Human Chromosome 2 and the Evolution of Humans

I don't think an exact number matters but I will stick with that figure for arguments sake. The point is whether or not it is possible to grow a human population of significant size from just 7 people in a short amount of time.Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given.

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Surely you agreed that the sumerian culture disappeared at a certain point in time?

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Disappeared as in vanished ? Certainly not. Conquered and absorbed by other peoples, yes. Slowly lost to change and time, yes. But certainly not - just gone, in a single event.

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There is indeed geological evidence for a substantial flood in the mesopotamian area at least in the vicinity of the time that the sumerian culture existed.

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I believe that there's evidence of some serious flooding during the Sumerian period. In fact there seem to be multiple flood events - at different sites (i.e. the flooding is local, even within Sumeria, there's no single flood affecting the entire region).

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What date does archaelogy give for the disappearance of the sumerian culture?

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Looking at Wikipedia:Sumeria was conquered by the Akkadians around the time of your Flood (dating is uncertain), with a revival following the downfall of the Akkadian Empire. Agricultural fertility was declining due to increasing salt in the soil (itself a consequence of poor irrigation and the dry climate), weakening the region. Sumeria was absorbed into the Babylonian Empire circa 1700BC and never reestablished itself after that.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Yeah, why not? Let's take the interval between generations to be 30 years, and take the flood to be 4000 years ago. That gives us 133 generations. In that time, we'd want to multiply the size of the human race by about a billion. So you'd want the average number of (surviving and then marrying) children per couple to be about 2.3. So it's biologically possible.The only fly in the ointment is that human populations haven't in fact grown that fast over most of human history, but since we're taking Noah's Flood as a hypothesis, I guess we're not worrying too much about historical accuracy.

Most biologists reckon you need a minimum viable population (MVP) of thousands for larger animals to survive. Minimum viable population - WikipediaThe problem isn't just genetic, it's mostly about accident and disease. You only need a few deaths during childbirth and it's game over.

I don't understand the point of your question. If there was no global flood, then there is scant reason to wonder how the earth got repopulated in only 4300 years.Two problems have been identified with starting with a starting population of seven. A third problem is that reducing all of earth's population to 7 only 4300 years ago makes it extremely difficult for all other historical events to have happened during periods contemporary with the post flood period.The fourth problem for some people at least is that it renders the flood story in Genesis as a rather allegorical, if not fanciful account.

Ummm... No. Flooding was a part of life for people of the Tigris-Euphrates flood plain. There was not one flood that wiped out a culture. Unlike religion, archaeology does not give dates for things that never happened.Soil salinity and influx of semitic people played a role in the decline of the Sumerians, but it didn't "disappear". It faded away.You really should stay away from fundie sites and do some actual research.Edited by Theodoric, : subtitle added

I am confronting just portions of all the objections to the biblical account of the flood. I realize there are serious problems with the idea of a global flood. But for the sake of argument, I want to know the possibilities of repopulating the world with just noah's family because the objections to the other problems could be resolved in the future with knowledge we do not now have. I realize the diversity of the gene pool is not possible coming from 7 people 4350 years with current biological knowledge. We cannot solve all problems at one time. I have already addressed the problems of inbreeding. What if we have misinterpreted the bible and the flood was earlier than 4300 years ago like 7,000 years ago? Would that still make it extremely difficult for all other historical events to have happened in the post flood period? No need for this problem if you realize that our understanding of a supernaturally inspired text written to a people and time far removed from us is not always going to be accurate. Resorting to naming a text as allegorical when a straightforward reading gives problems scientifically, is not the way to go IMO. There are a myriad of literal interpretations of biblical texts. The modern mind ,however, only grasps one particular literal interpretation when the ancient mind had a completely different idea when it was written.

This is the response I was looking for. Tangle knew what I was getting and did not respond with snark. So, accident and disease makes a MVP of 7 impossible? If you are constantly breeding and live in a favorable environment, wouldn't that lower the MVP from 500-1000 to much less?

So, it is possible. How do we know how fast global human populations grew in the past? From the biblical records, the families of each generation appear to be quite large. It doesn't take too many of that kind of generational enlargement to get an enormous population rather quickly.

First it says "perfect in his generations", which seems a reference to his ancestry, but my NRSV renders it as "blameless in his generation," which seem an obvious reference to his goodness as compared to the men of his time. Checking other versions online I see that The New American Standard Bible renders it as "blameless in his time," which is the same meaning. The NIV has "blameless among the people of his time." The New Living Translation has "the only blameless person living on earth at the time."Second, the Bible is not a scientific source. As far as science is concerned, Noah is a mythical figure.Concerning the possibility that humanity might have been reduced to a population of 7 around 4350 years ago, the archaeological evidence says there have been people everywhere around the globe throughout history, and the genetic evidence says it's impossible.It's certainly possible that a local flood reduced the population of Noah's people to a population of 7 around 4350 years ago, but they have obviously interbred since then.What has this to do with human chromosome 2?--Percy

Your biggest problem is working out how Noah's family survived the first few months.There would be no food - they can't eat animals and there's no grain. The land would be hundreds of feet deep in mud - everywhere; farming would be impossible. Disease would be endemic as everything that was once alive is now rotting.

You could create a realistic population growth model and work it out. The best known creationist human population growth models have been very flawed, committing the "Bunny Blunder" (ie, applying their model to the world population of rabbits, then that population would have resulted from 2 bunnies about 100 years ago).Back in 1991, I posted an article on CompuServe that examines Dr. Henry Morris' (PhD Hydraulic Engineering) human population model as he had presented it in a few places -- he continued to develop it over time -- , as well as actual population growth models that address the problems of Morris' over-simplistic "pure-birth" model. I've re-posted it at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/bunny.html.One of the problems that had been pointed out about his model and which your model will likewise have to deal with is that when we apply it to find the world population in the ancient past, we come up far too short to account for the massive construction of that time. From my article:

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In his article, "Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid," David H. Milne points out that since Morris' population model is predictive, then we should be able to use it to determine the world human population at any time in human history. Therefore, it reveals some interesting facts about human history.

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According to Morris' model, in 2500 BCE, the world population was 750 people, so there were only about 150 to 200 able-bodied males, all concentrated in Egypt, available to hew and haul the 2.3 million limestone blocks ranging in weight from 2 to 50 tons to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops. During the preceding 200 years, even fewer men built six neighboring pyramids and many other structures. Things were even more hectic back between 3800 BCE and 3600 BCE when the total world population of 10 - 20 people, including women and children, rushed madly back and forth between Crete and the Indus River Valley building and abandoning enough fortified cities and massive irrigation systems to have housed and fed millions. My father was right; we HAVE gotten soft!

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Now, Morris' model was based on Adam and Eve and not on the survivors of Noah's Flood, which means that your model will have to deal with even less time to build up the world population to a point where they could have built what they had left behind and much more.

What's with seven people in the Noah story?
Don't we have Noah, Shem, Ham, and Jay-what's-his-name and four wives?

As I said, for effective population size we don't count Noah's sons, so the number should be 5... (Even without the complication of a recent genetic bottleneck not so long before that !)I don't know where ForeverYoung got 7 from. Probably he meant 8.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

From the same "biblical records" the time between generations was hundreds of years. I'm beginning to think that these "biblical records" maybe aren't all that accurate.Also, the largest family I can remember in the Bible is that of Jacob. Twelve children in a family? Yes, but he had two wives and two concubines. That makes it rather easier. To look at what that really means in terms of population growth, we'd have to figure in the three men who were single because Jacob was hogging all the women; when you do that it took eight people to produce a family of twelve.To estimate actual population sizes we can use archaeology to look at things like settlement sizes, we have historians noting the size of this or that city, we have actual censuses taken at various times.