Evolution? How?

real life wrote:

Hmmmm now where have I heard that before? All humans descended from a very small group.....from just 1 geographical location......let's see......

Well, count yourself lucky that I introduced you to the Toba event because you now have new evidence for the story of Noah. Except that it all happened 75k years ago. So much for Usher's 4k year old Earth.

The evidence for a population collapse associated with the Toba eruption has become quite strong in recent years, especially with the advent of genetic sequencing. But none of this is necessary to demolish your population arguments, they are absurd for any number of reasons, only a few of which have already been listed.

You need to pluck another argument from your bag of creationist bologna. This one isn't worthy of you. Find something that's less obviously flawed.

real life wrote:

If the planets were 'spun' out into their orbits as postulated, they should all have the same direction of rotation, should they not?

Unless they were impacted by another massive object... which we know happens... and which (theory predicts) would happen more frequently and with larger objects back in the early solar system.

Are we going to leave biological evolution and move on to stellar mechanics now?

real, you're extrapolating backward from the last century or so when you think about population increase, and it just doesn't work, because the last century has been really anomalous in terms of human population, largely because of improvements in public health and agriculture.

No population grows unchecked. No animal can grow beyond the limits of its food supply. Which is why we're not overrrun by billions of chipmunks or bears or tigers. The carrying capacity of the land imposes limits. Until humans developed agriculture, hunter-gathering imposed strict limits. Agriculture expanded them, but there were and still are strict limits. You know all those biblical famines? They wiped out millions of people. Still do in areas with weak infrastructure where foods can't be transported to the area.

Disease wiped out millions more. Until the 20th century, cities were population sinks--people died of density-dependent diseases faster than they reproduced. The only way the population stayed constant or grew was by continual in-migration from the countryside. Europe took three centuries ffor its population to recover to pre-Black Death levels. And plagues and diseases (smallpox, e.g., took a huge toll)swept everywhere until the last century. When Europeans conquered the Americas, diseases wiped out about 95% of the indigenous population--an extreme example, but diease wiped out billions of us. Childbirth too was the greatest cause of death for women until the last century--far eclipsing any other cause and making being a woman far more hazardous than being a man. Public health and sanitation changed all that for most of the world (including the developing countries) in the 20th century.

In other words, you and most people have completely forgotten how precarious life has been for most of our history. Human increase was by no means a given and by no means linear, and not always with a positive sign. So "doing the math", even at .01% is an exercise in totally meaningless demographics. It's just pulling a figure out of a hat, with no correspondence to reality.

And the human genetic crunch does not correesond to any extinction event in other animals--its just us. There was a similar crunch amongst cheetahs, but nowhere around the same time, for example. To simplify, it's calculable by looking at the genetic variability in humans today, which is very small as compared to most species, and comparing that with the mutation rate, and calculating how long it would have taken to produce the observed figure. And that comes out about 100K. Genetically it's completely absured to think a population of 12 or 8 or whatever it was allegely in the ark 4300 years ago would have that genetic diversity today (or wouldn't have inbred so much with so many recessives that we wouldn't all be dead today).

Even throwing supposed disasters such as Toba into the mix, populations prior to Toba would have reached huge proportions.

Hey, people, is spendius back-peddling? Sounds like he's now on the defensive

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 10:18 pm Post: 1694322 -

Yes it's quite interesting as I mentioned at the beginning of this line of discussion that the common response is 'well there was this collision, see.....'

Problem is there is no evidence of the massive damage that such planet altering collisions would leave in their wake.

Care to provide substantiation for that assessment, spendi? Just what of the story of the human condition do archaeology, anthropology, and history get wrong?

As I mentioned, that still leaves 3 million years of population growth between Lucy and Toba. That's a lot of folks to account for. Did you do the math? Probably not.

As far as the rotational issue of the planets. Im still curious how this has any remote interference with a discussion on evolution