1. If the life spans of the postflood patriarchs (recorded in the Bible) had been mistranslated, randomly selected, or made up by someone with no knowledge of higher mathematics, a linear fit would be much more likely than an exponential decay.
Why was Noah’s life span apparently unaffected by the postflood environment? For the first 600 years of his life, Noah did not live in the postflood environment. Only during the flood did the fluttering crust produce the harmful isotopes. It took many years for them to work their way into the biosphere and the food, water, and air we take into our bodies. Then, more years were required for sufficient damage to build up in Noah’s already mature organs.
2. Some say a canopy, which shielded the earth from deadly radiation, collapsed during the flood, so lifespans decreased. If that were true, people living today at lower elevations and higher latitudes would be shielded by more atmosphere and should live longer. That is not the case. [See “Drop in Longevity” on page 518.]
3. Caleb E. Finch and Rudolph E. Tanzi, “Genetics of Aging,” Science, Vol. 278, 17 October 1997, pp. 407–411.
4. Consider a person weighing 160 pounds (72,575 grams). About 18% of that individual’s mass is carbon. Every 12 grams of carbon contains 6.022 × 1023 (Avogadro’s number) carbon atoms. One carbon atom out of a trillion (1012 ) is carbon-14 which has a half-life of 5,730 years. When carbon-14 decays, it becomes nitrogen-14. Therefore, a 160-pound human experiences 2,500 carbon-14 disintegrations every second !
Note: There are 31,556,736 seconds in a year, and 0.693 (the natural logarithm of 2) converts half-lives to rates of decay.
5. “The rates of disintegration of potassium-40 and carbon-14 in the normal adult body are comparable (a few thousand disintegrated nuclei per second).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14.
6. Lifespans in Figure 249 are based on the Hebrew (Masoretic) text. The Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch texts show a similar exponential decay, although the cumulative ages differ significantly.
| Time Span (years) |
Hebrew |
Samaritan |
Septuagint |
|---|---|---|---|
| From Adam to the Flood |
1656 |
1307 |
2242 |
| From the Flood to Abraham |
290 |
940 |
1070 |
See Walter Russell Bowie, “The Book of Genesis,” The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (New York: Abingdon Press, 1952), p. 143.
7. “Every living cell contains millions of these complex structures [ribosomes].” Georgina Ferry, “From Ribosome to Royal Society,” Nature, Vol. 561, 6 September 2018, p. 32.
u “You could pack four thousand [ribosomes] in the width of a human hair. There were thousands of them in every cell, from bacteria to humans.” Venki Ramakrishnan, Gene Machine (New York: Basic books, 2018), p. 14.
8. “AD [Alzheimer’s disease] is therefore commonly characterized as a protein-misfolding disease.” Sabrina Pospich and Stefan Raunser, “The Molecular Basis of Alzheimer’s Plaques,” Science, Vol. 358, 6 October 2017, 45.
9. Alice Park, “Most Cancer Is Out of Our Control,” Time, 19 January 2015, p. 22.
u Christian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein, “Variation in Cancer Risk among Tissues Can Be Explained by the Number of Stem Cell Divisions,” Science, Vol. 347, 2 January 2015, pp. 78–81.
u Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, “The Bad Luck of Cancer,” Science, Vol. 347, 2 January 2015, p. 12.
10. “The maximum-likelihood time for accelerated growth [of these rare mutations (coding variations)] was 5115 years ago.” Jacob A. Tennessen et al., “Evolution and Functional Impact of Rare Coding Variations from Deep Sequencing of Human Exomes,” Science, Vol. 337, 6 July 2012, p. 67.
Note: 2012 A.D. is the date of the above quote. Therefore,
2012 A.D. - 5115 = 3103 B.C.
u “Large-scale surveys of human genetic variation have reported signatures of recent explosive population growth, notable for an excess of rare genetic variants, suggesting that many mutations arose recently. ... accelerated population growth began 5,115 years ago.” Wenqing Fu et al., “Analysis of 6,515 Exomes Reveals the Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-Coding Variants,” Nature, Vol. 493, 10 January 2013, p. 216.
This second study by a different group confirmed the results of that by Tennessen et al., but base it on a much larger sample—6,515 individuals.
u Alon Keinan and Andrew G. Clark, “Recent Explosive Human Population Growth Has Resulted in an Excess of Rare Genetic Variants,” Science, Vol. 336, 11 May 2012, pp. 740–743.
11. Thomas Kirkwood, “Why Women Live Longer,” Scientific American, Vol. 303, November 2010, p. 35.
12. Aging is not the same as our 20 years or so of development from conception to maturity, so the time required to become a mature adult has probably not changed too much. Therefore, people living before the flood spent a much greater percentage of their lives as productive, mature adults than we who live after the flood. Indeed, Noah had children after he was 500 years old. [See Genesis 5:32.]
13. Susan Milius, “Aging’s Wild Side,” Science News, Vol. 190, 23 July 2016, p.26–30.