"We want to make clear that the existence of giant people [in ancient times] ... must be regarded as a scientifically certain fact." -- Louis Burkhalter, paleontologist, 1950
"Wherefore no one who considerately weighs facts will doubt that Cain might have built a city, and that a large one, when it is observed how prolonged were the lives of men, unless perhaps some sceptic take exception to this very length of years which our authors ascribe to the antediluvians and deny that this is credible. And so, too, they do not believe that the size of men's bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the same, when he speaks of that huge stone which had been fixed as a landmark, and which a strong man of those ancient times snatched up as he faught, and ran, and hurled, and cast it:
Scarce twleve strong men of later mouldthus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men. And if in the more recent times, how much more in the ages before the world-renowned deluge? But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchres, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found and rolled out. I, myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man's molar tooth of such size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature. And neither in our own age nor any other have there been altogether wanting instances of of gigantic stature, though they may be few. The younger Pliny, a most learned man, maintains that the older the world becomes, the smaller will be the bodies of men. And he mentions that Homer in his poems often lamented the same decline; and this he does not laugh at as a poetical figment, but in his character of a recorder of natural wonders accepts it as historically true. But, as I said, the bones which are from time to time discovered prove the size of the bodies of the ancients [See the account given by Herodotus (BK. I. 67) of the discovery of the bones of Orestes, which, as the story goes, gave a stature of seven cubits], and will do so to future ages, for they are slow to decay." -- St. Augustine, City of God, XV, 9
That weight could on their necks uphold,
There was no world-wide flood, and there is no such thing as "devolution" Only primitive forms, and forms derived from them.
ReplyDeleteIf a population of fish enters a cave, and the fish later find that they cannot escape back out into the light, they adapt to darkness, as sight is no longer selected for. Over thousands or millions of years, a total lack of eyes means that energy is funnelled to something other than sight. When humans find these populations, they find varying degrees of sightlessness, pigment fading and other adaptative radiations.
It's not devolution to get smaller, or lose sight, or have your forelimbs refashioned into flippers, if that's what the environment demands of your population. When a species adapts to the environment, we call that evolution. Say it slowly.
From ScienceDaily:
Worldwide, about 80 different species of cave-dwelling fish have evolved from surface-dwelling fish, but in most cases the surface-dwelling ancestor has disappeared. "The Mexican blind cavefish is one of the only cases where a similar ancestor still exists," explains Professor [William] Jeffery. "Except for the loss of eyes and pigment seen in the cave-dwelling form, the surface and cave-dwellers are hard to tell apart. You can study evolution very nicely if you have both the ancestral and derived forms of evolving animals." --ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2010)
I wish sometimes that you understood science instead of pretending to do so. Evolution is true, and wonderful and fascinating. It is also harsh, and uncaring and blind to its designs. Adapt or die. It's just that simple.
Hang on! Expanding Earth? How does this figure into your Expanding Earth Delusion?
ReplyDeleteLet me see... People were bigger in the past, so the gravity must have been less to allow for the larger frames of those folks living only a few thousand years ago.
Do you know how much the planet would have to grow to account for a change in gravity such as the one you are suggesting? Even if you do the math (and you never do the math, do you?), it does not square with all of the other evidence against such an idea.
Why should humans only be the ones to have gotten smaller? Elephants, bears, moose, horses (which have gotten bigger over time...Oops!) completely demolish this argument. Sorry for being all anagenetic about it, but why are there animals larger than humans if the planet is heavier now than just a few million years ago? At a constant-curve of density, a smaller planet has HIGHER GRAVITY (the same stuff in a smaller package). At some point with density/radius curves, you get so small and dense, or small and diffuse that the planet has too much air, or not enough, or...
I know, the earth HAS to have grown, it can't have accreted to a certain mass and then stopped. It just can't... cause then all of your bullshit "History" would be hogwash.