Even Younger Earth Creationism

quote:

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* Population Growth

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Evolutionists and Creationists alike have a problem with population growth. As Darwin himself admitted:

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The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase; it will be safest to assume that it begins breeding when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth six young in the interval, and surviving till one hundred years old; if this be so, after a period of from 740 to 750 years there would be nearly nineteen million elephants alive descended from the first pair. (Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species

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At that rate, if the Creationists figure of 4000 years after the Flood was correct, we can calculate that there would be about 2 x 1051 elephants now living. That's two thousand billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion elephants.

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Lynn Margulis, no fan nor supporter of creationism at all, used this particular quote from Darwin to name the phenomenon of "biotic potential" in a lecture I heard this year.She then showed a video of bacteria reproducing and filling up the presentation surface in short order. Bacterial potential is much larger than the elephants'.I would have thought that her discussion and implementation of the process could in no way be used to inform a creationist thought process, especially as I found myself (in the audience) being a "neo-darwinist" 'against' her position but she went on to say...this-that, during one reproduction the potential goes from 0 to infinity.The issue is, is how the population is to be plyed in space and time. Her notion of it fit in with Darwin’s use of the word “check”, so it really does seem that the evolutionist’s idea and use of biotic potential could actually be used by a creationist if the infinity were made into a continuous motion on the discrete (finite) changing Earth.No creationist has spelled this out, to my knowledge and thus the use of this quote in the series in the OP is more of stop gap rather than a fully functioning finis.