--- Peter D'Souza <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >I just read the article you refer to from the ICR. >Unless my understanding of the article is completely >off, I don't think Mr. Morris was making a case for a >2% population growth rate; rather, he was making a >case against the alarm raised by eugenicists such as >Margaret Mead (founder of Planned Parenthood) who >based their fears on such a growth rate. >
Peter, I have to say that your understanding of the article is completely off. What you state above refers only to the first couple of paragraphs of that article with quite revealing title of "Evolution and the Population Problem". If you read the entire article, you will find that Morris makes an argument for a Biblically mandated recent origin of man based on a constant population growth rate. He gives a formula to calculate the number of years that have elapsed since the origin of man assuming that the entire human population emerged from one human couple created by God given whatever the actual value of the population of the world was around 1800 A.D. When he plugs in a population growth rate of 1/3% (not 2%) in the formula he gets a value of 6300 years for the origin of man. He says that this is consistent with what is inferred from the Biblical account. Here are some of the relevant quotes from his article that you seem to have missed somehow: "In that case, the length of time required for the population to grow from 2 people to one billion people, at 1/3% increase per year is: n = log(10^9/2)/log(1.00333) = 6100 years To this should be added the 175 years since 1800. Thus, the most probable date of human origin, based on the known data from population statistics, is about 6,300 years ago. This figure, of course, is vastly smaller than the usually assumed million-year history of man. Nevertheless it correlates well not only with Biblical chronology but also with other ancient written records as well as with even the usual evolutionary dates for the origin of agriculture, animal husbandry, urbanization, metallurgy and other attributes of human civilization." Please ask your friend where he got his fallacious argument for linking the population growth rate with the origin of man. I am willing to bet that it is from Henry Morris’s writings or their derivations. > >Ergo, the extrapolation is based purely on >demographic trends and recorded natural events which >might have skewed the patterns of population growth. > Henry Morris’s (and your friend’s) argument is completely wrong for the following reasons: 1. It is well known that the rate and direction of population change has not remained constant throughout history. There were times when the world population declined drastically because of epidemics, wars, famines, natural disasters, etc. At other times, the population showed little or no growth at all. The increased growth rate of up to 2% occurred only in the last century. One does not have to be Harvard educated or a friend of Stephen Jay Gould to realize any of this. Here are the real scientific estimates of world population over the last 12,000 years, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html Please note that the table showing these estimates says that there were anywhere from 1 – 10 million people in the world in 10,000 B.C. The original reference on this is: Thomlinson, Ralph, 1975, "Demographic Problems, Controversy Over Population Control," Second Edition. 2. It should be obvious to most people today that there is an overwhelming amount of physical evidence such as fossilized human skeletal parts, which has been dated with high accuracy to being at least 80,000 years old. 3. There are well preserved human mummies that are much more than 8000 years old, e.g. ninety six 9000 year-old Chinchorro mummies from Chile and the 9400 year-old Spirit Cave Man from Nevada covered with leather moccasins, rabbit-skin blanket, and burial mats. > >My point in citing him and his colleague Stephen Jay >Gould was to say that, in spite of his belief in >evolutionary theory, he can't deny that our human >forebears can't be traced based on population growth >alone--beyond the 6,000 - 8,000 period that we've >been talking about. > It is hard to believe that any scientist would propose or take seriously such a patently flawed extrapolation based on erroneous assumptions about population growth rate. I submit to you that Stephen Jay Gould has never endorsed such an argument. He has certainly not written about it. I think this is simply a case of name-dropping. Cheers, Santosh