway the average number of births per woman is roughly: 5.5

  4) Annual risk of accidental death or any accident resulting in loss of fertility :) (wars, diseases, anything nasty):

  1 in 100.

  This may seem high, but if you look at the resultant figures, it's still a rather optimistic scenario.

  5) The period of time simulated is 200 years

  -----

  My initial conclusion is this: whatever your simulation, the results are terribly skewed. What we can know is the maximum, minimum and the average values.

  Once again, I must say, the Flood story pretends to be realistic and verifiable, but in fact it's not. BUt after all, what can you expect of a piece of religious writing written a 3000 years ago (or whenever Genesis was written)?

  Below are the results of 50 simulations of population growth from 3 couples in 200 years. The minimum result with my optimistic premises is 591, and the maximum is over 12000! But that's life, if you're lucky you win in the lottery, most of the time you don't.

  EDITED TO EXPLAIN: For instance the simulation with the final population of 591 after 200 years may be due to the unfortunate death of just two people at the very begining of the breeding period.

  The average is: 5924.

  This is still poor and urealistic statistics (the assumption is Jehovar blessed the people constantly), but better than the "explanations" provided by the WTS, which are simply ridiculous while pretending to be realistic.
• 

  Pole

  And the results of 50 simulations (each row contains the total results for 200 years and a based on the premises described above):

  Simulation #	Total natural deaths	Total accidental deaths	Total births	Population
  0	45	59	1894	1798
  1	37	90	10469	10350
  2	49	64	3827	3722
  3	40	84	10376	10260
  4	47	71	3487	3377
  5	46	86	9818	9694
  6	48	89	11229	11100
  7	40	91	7278	7155
  8	40	84	6586	6470
  9	49	79	7154	7034
  10	43	85	7321	7201
  11	44	88	6595	6471
  12	45	87	6101	5977
  13	28	43	594	531
  14	47	81	9663	9543
  15	46	77	7859	7744
  16	46	79	3727	3610
  17	46	78	4433	4317
  18	40	78	4401	4291
  19	44	75	4378	4267
  20	47	88	9701	9574
  21	37	90	7329	7210
  22	45	72	3304	3195
  23	43	84	7760	7641
  24	29	85	4981	4875
  25	42	68	1641	1539
  26	41	75	4060	3952
  27	42	79	10646	10533
  28	45	91	12161	12033
  29	40	65	3160	3063
  30	42	84	6206	6088
  31	39	75	2641	2535
  32	34	54	1590	1510
  33	47	74	2842	2729
  34	44	89	7819	7694
  35	40	81	8600	8487
  36	56	62	3206	3096
  37	44	82	9345	9227
  38	43	84	9872	9753
  39	42	76	5158	5048
  40	53	73	7044	6926
  41	45	72	3762	3653
  42	49	69	2318	2208
  43	45	89	9298	9172
  44	49	61	2279	2177
  45	51	67	3942	3832
  46	43	77	3984	3872
  47	49	73	5204	5090
  48	53	74	5853	5734
  49	48	79	8961	8842
• 

  TheOldHippie

  So you assure with 5.5 children per woman that each woman gives birth to 2.75 girls? What if you raise it to 10 children, 5 of which are girls? And for the sake of "Divine protection" give a premature death rate of 0?
• 

  Pole

  So you assure with 5.5 children per woman that each woman gives birth to 2.75 girls?

  Yes, exactly. Are you being ironic?. It's correct in statistical terms, because I was referring to the entire population over a period of 200 years and not to every individual woman at a particular moment. Getting an average figure with a decimal fraction is theoretically speaking infinitely more probable than assuming that every woman will give birth to exactly 5 (or any other round number of) children. So I'm almost infinitely more right than you in this respect! Unless you are just asking an honest question.
  
  

  What if you raise it to 10 children, 5 of which are girls? And for the sake of "Divine protection" give a premature death rate of 0?

  For a simulation period of 200 years this will probably crash my machine unless I rewrite the program to remember the growth ratio only. For now it keeps track of every individual person in the entire population and that creates a lot of perfomance overhead.

  Quick solution that should suffice:

  Below you have another 10 simulations with exactly the parameters you have asked for (no premature deaths, no infant deaths, constant life expectancy of 99 years). Another difference is that the time span in question is 190 instead of 200 years.

  To be honest your parameters are very unrealistic. After the initial 50 years or so, every single year added creates an exponential boom. I'm pretty sure with your parameters, after 1000 years you'd end up having trillions of little humans.THe life expectancy figure is constant (99 years). So in almost 200 years you have several hundred thousand births and just under a hundred of deaths. It's almost a paradise. As a result you'd have to have God intervene twice. First time to start this huge increase and second time to stop this process just as miraculously, before overcrowding the earth.

  Yes, divine protection solves every problem.

  190 years with your parameters:

  EDITED TO ADD: The figures are still skewed because the child bearing age for each woman is randomly determined (within the 20-50 period though). Of course you could further rule this out by assuming that God arranged for every woman to give birth to a child on a regular basis. At this point however I'm kind of losing my itnerest in the whole speculation :(.

  #	Total natural deaths	Total premature deaths	Total births	Population
  0	96	0	577725	577637
  1	96	0	734192	734104
  2	96	0	719657	719569
  3	96	0	424585	424497
  4	95	0	349210	349123
  5	96	0	470812	470724
  6	96	0	528831	528743
  7	96	0	633827	633739
  8	96	0	613628	613540
  9	96	0	508340	508252
• 

  XQsThaiPoes

  Okay I figured it out so lets put it to rest now. God used a miracle. It was the same one he hexed adam, eve, and flying stuff with. It apparently eliminates death by incest and allows an unrealistic population growth from a small group (yeah right). So it is official if you belive in magic and stuff it is clear God knew the damage he did and used a miracle to fix it.

  (Genesis 1:22-23) 22

  With that God blessed them, saying: "Be fruitful and become many and fill the waters in the sea basins, and let the flying creatures become many in the earth." 23 And there came to be evening and there came to be morning, a fifth day.

  (Genesis 1:27-28) 27

  And God proceeded to create the man in his image, in God?s image he created him; male and female he created them. 28 Further, God blessed them and God said to them: "Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is moving upon the earth."

  (Genesis 9:1) 9 And God went on to bless Noah and his sons and to say to them: "Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth. .
• 

  Pole

  Yep. The only question is: is there any point in coming up with "rational explanations of miracles"?

  Interesting, now that you've brought it up. If we depend on your interpretation of this wording, then God used the same population growth kind of a trick at other occasions, although to a lesser extent:

  Abraham the second time out of the heavens 16

  and to say: ??By myself I do swear,? is the utterance of Jehovah, ?that by reason of the fact that you have done this thing and you have not withheld your son, your only one, 17 I shall surely bless you and I shall surely multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens and like the grains of sand that are on the seashore; and your seed will take possession of the gate of his enemies.