The Trouble with Story Time
July
15, 2018
If you ever wondered why
so many people feel strongly opposed to Betsy DeVos and her education
philosophy, allow me to clarify the issue. Her campaign to allow private
schools to use public money – in the form of vouchers – allows them to skirt
any sort of regulation or minimum curriculum for competence. There are many who
feel this isn’t an issue because students from private schools generally score
higher on standardized testing than kids from public schools. Of course, those
statistics are greatly skewed by the fact that private schools get to
cherry-pick their students, so private populations almost never have kids from
broken homes, kids with learning disabilities, kids from lower-income families,
kids for whom English is a second language, kids with behavioral issues or any
kind of impediment to learning. In fact, many are culled from the best students
from public schools. This is like holding a race between a college sprinter and
Usain Bolt, only with Bolt (representing the private schools) starting at the
half-way point of the race. Gee, who do you think is going to win that race?
As with almost every
public service that the private sector claims it can do better and cheaper,
they are almost always wrong on both counts. But then again, I’m only looking at
building roads, providing security,
doing
scientific research, providing mail service, training pilots and developing
technology as my data sets. There are clearly some things that the private
sector does much better… like causing
environmental disasters.
But I digress...
This is the other problem
with allowing private schools to use public money: They
are teaching the Noah’s ark story not only as actual history, but as science as
well.
Seriously. So let’s look
at the merits of Noah as history and/or science.
Let’s start with the most
obvious. There are 8.7 million species on Earth, roughly 6.5 million are
land-based, 1-2 million of which are animals. That means if you put two of
every animal on Earth, you need space for between 2 and 3 million animals on a
wooden boat. Even if you dump all the insects - three quarters of all animal
species - that still leaves roughly half a million to three quarters of million
mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians to fit in a craft roughly the size of a
modern US Navy destroyer. If you’ve ever been on a destroyer (I have) you know that they aren’t
exactly roomy. What is interesting is that students from Department
of Physics and Astronomy at Leicester University did a thought experiment
and figured out that the ark as described in the Bible could handle about
70,000 animals. But that’s only 35,000 species. What about the other half
million plus? Did Noah make enough life jackets? Just the weight of half a million
animals would most certainly have sent the ark right straight to the bottom of
the ocean.
OK, so let’s say that Noah
only had to take types of animals rather than species of animals. So rather
than having to board with every type of gazelle (19 species) or bear (8
species) or finch (228 species), they only had to take two of each type. If you
believe that, then you have to also believe that after the boat ride they had
to evolve into the all the current species in less than 5000 years. That’s
problematic on two levels for biblical literalists (people who believe the
bible is the literal truth as both a historical document and as the scientific
instrument of God): 1) you have to acknowledge that evolution is real (which
many biblical literalists don’t) and 2) that it has to happen so fast that it
can utterly mutate a new species within a couple of generations. I’m not sure
what the population standard is for proclaiming that a creature is a completely
new species (as opposed to simply a mutant), but I’m pretty sure that number
has to be greater than four or five individuals. But assuming that God
mysteriously intervened after the ark landed and caused significant mutations
instantly, how long would it take to repopulate the planet?
Let’s use gazelles as our
model. Two gazelles would not only have to repopulate the Earth, but also
subdivide into 19 different species. The animals typically live 10-12 years,
producing one or two offspring every year. Some of those are going to die from
disease or predation. Females become reproductive in about 18 months, males it
takes up to three years to reach maturity. So assuming the first couple started
reproducing as soon as they got off the ark, and that all of subsequent
offspring were female except for one male who was born three years before the
alpha male died so that he could carry on the legacy in order to maximize the
population potential, the number of gazelles that existed in the world by the
time the first couple died would be 114, assuming they lived until the age of
12 and that all of their predators (cheetahs, lions, leopards, African hunting
dogs, jackals and hyenas) were satisfied with one kill per coupling per year.
That would produce some extremely skinny lions but let’s play it out anyway…
Then assuming that one new male was capable of carrying on and that all
subsequent offspring were female, even after two complete generations the total
number of gazelles would be only 34, 529. And that’s with that one male
servicing more than 13,000 females in his final year. The actual ratio of male
to female in gazelles is closer to four males for every five females so the
growth of population rate would be MUCH slower. And again, this assumes that
ALL of their predators would be content with just one kill per coupling per
year. I’m pretty sure a 500-pound lion eats more than one gazelle a year.
The current population of
Thomson’s gazelles is roughly 550, 000. Of course, the population used to be
much greater as human activity has reduced their number by 60% since 1975. So
if we’re trying to do an accurate accounting, they would need to produce nearly
a million and a half animals plus 18 other species (probably a total of eight
to ten million animals) in under 5000 years. At our maximum efficiency rate (1
male, all others female), it would take three complete generations to populate
the Earth with as many gazelles as there are. Of course, that last male would
be servicing 1.58 million females in his final year of life. Do they make
Viagra for gazelles? If the current male/female ratio were applied to the
original generation born after leaving the ark, and the death rate due to
disease, predators and other causes were as they currently are, it would take
tens of thousands of years to produce the millions of gazelles that inhabit the
Earth. Remember, the human population didn’t reach one million until about
10,000 BC and that’s with the genetic bottleneck at 70,000 BC (where only about
a thousand humans survived). Humans were also at or near the top of the food
chain, with longer lifespans and have much longer fertility spans. Gazelles
enjoy no such advantages and with only two coming off the ark they would be
hard-pressed to repopulate so quickly. So mathematically it’s possible only if
God intervened in both keeping them out of the mouths of predators, changing
the way they reproduce and keeping them free of disease and other causes of
death. Other than that, no problem.
OK, how about the
caretaking of the animals? The amount of
food they would need for 40 days would sink several arks. That food would of
course produce a commensurate amount of poop. The average elephant produces 300
pounds of poop every day. The average cow poops 15 times and produces 65 pounds
of it every day. With even only 70,000 animals on a boat (again, we are
forsaking the actual number of more than half a million), we are talking about
multiple tons of poop having to be scooped out every day. And the only people
on board doing it were Noah, his wife and six of his family. As for the food,
it’s hard to imagine what they could feed animals that only feed on other
animals. Manna, perhaps?
What about when they got
off the boat? Assuming predators started eating prey as soon as it was
available, why didn’t the lions just eat the gazelles as soon as they got off
the boat? Forty days without a real meal would make many species a little
cranky. And some species specifically and particularly prey on one and only one
other species. Did they give them a pass for a few more days to give them a
head start? I’m sorry, but we talking about nature here. Have you ever seen any
National Geographic or Richard Attenborough documentaries? Good sportsmanship is
a uniquely human characteristic when it comes to predator/prey, and even then
it is quite limited.
Then there’s the problem
of species from other continents getting there for the ride. How were the
kangaroos supposed to get there? Wombats? Koalas? Have you ever seen a koala
walk on the ground? They are slow, awkward and wobbly. I can’t imagine they’d
be too much more graceful swimming across the Indian Ocean in order to trek
across
Maybe God airlifted all
the foreign animals there. If you’ve ever flown with a pet, you already know
how terrified they get, and that’s with walls surrounding them. But maybe he
could give them a holy sedative. Of course, transporting them requires that
they obey the laws of physics. Otherwise they could fall apart, suffocate from the
altitude or be severely damaged by the buffeting en route. And if the trip
takes a long time, God has to figure out how to feed them while they are in the
air. But if He could simply transport them there, then why did Noah have to
build a boat? God could have just suspended everything He wanted to save above
the clouds giving them manna snacks until the flood subsided. I mean, if you’re
going to suspend all reality, why not go all the way? Or why not transport them
to heaven and then transport them back after the ruckus is over? In fact, why
didn’t He do that in the first place – just transport Noah and his family to
heaven for a few days, blow up Earth and build a new one. After all, the first Earth
only took six days to make. Actually, it was the entire universe He built in
six days. Earth just took one. So He just wasted 39 days with a stupid flood.
Some species have
subsequently gone extinct in the last 5000 years due to many causes, but
primarily man. Since God supposedly knows the future, why didn’t he just eliminate
those before the flood (or with the flood) in order to conserve space? I would
much rather have had unicorns around than dodo birds. What was He thinking?!
Did Noah also put aquatic
species on the ark? Turtles? Otters? Seals and sea lions? They require both
water and land. How did that work? Were aquatic animals exempted from the
pairing down? Did Noah also have to fit two dolphins and two orcas and two blue
whales on board? Did he have Scotty beam some transparent aluminum onto the ark
to build enclosures for his sea-born refugees?
There is no archeological
evidence to support a world-wide flood within the last billion or so years.
There is one guy (Robert Ballard) who claims that there is underwater evidence
for a flood in the Middle East perhaps 5000 years ago, but it was localized
around the
But even if it were due to
the mother of all rainstorms, meteorologically speaking how would that even
work? Supposedly, the flood lasted for 40 days and 40 nights but newer
translations imply that the word was actually one that meant “a really long
time”. Highest recorded annual rainfall in a year is 467 inches (39 feet) over
a year. But that wouldn’t be enough to reach the tallest trees, some of which
live on mountains which happen to be 10,000+ feet high. I imagine smart people
would take the cue to move up there once the waters got reasonably high. Oh, and
by they way, what did the trees do to deserve getting wiped out by a flood?
There is no way grass and trees could survive a global flood because they need lots
of sunlight and carbon dioxide, neither of which are found in abundance in sea
water deep enough to cover the Earth. They would have all suffocated. There
would be no plant life after such a flood. Did the gazelle’s suddenly develop
an appetite for mud, then evolve back into grass-eaters? There we go again with
evolution. So did God also rain down organic nutrition bars for everyone to eat
for the next six months afterward while the grass and trees grew back?
Anyway, the heaviest
rainfall in 24 hours was 71.8 inches, roughly six feet of rain in 1966. But
that was only in one place on an island in the
Also, since olive trees
can’t grow in cold weather climates, the branch that the dove brought back had
to come from a tree that grew at a lower elevation than
Couldn’t God have been
more precise with his punishment? He’s got lightning already, or is that only
Greek, Roman and Norse gods? He can turn bad people into pillars of salt.
Wouldn’t that be more efficient and more dramatic? I mean, he wouldn’t even
have to kill all the people, just the most wicked. Wasn’t that the whole point
of the flood? That would also send a much clearer message. Mobsters and
villains would be publicly crispified/saltified while bakers, farmers and
weavers would be spared. Just another thought – its hard to teach people the
lesson you want them to learn when they are dead. Just saying. And did all
those killed by the flood go to Hell? If some of them managed to sneak into
Heaven, there again, the whole point of the flood has been lost.
And there’s yet another
problem with the story: decay. Killing everything would leave a lot of dead
bodies which would probably become diseased. That begs another question: did
only two types of each bacteria survive too? In which case, how did they break
down all those bodies? It would have taken hundreds of years for them to
replicate enough world-wide in order to break down the bodies of the dead from
the flood. And if they only used the bacteria already inside, then disease surely
would have become a problem. So God either gave everyone immunity to disease
(which makes me wonder who was the wise-ass who blew that deal for the rest of
us) or He started making tougher diseases. Either way, the moral mathematics
doesn’t quite add up.
OK, so maybe there are other
possibilities that might explain the story. What if Noah had a shrink ray? Or a
freeze ray so he could just stack the animals like boxes for 40 days? Or maybe
he had embryos or babies of every species that he and his family nursed to
adulthood. Of course, he destroyed the tech afterward because what possible
application could there be for a shrink ray or a freeze ray or incubating
equipment? Pshh.
And only now are we
getting to the part that is most absurd. That’s the part where these private
schools are teaching that Noah had baby dinosaurs on board. Take a moment. And
now understand that they are also including the Loch Ness monster in that group,
which they acknowledge was probably a plesiosaur. Just so we’re clear, evidence
of dinosaurs wasn’t discovered until the 19th century. Yet Noah had
them on board and no one in the Bible thought it was noteworthy that there should
be 20-foot tall meat-eaters roaming about the Earth. Even in the modern age we
live in, lions, hippos and crocodiles kill hundreds of people every year.
Gustav, a giant
One last flourish on the
topic: The flood happens pretty early in the bible so it’s possible that Noah
remembered everything important that had happened before. And maybe that’s why
there’s not much story about what happened after Cain slew Abel although they
did mention Adam and Eve had another son, Seth, but no mention of any
daughters. Not sure how that carried on. There’s also a mention of Nephalim, a
race of giants or fallen angels, depending on the translation that were the
offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men… where the daughters came
from, there is no indication. Regardless, there has never been a fossil finding
of men who were so large they made others look like grasshoppers (not my words:
the Bible’s - Numbers, Chapter 13). Anyways, Noah would have had to either
memorize all this and write it down after the trip, or carry the records of everything
that had happened before his was born on board. Otherwise, it would have been
destroyed by the flood. That includes both creation myths. Both, you may ask?
Oh yes. In one, Elohim (God) creates Earth and the universe in six days, with the
creation of Adam and Eve on the sixth. In the other story, God has a new name
(Yahweh) and he creates Adam and Eve (on the fourth day), then places them on
Earth in the Garden of Eden. Throughout the first five books the stories often
come with two versions. Moses and the commandments, for example. In one, his
brother Aaron is responsible for the creation of the golden calf, in the other
he’s just a helpless onlooker. But I digress…
The point is that taking
anything about the ark story as history or as scientific is not only
wrong-headed, but dangerous. If people start believing such utter nonsense as
factual, they might also be subject to believing the lies and mis-directions of
a feckless conman, and mistakenly vote him into a position of power. Oh wait…
I am not saying people
shouldn’t believe in religion. There is much value in a spiritual life. What I
am saying, however, is that people should use what is known as a tool to
analyze the stories of religion and parse which ones are allegory and which
ones are an attempt by ancient people to explain things they didn’t understand.
Some of these, maybe even a lot of these, we do understand now. Anyone who
tries to make these stories something more than that undermines the wisdom
contained within. Don’t believe me? Ok. If I were to say to you that a truly
enlightened person treats others the way they themselves would like to be
treated, you might say, hey, that sounds pretty good. That’s pretty profound.
But if I follow it up by saying that I command an army of flying monkeys that
take refuge inside my butt, then you will probably dismiss the first thing I
said, seeing as it came from someone who is clearly insane. Maybe I am. But it
hasn’t been proven. These other things… have been.