Hi TB:
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My basic answer is that the 2000 or so speciation events per year required are not happening in series but in parallel. This is evoltuion we're talking about! It is a branching thing. It is multiplicative. Naively, but logically, if we branch from 20,000 kinds every 100 years one would quickly get 10 million kinds by 1500 BC.
Lol! I'm not trying to be insulting here, TB - I have a lot of respect for you, honestly - but LOL! Think it through, man. You're now postulating that every single kreated kind on the ark spawned a new species every one hundred years. Then each of these species spawned a new species every one hundred years, and so forth. This only works if every newly spawned species remained extant for the entire time AND every single one of them reproduced like rabbits in order to get enough of a basic population going for speciation to occur in the first place over and over for a thousand years, with hypervariation/mutation occurring in each population to generate sufficiently different alleles to develop the reproductive barriers necessary to claim they're new species in the first place. Talk about chickens from lizard's eggs! All the while the poor critters are trying to migrate across a barren, lifeless world and empty seas to the continent or island where they finally end up! I take it all these new species being created at the rate of 200 a year (for the first century, 400/yr the second, 800/yr the third, etc) using your assumption migrated together? Nobody died and nobody tried to eat each other? No deleterious mutations in all that hypermutation? No lineages died out through disease, flood (natural ones, I mean), being struck by lightning, falling down a chasm, etc etc? Man, the place must have looked like a mass lemming migration all over the world!
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And there are very good reasons for the branching rate to die down over time. Every system adjusts exponentially to a new environement. This is a mathematical law of equilibrium that would hold almost without exception. These exemplars of each kind, presumably hand picked by God, were suddenly flung into the world to their own devices. It makes a lot of sense for there to be a sudden adjustment to a new equlibrium based on the initial starting point and their new environments.
So no new niches have opened up since the Flood (or rather since 1500 BCE by your reckoning - or am I misunderstanding when this halt was supposed to have occurred)? There are no new ecosystems, new habitats, new lakes/rivers/seas? No new islands? One huge ecological release taking place over the course of a thousand years and then ... nothing else happens? The entire planet is in stasis since then?
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We really should be looking at land based species since we are talking about post-flood ark-sourced diversifation. There are about 2000 land based families. Anyone know how many (non-insect) land-based species there are?
How can you say this? I'm no expert on the bible, but doesn't it talk about the death of everything that wasn't on the ark? Even if not, there is no way that you can have a global flood and discount marine organisms. What about all the salt-water species that would die in brackish water? What about all the fresh-water species that die at the faintest whiff of salt? And not just fish - amphibians (or were they on the ark?), molluscs, crustaceans of various flavors, etc - would all suffer and/or die out in a gobal Flood. And why do you exclude insects? Most are terrestrial and extremely closely adapted to particular niches - there's no way the floating mat (evidence for which is found where, exactly?) hypothesis could even approximately account for insect diversity - unless they're even more hypervariable than vertebrates. Finally, what about plants? With a very few exceptions, the vast majority of plant species cannot survive immersion in salt water - or even saline water - since they've never had to develop a capability to eliminate salt from their tissues. Doesn't work, TB.
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Your Cambrian explosion analogy works only as far as the species number is concerned. In terms of informaiton content of the genomes there is no comparison. We are not proposing thre origin of a single new gene family after the flood. The Cambrian explosion generted the orgin of probably 50% of our curnet gene families in all of life! please note this oft ignored differnce in what you and what we claim.
Sort of a non-sequitor TB. I wasn't talking about complexity - especially not genetic complexity - rather the preternaturally rapid diversification. The Cambrian ain't got nothing on your post-Flood extravaganza.
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If some top fraction of the Cenezoic is catatrophic glacial melting then we actually see a lot of evidence of a multitude of variations of mammals. Think of any mammal and there was a bizaree assortment: e.g. elephant variations.
I'm not entirely clear how this is a response to the lack of transitionals from the hyperradiation after the flood. In addition, you would need to show fossils of one or more of the kreated kinds (I'm not asking for all 18,000), and not only trace their lineage to a given group of modern organisms, but also trace them spatially from an origin in the Middle East 4500 years ago. Where are the transitionals, TB?
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Biogeography? We would explain that the current populaiton of marsupials are where they are becasue this is where they emmigrated after the flood, whether directed by God or not. Since then they have been isolated by geographical factors.
Major problems with this statement. I'll concede (for the sake of argument) that the original created "marsupial kinds" migrated to Australia along with the monotremes (although at some point you're going to need to explain exactly HOW they got there), this begs the question of OTHER marsupials such as the extinct South American fauna (like
Thylacosmilus among many others). Not to mention now-extinct animals that appear "out of place" geographically, like fossil rhinos and lions in north England, camels in NA, etc. They all get lost and take a wrong turn?
Thanks for trying, TB.
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