Population Numbers: Something is not right here.

reply to post by ProfEmeritus


If I am standing 10 feet away from you holding a golf ball in my hand and you are at the opposite end of the 10 foot length holding 512 golf balls, who has more golf balls?

Don't you indeed have 512 golf balls to my 1 forward or backwards?

Peace

Originally posted by Rumpelstiltskin

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
...by looking at "only you", and working back, you ignore the heavy degree of merging of family trees as you go back.

Incest, if that's what you mean by “merging”, was raised before in this thread, but I'm not sure why it should make a difference. Isn't the opposite true? That is, wouldn't merging or incest make a difference only to counting back from 6 billion and not from one?

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
The population of the world at any one time is dependent upon the following factors:

-average life expectancy of males
-average life expectancy of females
-average number of children per woman
-percentage of population that are women
-average growth rate
-death rate expressed as number of deaths/given fixed number

All of these points seem (please note “seem”) like they fall into the same trap that everyone else who misunderstood the question did. In counting back from just one, are we not just counting the number of progenitors (not whole population) needed in the past for one person to be present today?

Why should any of the above factors impede the progress of counting the number of progenitors needed for one person to be alive today?

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
Another faulty assumption that you are implicitly making (probably without realizing it)...

Why do you say “probably” without realizing it? Why would anyone want to make a 'conscious' faulty assumption about a subject like this?

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
...another faulty assumption that your logic makes(again, probably without you realizing it) is that this is one homogeneous group of people, all available to each other, for procreation. In reality, population groups are isolated from each other, and thus, the starting numbers for any group remain small for a much longer time interval. With many smaller subgroups(as opposed to one large group), plagues, inbreeding, wars, etc have a much greater influence on the rate of growth, than do those factors for one large group.

I think most of the above was granted before your post, and the question of how long did we have to interbreed was posed, although I guess the second question would be a lot harder to answer than the first, if possible at all.

War, natural disaster, life expectancy, birth rate, famine, plague, pestilence, etc, none of these things should impede counting progenitors needed for one, as far as I can tell. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but please allow that no one in this thread should have any reason to make a faulty assumption, consciously.


[edit on 17-1-2009 by Rumpelstiltskin]

[edit on 17-1-2009 by Rumpelstiltskin]

YES thank you, you understand what I'm saying. People are confusing links and all of these things, but I am strictly talking numbers in comparison not added up with exact times and numbers of siblings. I am the only one I am concerned with reconciling, or you or any one person in reference to the number of like descendent's it took to make 1.

By the 10th generation, numbers start going haywire.
10th = 512/1
11th = 1024/1
12th = 2048/1
13th = 4096/1
14th = 8192/1

It only takes a 1000 years and the earth in no way could have contained the people.

Thanks again,

Peace

reply to post by letthereaderunderstand

I am the only one I am concerned with reconciling, or you or any one person in reference to the number of like descendent's it took to make 1.

That is the problem. You cannot look at just one person, take those numbers, then extrapolate that person's ancestral numbers, and then conclude that if one person had X precedents, then 6 billion must have 6 billion times that one person's precedents, because although YOUR single-person methodology results in a large number, multiple people today have many of the ancestors in common. In fact, as you go back in time, you will find less people, because,as I tried to explain earlier, of the merging of ancestral trees. Merging occurs when several related people from family A marry related people from family B. As I also explained, fertility rates, death rates, etc. all go into determining whether populations grow or decline. In recorded history, since census figures have been kept, the world population has been doubling, at varying rates.It DOESN'T matter how long it it takes, as long as the population doubles at some point, and continues that trend, then the geometric series results in the numbers I indicated earlier. The number of current generation humans will be greater than the total number of all previous generations.

Did you ever try to trace your family tree? If you go back far enough, you will find many famous people in your family tree, as will most people. That is because we have common ancestors. In fact, today, you can get a special DNA test that will tell you exactly where your ancestors came from in the ancient world. That is because we eventually all go back to the same family.

I don't wish to get into the mathematics of this in detail, but statistics show that if you go around 30 generations, odds are that virtually anyone alive on earth 30 generations ago, is a relative of yours, that is, they are in your family tree.

If you are interested in seeing the full flaw of your logic, I suggest a site such as this:

members.optusnet.com.au...

reply to post by ProfEmeritus


I do thank you. I will check out your link.

I fully understand what you are saying, I really do. I understand the crossing of lines, the siblings, the 6 billion at once not adding up, I see this very clearly I believe.

I'm not talking about ANY of that. I am speaking in ratio, using only 1 individual reproduction of two individuals. 2 parents to 1 child. It is all hypothetical. I'm not trying to break science, I am just doing simple math based on a 2 to 1 ratio.

So do you have more golf balls or not? if you came in a pace, and I didn't move being fixed you now have 256. Still way more then my 1.

Do you understand your logic? The only way what you are talking about would work is if you fictionalized the people going backwards to make less, but they were whole people not percentages or fractions.

I'm not trying to argue with you and am truly trying to see this. I will see your link and I thank you.

Take care, ltru

Originally posted by slackerwire
The planet is already overpopulated, a reduction is needed.

Not a pleasant thought, but its called reality.

Wrong. The entire population of the EARTH has been proven to be able to fit inside of Duval County Florida. The population isn't the problem it's the pollution and industrialization that needs to be evolved past the current standard.

reply to post by letthereaderunderstand

I'm not talking about ANY of that. I am speaking in ratio, using only 1 individual reproduction of two individuals. 2 parents to 1 child. It is all hypothetical. I'm not trying to break science, I am just doing simple math based on a 2 to 1 ratio. So do you have more golf balls or not? if you came in a pace, and I didn't move being fixed you now have 256. Still way more then my 1. Do you understand your logic? The only way what you are talking about would work is if you fictionalized the people going backwards to make less, but they were whole people not percentages or fractions.

OK, let me try to explain it using the fact that it takes 2 people to make 1.
If every couple in the world had only one offspring, I think we all would agree that the population would decrease, correct?

OK, now let's assume every couple had exactly two children. Assuming an equal number of male & female, and assuming that everyone lives past reproductive age, no accidents, etc. The population would stay stable, correct?

Now let's assume that each couple has exactly 4 children, again with the above assumptions. I think we would agree that the population would double each generation, correct?


Now, of course, those assumptions are not correct. A higher or lower reproductive rate would affect how the population grows or even decreases, as would number of women who are fertile, their health, their fertility, the death rates, and all the other factors that I discussed in an earlier post. So far, ok?

Now, we know that the population has been doubling recently, but at varying rates. In the past, it took hundreds of years to double, while recently the number of years to double has decreased drastically.

Now, here is the crucial point. It doesn't matter HOW LONG it takes to double, the math is still sound.

Let's just assume, for purposes of simplicity(I promise that this assumption will not affect the math) that mankind started with 2 people, a man and a woman.

Regardless of how long it takes to double, we know that 2 becomes 4, which becomes 8, which becomes 16, etc.

This is a simple geometric series (2,4,8,16,32,64,128....)

A geometric series is a series of numbers which increase by a fixed ratio, in this case the ratio is 2. That is, the next number in the series is always 2 times the previous number.

The total number of people who have ever lived(assume you are now living in the generation of the 128 people-the latest generation) prior to that generation is:

2 + 4 + 8 +16 + 32 + 64 = 126 which is 2 less than the current generation.
That is, all previous generations together do not equal the number of people in the current generation, no matter how many times you double it. In fact, for this series, as you can quickly see, by taking a few examples, the sum of all previous generations put together will always be 2 less than the total of the current generation.

Notice that nowhere in the calculations does the time it takes to double come into the calculations.

In case you are interested, the general formula for the sum of a geometric series is:

SUM(N1,N2....NX) = N1*(1 - R**X)/(1-R)

where N1 is the first number in the series, R is the ratio of increase(or decrease) of each number in the series, and X is the number of members in the series.
(R**X means R raised to the xth power)
In our case above, if we want to know the total number of people who lived up to and including generation 6(the generation that has 64 people)

SUM(2,4,8,16,32,64) = 2*(1-2**6)/(1-2) = 2*(1-64)/(1-2) =2*(-63)*(-1)=126

I hope I have explained this to your satisfaction.

Cheers.

reply to post by letthereaderunderstand

So just going back 10 generations, there HAD to be 512 people to get to my 1

Here is what I have learned about this problem:

Ancestors from different lines are not necessarily unique as pairing of relatives could allow for less than the upper bound of 2^(n-1) ancestors in the nth generation (assuming the first generation is oneself); for example, the ratio could be 510:1 in the 10th generation if there are two cousins in the 8th generation. This is known as pedigree collapse [1].

A way to visualize this is to follow two lines on a family tree; going back far enough these lines will intersect at a common ancestor. These intersections cause a divergence from the geometric progression 2^(n-1) and eventually the tree collapses to an identical ancestors point which for the current world population is estimated to be between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago [2,3] with a population between < 1 million and 25 million [4,5].

Here is a recursive procedure to calculate the number of ancestors in the nth generation:

numAncestors(descendant, n)
if descendant.visited == true return 0
descendant.visited = true
if n == 1 return 1
return numAncestors(descendant->mother, n-1) + numAncestors(descendant->father, n-1)

As seen in this procedure, common ancestors result in some parents not being counted for a given generation i.e. pedigree collapse. If the theory of evolutionary common descent is correct then for large enough n (which depends on the variable rate of pedigree collapse) the tree collapses to the last universal ancestor or to an ancestral gene pool [1].

[edit on 25-1-2009 by tmk81]

Originally posted by slackerwire
The planet is already overpopulated, a reduction is needed.

Not a pleasant thought, but its called reality.

If you took every single person on the planet and put them in Texas,
everyone would have over 1,000 square feet.

Texas

268,820 square miles = 7,494,271,488,000 sq. ft.

The over population myth springs from writings from ppl from the
Club of Rome, or Committee of 300.

One book, Limits to Growth, was written by one of their so called
scholars and is their blueprint for what they plan for us.

They want 6.2 billion ppl off their ride.

Ppl who have not travelled the Earth have no idea just how big it
really is, and the real issue is we do not live in harmony with it.

We need sustainability, and we need to drop fossil fuels.

Thousands of Tera-watts from the sun everyday

We do not need expensive photo voltaics, we can use Solar thermal
like these ppl are already using.

350 Mega-watt thermal solar power plant

We also have wind power to help the load at night.

We have underwater currents that are massive.

Shrouded passive turbines would not silt in like barrage designs.

We can tap geothermal heat that is present at all times.

Geo Thermal Power

Micro Hydro is also starting to get a lot more attention:

Micro Hydro Power Generation

All of this combined would free us from fossil fuels and make
more than enough power for much more ppl than we have now.

The next thing we need is food, and for that we can simply
go primarily vegetarian.

Once the oceans recover we can add back in some fish.

Vertical Hydroponics as displayed by Valcent Technologies would
grow all the food we need in a very small area.

Some other resources are running low, but that is because we have
a poor almost nonexistent recycle policy.

All the so called scarcity is artificial and is there as a control mechanism.

Keeping the rabbit population down is the law in Australia.

Rabbit population explosion kept at bay by disease

We could feed the whole world just on rabbits if we gave them the
medicine for their well known diseases.

[edit on 25-1-2009 by Ex_MislTech]