vendredi 18 juin 2010

Human population after Noah, racial and demographic pseudoproblems for creationism


Numbers: if Noah and three sons with wives were only people alive some five thousand years ago, why are we so many?

A man becomes fertile at fourteen, give and take some years, very extreme limits being nine and eighteen. For a woman the extreme limits are the same, but the mean puberty is twelve. She rests fertile until c. age 60. A man rests unctionnally fertile longer.

A pregnancy takes nine months, but ideally one spaces them out one in two years. You start off with three couples - presuming Noah and wife had no further children, besides where would a fourth son have gotten his wife from? - and their sons (enumerated in Genesis) are free to marry first cousins, but not siblings.

If each one of them has enough empty space and good health, and so on ... the present population would have been reached very long ago.

So why are we so few?

The reasons are sufficiently different among themselves to spare us any so called responsibility for keeping us "few enough".

Colours: if all races - black, white, red and yellow - descend from Shem, Ham and Japheth with wives some five thousand years ago, why are we so different?

Linking to a picture of Halle Berry.

She belongs to the black community of US. Why? Because there are these ethnic communities there, and because solidarity - previously exclusion too - where strong within (previously against) that particular community.

In France 150 years ago, she would have been accepted as a "Caucasian" (White). Alexandre Dumas the Elder was 1/4 grandparents black ancestry, 3/4 grandparents white ancestry. A. D. the Younger was 1/8 great-grandparents black and 7/8 great-grandparents white. He had blue eyes. If he looked a bit more white than Halle (except that or if she has naturally straight hair), his father looked a bit more black than she. Today, here, she might (except she is allready known) pass for a Gipsy, Arab or South Spanish woman. The near extremes of skin colour are then 8 ancestors getting or loosing a melanine gene. Sometimes there is a place for the saying "difference is only skin deep".

Both: how did the races get to the places, like Ararat is no where near either Manhattan or Easter Island?

When I formulated the objection, and included Easter Island, some of you may have guessed I was thinking of Thor Heyerdahl. He was not a creationist, we know from some of his writings he was not just agnostic but a believing Old Earth Evolutionist. He did nothing of what he did harbouring the intention himself of proving creationism possible on this account, but we know he did prove the population of Americas and Oceania after Ararat by boat a technical possibility. The raft he used for Perú - Polynesia and the Reed Boat he used for Heliopolis - Americas were well within technical know-how of Noah with immediate successors. As for the official 20.000 years since Americas were populated, that may very well be a misdating (problems of C14 for very old dates are dealt with by other creationist authors).

Even without Thor Heyerdahl, Easter Island proves "by itself" (or by being populated before Roggeveen, Cook, Bougainville et al.) that population of continents across the sea have been possible before Columbus.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Day of St Ephrem
Bibl. Clignancourt
75018 Paris

Update for modelling of diverging skin colour from mid brown parents:

The sets of AaBb in both parents were given by a CMI video, but here I get out implications according to my knowledge of Mendel's laws:

AaBb * AaBb each has one of two possible melanine plus in each of two locations (each location also permits lack of melanine) regulating possibly different types of melanine = 2+ Note that A/a and B/b are different loci on even different chromosome pairs. Otherwise they would not recombine free, one of them independently of each other.

AA BB 4+ – probably darker than parents
AA Bb 3+ – probably darker than parents
AA bB 3+ – probably darker than parents
AA bb 2+ – as parents, but maybe different shade (like if the 2+ are concerned with same melanine while parents had different ones)

Aa BB 3+ – probably darker than parents
Aa Bb 2+ – as parents
Aa bB 2+ – as parents
Aa bb 1+ – probably lighter skinned than parents

aA BB 3+ – probably darker than parents
aA Bb 2+ – as parents
aA bB 2+ – as parents
aA bb 1+ – probably lighter skinned than parents

aa BB 2+ – as parents, but maybe different shade
aa Bb 1+ – probably lighter skinned than parents
aa bB 1+ – probably lighter skinned than parents
aa bb 0 = no melanine, very light skinned

Note that skin colour is just one parameter differentiating Caucasian from Negroid type, where these two are extremes. Mongoloid type falling usually in between (except some very light skinned Japanese). So called Mulattos – mixed ancestry Caucasian Negroid – are not Mongoloid, but they also fall in between. Some Caucasians even are as dark skinned as these mixed ancestry. Certain Arabs, certain Indians, including many Gipsies.

In hair structure, Negroid and Mongoloid type are extreme, and Caucasians are all the middle out to the extremes. Wavy hair ? Caucasian. And wavy is in middle between curly (where Caucasians get as curly as Negroid type) and straight (where Caucasians get as straight as Mongoloid type).

Hair colour ? One extreme is black. It is over nearly all Negroid and Mongolian types and over a great part of Caucasian type. The other extreme is Blonde and Red head – both only within Caucasian type, when we speak of populations.

Eye colour – different shades of Brown is usual, while Blue and Green eyes come within Caucasian type. Brown eyes in Caucasians do not mean they mixed with Negroids some recent time back in the family, as blue eyes usually would in people of the Negroid type (albinos excepted).

Though in skin colour, Caucasian type is one extreme, thus not very varied, in many other aspects Caucasian type is the spectrum, while Negroid and Mongoloid types are either sharing one extreme of it (like in hair colour) or are at different extremes (like in hair shape).

This does probably mean that Caucasian type is the most mixed and represents kind of the bulk of mankind. Which is a far better explanation of why people showing this type have colonised or deported people not showing it but showing instead Mongoloid or especially Negroid type than the explanation of overall genetic superiority./HGL

6 commentaires:

  1. "A man rests unctionnally fertile longer"
    "A man rests functionnally fertile longer"

  2. I got a query:

    The different races descend from Sem, Cham, and Japheth. But if Sem's son married Cham's daughter, then their children were descended from Sem and Cham. And if Cham's son married Japheth's daughter, their children were descended from Cham and Japheth. And if another of Sem's children married another of Japheth's, their children were from Sem and Japheth! Unless Sem, Cham, and Japheth's children were only allowed to marry their siblings (which seems unlikely since they obviously had cousins they could marry).

    Brief answer:

    a) juridically and religiously the descent of the peoples are patrilinear*, so a grandson of Shem and Japheth counts as descending from his father's father in genealogy of peoples

    b) racially I think this is irrelevant, I believe colours and other things were more differentiatated after Tower of Babel split the unity of mankind into many populations (in other words, I do not believe Ham was the first black man, I do not even believe their obvious ancestor Ham's son Kush - Ethiopia - was the first black man.

    France was separated from Roman empire by Clovis' conquest centuries before Gaul's Latin became French and Provençal.

    Similarily, I believe the black and contrary white trait comes from melanine genes wandering between different chromosome pairs, and people ending up with melanine gene in both chromosomes of most pairs became black - this happened among Kush's descendants - whereas people ending up with no melanine genes on either of most pairs became first rednecks, that happened among some descendants of Japheth.

    Blessed day of St Clare to you!

    *The matrilinear counting of Judaism is post-Babylonic-exile or most probably even post-destruction-of-Jerusalem (i e after they split off from the Church) and was decided since a people subjected to diverse humiliations including rape and including "seductions" the husband could not afford to protest against should still be able to have some confidence in collective identity.

  3. Actually, the first sentence is true but a bit short:

    The different races descend from Sem, Cham, and Japheth.

    The different NATIONS descend from Sem'S, Cham'S and Japheth'S 72 GRAND- and GREAT-GRANDSONS.

    That does not mean there are exactly 72 nations in existence today, but that these were the original ones. Since then nations have both divided and coalesced.

  4. And, some of these nations have characteristics vis-à-vis others of them which are now regarded (or were recently regarded) as rather "racial" than just national.

  5. I read a really great article by Robert Carter on CMI on this:

    CMI : Inbreeding and the origin of races
    by Robert Carter

    One little fault:

    Children each inherit half of the DNA carried by each parent. Thus, a child will carry a quarter of each grandparent’s set of DNA, one-sixteenth of each great-grandparent’s DNA, etc.

    Each progenitor as progenitor gives exactly one half of his genome (unless some occasions giving two or no chromosomes of a pair, but that is rare). But grandparents (i e parents of the progenitor in question) have no way of ensuring that half of what the progenitor leaves on is from each of them.

    So, this should be corrected:

    Children each inherit exactly half of the DNA carried by each parent (except medical anomalies). Thus, a child will carry with a statistic probability around a quarter of each grandparent’s set of DNA, with some greater lee-way one-eighth of each great-grandparent’s DNA, etc.

    Among your four grandparents, all your genome comes through them as opposed to others in their generation, so no of your genome comes not through them. But you cannot be sure to have 25% of each.

    If they are all different persons (as they should be), you can be sure to have no more than 50% of any one of them. And it is not quite probable that the 50% you have from your father are exactly the same as the 50% he had from his father. But it is just barely possible as a rare occurrence.

    So, even among your grandparents, you could theoretically have one from which you have no genetic material at all.

    Among the eight great-grandparents, the statistic mean contribution of each is 12.5% but even so, you might have genetic material only from seven of them.

    Apart from that correction, Robert Carter's article is fine.

    If you are a man, you have your Y-chromosome from your father, he had it from his father (so you have it from your father's father and not from your mother's father) and so on.

  6. Btw, it is marked as from Friday 12-XII-2014. Yesterday.