Southern Bread

I stumbled upon this pair of refutations of the young-earth population rate argument. The population rate argument is primarily against evolution, not the age of the earth, though it is often employed by young earthers to show that their position is reasonable. Their are actually two parts to the argument, the latter of which is often ignored, and they go like this:

1. Given a historically lower than average population growth rate, we can arrive at the earth’s current population rate in a time frame that fits into the young-earth timeline. Usually anywhere from 6,000-10,000 years.
2. If man has been around for 2.5 million years or more, todays human population should be so absurdly big that the earth could not sustain it.

That seems like a very reasonable argument to me if the math holds up right. Let’s tackle the second part first.

First of all, we start with the general scientific consensus that man is at least 2.5 million years old. It may be more, but it’s certainly not less. From what I have found, they are dating flaked stone tools back 2.5 million years so it’s a pretty safe bet those were homonids making them. The other thing we need to know is what the human population was at it’s earliest estimate. The best I could find was that the human population around 8000 BC was 5 million. I got that figure by looking at as many human history timelines as I could find; and 5 million seemed to be a pretty consistent estimate.

With this data in hand I run into my first problem with this account of human history. In order to believe that in 2,492,000 years we only got up to 5 million humans, you would have to accept that the human population only netted 2 new humans per year for over 2400 millenia. That’s pretty hard to swallow. It would seem that growth rate for an emerging new species would have to be robust at first in order for that species to gain traction. Also, if it’s not robust then why is the evolution happening in the first place? According to the terms of natural selection, a new species is selected when it develops a characteristic that conveys an evolutionary advantage on it. Why would a species with an evolutionary advantage over it’s peers have such a terrible, terrible growth rate?

Not only that, but in the 10,000 years since you would require a nominal growth rate of no more than 0.07% to avoid going over the current population of 6 billion. Again, this seems very hard to swallow. Those 2 growth numbers are just ridiculously low. And if you bump the growth rate up to 0.08% (just 0.01% more), you have to expect a modern population somewhere around 14 billion. If you go up to 0.09% then you are left with a modern population of 40 billion. That’s nearly 7 times the current global population and we aren’t even at 1% yet.

So summing this up: A modern understanding of hominid history would require that from -2,500,000 BC to -8000 BC, the human population only grew by 2 people per year, and then from -8000 BC to present, the average growth rate was only 0.07%. This hardly seems sustainable for any animal population. Modern species with a growth rate of only 2 per year are probably at the top of the endangered list, yet we are to believe that humans maintained those paltry numbers for 2,502,000 years.

More later.