There Are Too Few People For Evolution To Be True?

“50 Reasons to Leave Your Faith (Evolution)” tells us:

30. World Population Growth Rate — In recent times is about 2% per year. Practicable application of growth rate throughout human history would be about half that number. Wars, disease, famine, etc. have wiped out approximately one third of the population on average every 82 years. Starting with eight people, and applying these growth rates since the Flood of Noah's day (about 4500 years ago) would give a total human population at just under six billion people. However, application on an evolutionary time scale runs into major difficulties. Starting with one “couple” just 41,000 years ago would give us a total population of 2 x 10 to the89th [sic]. The universe does not have space to hold so many bodies.

This is a classic example of creationists making technical sounding arguments that dissolve with either a few minutes fact checking or with a few minutes of thought. In short this argument is outright stupid and anyone making it must either be dishonest or incompetent (or both). And yet it is another argument that is used again and again in creationist circles.

Since I have made some serious charges in the above paragraph, I should back them up. My first argument is that this creationist assumes that evolutionists think that rate of population growth of the human species is constant. No professional biologist (and probably no one period) accepts this, for it is a profoundly stupid thing to assume. Thus the claim that evolution predicts a human population of greater than 2 x 10⁸⁹ individuals (greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe) is as false as it is a straw man argument. There is no reason to suppose whatsoever that the rate of population change in any population does not change depending on the circumstances. Indeed I don’t think that there is any college freshman biology text that does not cover the fact a population’s growth rate does change. The s-shaped or logistic curve is a classic example of this. Populations can also go down as well as up.

Furthermore by lets apply their assumptions. By their reasoning Earth cannot be more than a week old. Why? Simple. A bacterium with a doubling time of a half-hour will have reached a population of 2 x 10⁸⁹ in well under five days! I am pretty sure that it is absurd to believe that there could possibly be more bacteria than atoms in the observable universe. Consider that Escherichia coli, a bacterium in your gut, has doubling time of 20 minutes and that Bacillus stearothermophilus can double its population in 11 minutes. Of course the Earth is older than a week old. The bacteria cannot keep reproducing forever: they run out of food, die, etc. The same goes for all forms of life on Earth including man.

For my second argument lets check at the creationist alternative model. They think it is reasonable to have assumed a constant growth rate for 4500 years starting with a population of eight (the number of people on the Ark). So lets see what their model predicts:

(For the mathematically inclined, the population at time t is the starting population times e^lt where l is a constant and e is the base of the natural logarithms and is approximately 2.718281828.)

Do you believe that Egypt used less than a thousand workers to make build the pyramids? Well the assumptions of the creationists has less than a thousand people on the entire planet when the pyramids were built. The calculated population of the planet at the birth of Christ is less than the number of Roman citizens at that time. So whose model is unreasonable?

Thus I think that it reasonable to conclude that anyone using this argument is incompetent or using an argument that they know are false.

And yet this is another widespread creationist claim. The page credits Jonathan Sarfati of Answers in Genesis as a reviewer for this nonsense. Indeed he has an essay of his own making this claim. Henry Morris, one of the most influential creationists, made the claim in his 1974 The Troubled Waters of Evolution. Arthur Strahler’s Science and Earth History debunked a version of this argument presented in Scientific Creationism. The ever-dishonest Kent Hovind cited Scientific Creationism and made those silly arguments debunked here (among others) in this slide show.

So why are this claims being made? It probably has something to do with that young-earthers don’t have any legitimate arguments.

Also see: Another site debunking these claims.

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