He doesn’t deny that possibility that there were years of stagnancy or higher death rates. But the fact is that from 1900 to the present, even with World Wars, abortion, etc. the growth rate has always been consistently over 1% and we can presume that that has generally been the case even before the 1900’s.
His point is to be reckoned with: you simply can’t say that man dates back hundreds of thousands of years if, in general, population is simply growing.
The same thing happened in the late 1300 to early 1400s period ~ Black Plague put a stop to that growth stuff.
Wars have become less deadly BTW. Back in the day they were far more deadly.
Then, there's the early 1500 to mid 1600 period in the Americas where almost the entire native population of tens of millions of human beings were destroyed by hanta virus.
1900 to present is a modern era with countries and organisation and ability to farm with irrigation systems and domesticated animals and fertilizer. Im just scratching the surface at the amounts of technology that allow the growth of the population. This is not including wars, which were more frequent and bloodier in the past than in the present. Genghis khan alone killed 11.1% of the world population, the plague killed about 20% of the world population. Im sure animals killed humans more frequently, im sure lots died from the flu or tuberculosis or polio or malaria or an innumerable amount of diseases that we regard as nothing these days. And just the thought of humanity being borne out of incest is ridiculous. Take a look at Saudi Arabia to get a view of what excessive incestual relations do to genetics. They have the highest rate of mutations and cogenital diseases in the world because more than half the population marries their cousin.
A million facepalms.
You just pointed out his two main problems:
1 - he based his permanent growth rate on relatively modern times with all the transportation and medicine that implies
2 - his math is built under the assumption that in general population simply grows
Through out history population didn’t simply grow. There are long stretches of no growth and negative growth, whole civilizations that just evaporated. Even in periods of general growth the rate was often much slower than in modern times. You can tell the flaw in his “logic” just by the fact that his 8 to current timeline doesn’t even get us back to the Roman Empire. Once his math worked out to 8 people after 500AD he should have seen his deep flaw and walked away from the hypothesis, known recorded history shows his math doesn’t work.
There is a concept called carrying capacity. A hunter-gatherer culture needs a lot of land per person in order to hunt/gather enough food. Once you reach the carrying capacity, the death rate from starvation rises to matches the birth rate.
When agriculture was invented, you could grow food for more people on a given amount of land. Innovations like irrigation, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, etc increased the amount of usable food you could get from a given acre of land, and thus increased the carrying capacity.
There was point in that poorly written and grammatically nonsensical word salad? And his assumptions about population growth are completely false and not supported even by birth and death rates as recorded over the last several hundred years live alone over several thousand and I would add that he demonstrates a complete ignorance of not only general, but also of exponential mathematics and statistics which he conflates without understanding the difference (not withstanding his claims that his father was an actuary and therefore this sort of thing is “write up his alley”).
This post is not about Christianity. It’s about common sense. His equation is no different than what an investor would use for an interesting bearing investment. Each year it bears interest and that interest bears interest. Start with $8 and with a 0.5% yield of interest annually you arrive at $7 billion after 1481 years. Plug and chug.
Human population growth (and historically well documented population declines for that matter), do not work at all in same way as compounding interest.