bluewaterrider
Senior Member
Originally posted by Robtard
The lion was a cute little story.
I was referring to the notion that all animals (including dinosaurs) liv[ed] in harmony in the Garden of Eden before the fall.
Does not follow logic ...6,000 year old Earth (also) spits in the face of logic ...
I'm not so certain about this.
Are you actually familiar with any of the theories that propose 6,000 year old Earth? One of the premises of almost all 6K models is a life/growth encouraging environment being stripped of nearly everything that made it so, and, arguably, a great deal of the full variety and richness by a cataclysmic world event.
Comparable, I suppose, to the great asteroid many posit struck Earth some 60 plus million years ago.
Except, of course, in the 6K model, whether that asteroid struck or not, the cataclysmic world event became known as the Great Flood.
None of us were there; presumably we don't have the ability to recreate exactly what happened or did not happen there, assuming that we'd even want to.
So we cannot actually reproduce the type of repeatable controlled experiments science formally calls for. We're rather left with playing detectives, relying on "forensic" evidence.
We theorize what occurred, construct a model of what should and should not have occurred given x and/or y and/or z, and see if we can fit new discoveries to that model, all the while examining whether our model is not so contradicted by what we find that we must change that model.
There are problems, though.
One is that we tend to assume that what we see today is not only the norm for everything we see today, but is ALSO the way things are supposed to run, and the way things were in the past, often without significant variation.
In another thread, for example, we discussed whether or not men in the past were more or less healthy than their modern counterparts.
Or rather, 2 other posters did. I don't remember now weighing in on the debate because I was only then searching for articles like the one I refer to here.
There's no real substitute for reading the article. I hope you'll do so. It is perhaps the equivalent of 2 pages in a book and should take no more than 5 to 7 minutes. Here is a brief excerpt that you might get one of the general drifts of my thought:
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" ... [W]hile farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s ...
... hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition ... today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life ..."
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http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Source: Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66.
Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School