Summations Only

That is a blatant disregard for the truth. What is being discussed is whether the most recent ancestor is > 40,000 years ago as the scientific evidence shows or whether you can find excuses to reduce that number to 4500 years. Where do you get this 8000 nonsense? Nobody would argue that such a number ruled out the Noahic flood. Yet you quote an article from 1992 that says the bottleneck could have been between 200 years ago and millions of years ago based on a particle piece of evidence. It also cites other evidence that eliminates the 200 year possibility. But ignoring whether the article can pin down the date accurately, what does the fact the evidence is consistent with a bottleneck of millions of years do for your argument that bottlenecks of more than a few hundered years ago are undetectable?Your logic is flawed, and easily seen as such. Let me lay out the some facts.First, a more modern answer for the timing of the bottleneck of cheetahs is between 6000 and 20000 years ago. I'll provide citations if necessary, but I think your cherry picking of your own reference ought to be enough to show your lack of bona fides. Even if you claim that to be consistent with the flood, the cheetah and the elephant seal are among the few animals on earth that show such a bottleneck. Humans do not.The detectability is influenced by how long ago in terms of generations, and how few animals were left.And in that regards a reduction to 14 or fewer animals only a few 1000 years ago is about as severe as it gets. Yet genetics tells us of a common ancestor for humans at no earlier than 40,000 years ago, and a bottleneck for cheetahs that proceeds the time you claim for the flood.If we all descended from essential 5 humans worth of unique genetic material 4500 years, every human on earth ought to be pretty near genetically identical even today. Yes there would be a huge number of mutations in billions of people, but those billions did not simply magically appear 4500 years ago. They built up over time. Yes there would be lots of new mutations between 4500 years ago and now, but each person would be only a few mutations away from a very tight baseline of Noah, his wife, and the wifes of Noah's sons. That kind of lack of diversity ought to be extremely visible.And of course as the population grew, people spread out. Those mutations going on in China right now do not contribute one hill of beans to any genetic difference between me and say jar.The truth of the matter is that our large population of humans is not the deciding factor in what patterns we ought to see. The deciding factors are the depth of the reduction in population, and the number of generations since that reduction.And the reduction of humans to only 8 members, 3 of whom were directly descended from 2 of the 8 is about as extreme a bottle neck as you can imagine. 4500 years is way to short to produce the kind of results we see now, and there are multiple lines of genetic evidence to show that. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Fair enough. I accept your explanation. But it brings up the quetions of what was the basis for even making a statement at all?Substituting the right number into the question kinda makes the rest of your message moot. The point then becomes a debate over genetics setting a number at 4500 or much greater followed by your claim that genetics is useless at showing such things at greater than a few hundred years.Because let's face it. When genetics shows some common ancestry back to anything like the time of the flood, your argument that no bottleneck can be detected at greater than 200 or so years is effectively shut down.And what about your failing to note the range of possible ages for the cheetah bottleneck? You claimed the article said it was a few hundred years. You could not have seen that number without seeing the rest of the numbers, and it is difficult to believe you did not see the information supporting a much higher number.Edited by NoNukes, : Fix some punctuation delete a tiny bit of testiness.

No, the thread is not about carbon dating. But that does not mean that dates established by carbon dating cannot be used in an argument. It means that if you want to continue the discussion beyond that point, the reliability of the dating methods will of necessity be on topic. Maybe we will end up in separate threads, but so be it.The same thing can be said for mutation rates. If you want to argue that our estimates of mutation rates are off, once the point has been made that they rule out any possibility of a recent global flood, then we can pursue them as ontopic discussion.The same can be said for any other dating method. You don't get a free pass to deny any and all dating methods if a claim is made that such dating methods rule out a Flood.In fact, an argument can be made that this debate really ended as soon as you began to rely on the K-T boundary as being the Flood. All methods of dating we can come up with including radiometric, geological, and biological all indicate that the K-T boundary dates from before humans existed, regardless of exactly how the bounday formed. Game over.ABE:It's been pointed out to me that you actually claim that the P-T boundary represents the Flood. I acknowledge my error, but note that it is even easier to rule out that as recent. Really? What a question.I get the bottleneck I'm sticking you with from Genesis 7:7 and Genesis 7:13. Are you arguing that there were more than 8 people on the ark? What are you really asking me?Edited by NoNukes, : add so be it.Edited by NoNukes, : Correct about a dating error

Yeah, I knew that. I suppose I forgot just how ridiculous his argument was.

Your time frames and what you "feel" are not relevant because you have not done the work necessary to make them relevant. Other than the fact that you want the flood to be 4500 years ago, there is absolutely no reason to even suspect time compression.Further, we can eliminate the P-T boundary just by using relative dating. Humans did not exist at that time.Apparently you believe that the argument is not over until your nose is so rubbed into it that even you can cannot admit you do not smell the odor. For me at least that is not true. For me the argument ends favorably when you don't even try anymore to use evidence based argument; when you misread scientific articles in a deliberate fashion; when you avoid the arguments counter to your proposition; and when you cherry pick the questions you deign to answer. We're way past that point.Cheetahs are bottlenecked so extremely that we don't need a microscope or DNA sequencing to see the genetic problems. Their genetic issues are bout what we ought to expect for most mammals their size and larger if their populations were reduced to a few 1000 about 10,000 years ago. The Thomson's gazelles that cheetah's like to snack on do not show those issues.

Many? Really? Which ones?

Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth (with poor accuracy) in about 230 BC. At that time, at least, it was known that earth was a planet. I don't believe you can time compress that history into the last couple hundred years, but who knows what you'll try. But let's not confuse a belief in a geocentric universe with not knowing that earth is a planet.The fact is that none of the translations of the Bible we're likely to use in this thread date to a time when the earth was not known to be a planet. The translation issue is that there is no information in the text to work with. To change the text so that the author of Genesis knew what he apparently did not would be to lie.Yes, I agree with your point about how the word earth was used in the Bible. But that error does bring into question exactly what the author knew about the Flood, because clearly the author was not present at the time the event is supposed to have happened.

Do you understand that as far as the date of the flood is concerned, that the P-T boundary is still a factor of 2,000 beyond the compressed dates you think correspond to the flood? Want to try this one again?

And of course the con-game is beyond mere misdirection. Regardless of what happened to birds or mice, we can make the observation that pigs cannot fly or climb ropes to board a ship. Explaining away the issue for a few species, when ALL species must show a bottleneck is beyond 'making a typo' or the other things that mindspawn uses to excuse himself. Such things are evidence that the man will say practically anything.I'm quite done with him on this issue, and I doubt I'll be able to give him the benefit of the doubt on honesty in future dealings.

Actually, I think your statement of belief is wrong. You don't actually have anything like an organized belief about this stuff other than that you do not accept scientific dating. The various dating systems have correlate between them anyway, so that it is simply not possible for your belief to be something you've thought through while considering the evidence.But worst of all, your purported explanation does not address the question you've created and that I've asked. If you want to show that I am wrong then tell me which scientific scheme it is that you believe gives a 130,000 year date for the P-T boundary? That is after all the scientific date that you are claiming maps to the flood date, right?And of course there is no such dating system.

Wow. You actually believe you are doing well here. I find that astounding.

My own posts are not important. I would not accuse you of cherry picking if you never responded to any of my posts. Given that there is only one of you, I think responding to even a quarter of the posts here is a great job. Don't take Percy's comment to mean you have to address all posts. I don't think there is anything in my posts that somebody else hasn't asked. Just respond to the questions once if that is your goal.When I refer to cherry picking, I am referring to not answering the most important questions in the post you chose to respond. I am also referring to your cherry picking of information from the references you cite. Claiming that your reference put a few hundred year date on the cheetah bottleneck, or ignoring that another reference cites dates of > 60000 years because you like the way it counts mutations is the kind of cherry picking I refer to here. You continue to talk about rats and birds sneaking on the ark, when nobody has raised the issue of rats and birds having a bottleneck.You haven't covered carbon dating in any successful way, but you don't need to refer to my posts for that.

None of which has anything to do with dates of 65k-130k. My point is that without even getting into anything regarding the mechanics of dating we can see that you just made that stuff up. Nothing you've mentioned regarding dating is the least bit helpful in that regard. Are you seriously claiming to have done this kind of study already? Can you honestly do any kind of dating beyond historical references without making some assumption about the rate of some process. Unless it gets the pyramids built sometime after the flood, revising those dates may help with other parts of genesis, but as far as proving a flood date, Rohl's dates (which don't constitute a dating system) are just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. They don't help you correct C-14 dating in any significant way.

Which assumptions were used?You are just confirming my point that you are assigning dates ad hoc and not based on dating scheme X being off by factor y.Do you consider simple denial to be holding up your end of the discussion?

I doubt you can do what you claim.Do you really believe that the a current fast rate of deposition makes a past slower rate of deposition under different conditions impossible? Which is more likely to be constant over time, a rate of deposition of sediment anywhere in the world in various conditions of water flow and geography, or the decay rate of potassium 40?[1][1] RhetoricalEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.