animals on the ark

Yeah, John. I was kidding. I was just taking the "no variation between kinds" argument to its (il)logical conclusion. If you doubt it, see my long-winded discussion with Philip on the human evolution thread. I'm arguing against biblical essentialism - which is the heart of the "kinds" argument.

I don't want to take that time to read through all of this topic but I did see that John Woodmorappe’s book on Noah’s Ark came up in this discussion. I have it and it so full of total nonsense that one hardly knows how to start. I grew up on farms, and often stayed with a neighbor who farmed in very primitive style (Horses not tractors, no electricity and water pumped by hand or wind from a well). Since then I have worked with laboratory animals, had a friend who was a zoo veterinarian, and two of my cousins are animal trainers. In my opinion, based on considerable experience, Woodmorappe's ideas on feeding, waste disposal, loading the ark and so on and on are totally unworkable. The self-feeding and clean up methods he describes are not nearly as easy as he makes them out to be and would be particularly difficult and in fact unworkable on a boat. Remember that we not only have a lot of animals here we have a lot of different ‘kinds’ of animals. The Cincinnati Zoo has about 700 different kinds of animals, not 8,000 and I remember reading that about 1/3 of their staff of about 190 are just involved in animal care and feeding. No zoo has ever tried to care for 8,000 different species. Extrapolating from either modern farming methods or the number of animals of a single species that someone could care for as Woodmorrape does is just not valid. In his scenario, each person must care for 2,000 animals of 1,000 different kinds. Think about it.There are some things in the book I do find very amusing. One is that he refers to three papers by Peczkis without of course telling anyone that he is Peczkis. Another is when he writes.'For expample it is possible to train animals to urinate either spontaneously or on command into buckets'.In my experience you can generally expect cows or horses to urinate at the most inconvenient time and not on command. In any case, anyone who has ever seen a cow or mare urinate would rather clean up the mess than hold the bucket especially on a boat that would be moving around. This is a real howler that gets a lot of laughs from anyone with farming experience.He talks about expediting waste disposal by having slotted floors. Now that’s really bright on a three-floor boat. Just don’t get below the slots! I hope the bottom wasn’t slotted. And you better get rid of the waste. If you allow the waste from 16,000 critters to accumulate in the bottom of the boat for a year you are literally going to be in deep do-do.He talks about ways that special foods could be prepared for various animals but does not allow any time for that preparation in his time calculations.He talks about possibly using pelleted hay. This is completely ridiculous. There was an alfalfa pelleting plant built near our farm. It used some massive machinery and technology that was clearly beyond Noah.He talks about loading all those diverse animals on the ark at a rate similar to that attained when unloading hogs in a modern slaughterhouse.He talks about bringing the young of large mammals on board only a few weeks after birth so they will be smaller but completely forgets that they would have to be weaned first or you would spend forever feeding them even if you could get the milk.I could spend many hours discussing the things that are wrong with Noah’s Ark a Feasibility Study but I don’t have the time right now. Woodmorrape may have read a lot of books and papers on the subject but I doubt his level of first hand experience in caring for animals.The idea that all the animals in the world are descended from two members of each genus that went for a year-long boat ride with representatives of all the extinct genera and only eight people to care for them is absurd in the extreme. The impossiblity of eight people caring for enough animals to repopulate the earth on a wooden boat for a year is just another in a long line of falsifications of the flood myth.Randy

Hi randy.Yeah, Woodmorappe's a joke. However, in the interests of fairness, I asked my resident science advisor (Dani, age 8) to provide a reference list of critters that could have been on the ark two-by-two (except when it was seven). Once you accept the creationist hyper-"microevolution" from the ark kinds to the 11+ million species alive today (and rejecting the hollow Earth and ark-as-planetoid-sized-spaceship explanations), it's pretty easy to come up with the exact list of what could have been on the ark.Here is Dani's list of Kreated Kinds:Feathered Kind
Bug Kind
Plant Kind
Things-that-live-in-water Kind
Things-that-live-in-water-and-breathe-air Kind
Things-too-small-to-see Kind
Furry Animal Kind
Furry-animal-with-wings Kind (had to have bats in there somewhere)
Cold-blooded-animals-with-feet Kind
Cold-blooded-animals-without-feet Kind
Dinosaur Kind
Animals-that-live-in-water-sometimes Kind (she has a thing about frogs, for some reason)
Things-that-live-in-water-and-breathe-air-with-shells Kind (e.g., turtles)
Things-that-live-in-water-and-don't-breathe-air-with-shells Kind (e.g., clams)
People KindAs you can see, there were in fact about 15 species on the ark. She might have missed some - after all, she's only 8. Could've been housed in something about the size of a small yacht with a couple of acquariums. I don't know why AiG and ICR haven't realized how easy it is...

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Originally posted by Quetzal:
Hi randy.

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Yeah, Woodmorappe's a joke. However, in the interests of fairness, I asked my resident science advisor (Dani, age 8) to provide a reference list of critters that could have been on the ark two-by-two (except when it was seven). Once you accept the creationist hyper-"microevolution" from the ark kinds to the 11+ million species alive today (and rejecting the hollow Earth and ark-as-planetoid-sized-spaceship explanations), it's pretty easy to come up with the exact list of what could have been on the ark.

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Here is Dani's list of Kreated Kinds:

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Feathered Kind
Bug Kind
Plant Kind
Things-that-live-in-water Kind
Things-that-live-in-water-and-breathe-air Kind
Things-too-small-to-see Kind
Furry Animal Kind
Furry-animal-with-wings Kind (had to have bats in there somewhere)
Cold-blooded-animals-with-feet Kind
Cold-blooded-animals-without-feet Kind
Dinosaur Kind
Animals-that-live-in-water-sometimes Kind (she has a thing about frogs, for some reason)
Things-that-live-in-water-and-breathe-air-with-shells Kind (e.g., turtles)
Things-that-live-in-water-and-don't-breathe-air-with-shells Kind (e.g., clams)
People Kind

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As you can see, there were in fact about 15 species on the ark. She might have missed some - after all, she's only 8. Could've been housed in something about the size of a small yacht with a couple of acquariums. I don't know why AiG and ICR haven't realized how easy it is...

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Hmmm. That's a lot of micro evolution in a few thousand years. One might almost think it was macro evolution but of course we know that's impossible.
Randy

I think many of you fail to notice the most important point concerning whether or not a worldwide flood actually existed. If anyone has read the newest translation to the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic that quite possibly predated the construction of the Old Testament, you will find an extremely similar account of the flood story. Several other cultures also incoprorate flood stories into their religions and myths. What is important to look at is who told the flood story first and if each civilization would have the knowledge of each other's existence. Or perhaps they merely copied off each other. Could this mean there actually was a huge flood (in all reality it was probably only a portion of the land), for at that time most not the entire world was populated, or was this a common knowledge that religious groups merely reproduced. Also, many of you forget that not all creationists believe the bible to be literal. Some find several scientific errors but merely look past it to find symbolism and "deeper meaning". So in all actuality the account of Noah's ark does seem incorrect, but that does not erase the deep culutural influences it possesses. That, I feel, is the most important part.

Y'a know I would have thought this was an OK question to ask to have answered but now in reading some of the letters to Journals' SIENCE and NATURE about the chaning face of taxonomists on the use and development of computers and taxonomy (raison de etre of web site TAXACOM (taxonomy &computers)) MY OPINION that caused me to be booted off the discussion has made print in a respectable place and not by me and developements possible that even my ostensibly illegible biology proposes has not occurred and WAS recognized as able to be done and not to the extreme that some rightly also WISH enabled (free exhange of data).So, Taxonomists HAVE not been able to give up on the monteary vaule of a name for the progress of the field and it makes non-sense on my 2nd opinion to ask about a NUMBER of species names for the ark when the scientists are not willing to use the larger pollent net .millions of storge places to sort out disambiguities etc to help bring about a more sustainable economy. National interests are too tied NOW to the golbalization which did not exist when the sanity of these kinds of questions were begining to become recognized as legit.They are not. Even by the actual (non Brad) scientists themselves. I vote to table this "discussion". But I am almost quite litteraly only "one" vote here. So I doubt I would win the tail end even of this thread.It is a sorry state when we have the ability but we would rather committ the student who wants to rename Coulbrids to the Garden of out of Eden than make the apple apply for some creature took out of Africa.

This is an anaylsis of ancient flood myths I found last night.http://www.louisville.edu/~aoclar01/ancient/flood/flood1.htm

Another problem that we run into with the Ark is the shipbuilding knowledge of the people of that time period. The descriptions of the Ark in the Bible give it a length of 450 feet, a beam (width) of 75 feet, and a height of 45 feet. Apart from the obvious problems of its incredible cargo, consisting of huge amounts of food as well as all those animals, large and small, we run into the problem of the limited engineering knowledge of the people of that day. We're talking about a vessel somewhat larger than a World War II destroyer, but with a much greater overall tonnage when fully loaded. Such a large vessel requires expansion joints to allow it to "bend" with the movement of the water. Without expansion joints, the Ark would have quickly broken up and sunk,even on a normal sea, regardless of the shape of its hull (and especially since it was constructed of wood!) I seriously doubt that Noah knew anything at all about expansion joints, especially since a ship this large had never before been built, and indeed would not be built for millenia! I also doubt that the concept of weight distribution of the cargo and its effects on the structural integrity of the vessel were very well-known, again considering the unprecedented size here. A major shift in cargo during a storm would have sent the Ark to the bottom...this has caused the destruction of much better-built cargo ships in recent history. So the Ark, in all likelihood, really couldn't have been very seaworthy at all!

Interesting. The largest ships IIRC of the period were the Roman frumentariae or grain ships (plying the waters between Alexandria and Rome, but also used to carry legions during the Punic Wars - which is the only reason I know anything about them ). They ran about 180 feet long, fairly wide, and supposedly wallowed like pigs in even a normal sea. They were sailing vessels rather than oared, and constructed of cedar. 'Course, no one knows what "gopher wood" is, so the creationists can simply claim it had magical properties that prevented a boat constructed of it from breaking up at the first wavelet.

Thanks for the info on the Roman frumentariae! I was unaware that the Romans built such large boats...I'd like to learn more about ancient seagoing vessels--though I did see an outstanding example of a Roman boat (a small one) that was well-preserved in the lava at Herculaneum from the Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. National Geographic did an article on it back in '84, I think. At 180 feet long, the frumentariae was, of course, well within the structural limits of wood for ships. The longest wooden ship I've heard of is the Wyoming, built around 1900--she was about 325 feet long, which is beyond wood's structural limits, so she was reinforced with steel crossbeams and supports (steel of course, didn't exist in Noah's time!) Even then, the Wyoming's structure wasn't up to the rigors of the sea. I agree with you on the creationists--they can dodge any legitimate argument against the feasibility of the Ark with a supernatural explanation which takes us outside the boundaries of science--yet many of these folks claim to be Creation "scientists"! Oh, well Cheers!

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Originally posted by galon:
The longest wooden ship I've heard of is the Wyoming, built around 1900--she was about 325 feet long, which is beyond wood's structural limits, so she was reinforced with steel crossbeams and supports (steel of course, didn't exist in Noah's time!) Even then, the Wyoming's structure wasn't up to the rigors of the sea.

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The Chinese of the 14th(?) century built wooden ships in excess of 400 feet, some rumored to have been over 500. At any rate, they dwarfed anything in Europe at the time. I'll look up the links later.------------------
http://www.hells-handmaiden.com

That's very interesting! How in the world did these ships not break up? I very much look forward to seeing your links...I did some checking around too, and found that these were sailing ships (treasure ships) which also were used for military purposes. A rudder from one was found, which indicated a length of over 450 feet. If the sizes are not exaggerated, I may have to stand corrected on the structural limits of wood (which I based on an article by a boat builder on the Wyoming). I have emailed naval-architecture.co.uk asking about the validity of the 400-500 foot length claim and will let you know what they think about it. Again, thanks for the post, John!

I have two questions:1) How did Noah get to the polar regions to collect penguins, and back down to the southern hemisphere to collect kangaroos in the space of just 7 days?2) How did the Penguins live on the boat? Did they have some kind of special cooling room?

I'm not a believer in of the christian myths but here's the answers you'll likely get from one of them.1a. Noah did not take 2 of every animal, he took 2 of every Kind of animal and after the flood microevolution occured and you have the variety you see today. Therefore he didn't take 2 penguins but 2 of the bird "kind" and eventually we got penguins out of them.1b. The continents were in different locations before the flood, therefore all the animal "kinds" were easy to collect.2. Given 1a. this is irrelevant.

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If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room", I'll be an elitist!
*not an actual doctor

Thanks DrJones.The following rebuttal is not aimed at you directly, but rather at those who would argue the points you put forth to be fact.

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Boolean
1) How did Noah get to the polar regions to collect penguins, and back down to the southern hemisphere to collect kangaroos in the space of just 7 days?

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DrJones*
1a. Noah did not take 2 of every animal, he took 2 of every Kind of animal and after the flood microevolution occured and you have the variety you see today. Therefore he didn't take 2 penguins but 2 of the bird "kind" and eventually we got penguins out of them.

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We know, according to the bible, that the great flood happened in 2461 BCE. So this leaves around 4467 years to get until the present day (correct my maths if I am wrong) for an eagle, a parakeet, a penguin etc. to evolve from this one 'base' bird, which according to the bible must be a dove (since Noah sends it out at the end of the story). From this I see that the only way for the creationist story to work is to rely on the theory of . .evolution.But not just normal evolution that takes million upon billions of years, but HYPER evolution, which states that 8,800-10,200 species of bird evolved from just one base bird in the space of just 4461 years. In fact, it relies on a theory of evolution SO advanced, even those who believe in evolution over creation just can’t see how it could happen. Now we know that Noah had a dove, since that is what he sends to find land in the story. So did a penguin evolve from a dove in the space of just a few thousand years?This leaves me with the following outcomes:1) God just 'made' these new species after the flood, or gave the temporary ability of hyper evolution, which is not recorded anywhere in the bible, nor is there is any evidence of that happening outside of the bible.2) That animals do indeed evolve at a rate where one new species of bird appears every 6 months, and it’s a commonly known fact today that I am unaware of.3) The person who wrote the story had not travelled every square inch of the globe and had not discovered just how many species of animals there really were in his time, along with the habitats they would need to live, their daily needs to stay alive, what they would all need to eat and drink, the complex nature of needing to be a vet if one of the two animals he took on board got sick, and so on. He unknowingly wrote a story that he believed to be accurate, just like how there are stories of people travelling to the edge of the earth, fighting a minotaur, and speaking with dragons. The author based the stories of a limited understanding of the world at the time, which don’t hold up accurately to what we know about the world today.