Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown.
Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other material.
Why Did People Live for about 900 Years before the Flood?
Life spans suddenly began decreasing after the flood, at least for the patriarchs whose ages are listed in the Bible. [See Figures 209 and 210.] This “ski slope” type of decline (called an exponential decay) is one that every engineer and scientist sees frequently. It occurs when a system moves from a balanced, equilibrium situation toward a suddenly produced, lower equilibrium state.
Figure 210: Declining Postflood Longevity. Notice the sudden downward trend in postflood life spans after of the flood. This type of downward declining curve (an exponential decay) strongly suggests that man’s environment underwent a drastic change which reduced human life spans.
Many people have speculated on the cause of this decrease, but few proposals fit all the following facts. The decline:
Some say the decline in life spans was caused by a “genetic bottleneck.” Yes, a genetic bottleneck occurred at the flood. However, Shem avoided that bottleneck, because his genetics were fixed at his conception, a century earlier. Yet, his drop in longevity was the greatest of all the patriarchs listed in Figure 210. We also see genetic bottlenecks (a) in pioneering families or other small groups that live in isolation for generations, and (b) in hundreds of breeding experiments with different animals. But to my knowledge, nothing similar to an exponential decay in their life spans has been observed.
While genetics certainly plays a role, it is not as large as some may imagine. Identical human twins who die of natural causes typically die more than 10 years apart. “Two studies of human twins attribute most (>65%) of the variance to non-shared environmental factors.”3 Genetically identical laboratory animals give similar surprising results.
Unfortunately, proposals that do fit these facts cannot be tested experimentally, including mine. However, the flood events I have already described fit all of these facts and would automatically and greatly reduce longevity.
A previous frequently-asked question (pages 431–434) concerns radiocarbon dating and the rapid buildup of carbon-14 beginning at the flood. As explained in “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” (pages 337–382), during the flood, powerful electrical (piezoelectric) currents inside the fluttering crust released small, but significant, amounts of carbon-14. Also produced were a few thousand other new isotopes—chemical elements that were unusually light (or heavy) because they had fewer (or more) than the normal number of neutrons.
To illustrate what contributed to some extent to decreased life spans after the flood, let’s first consider carbon-14—just one of these few thousand new isotopes. A different aging mechanism will then be given for all the other isotopes produced during the flood.
Imagine a man weighing 160 pounds (72,575 grams). About 18% of his body (by mass) is carbon. Every 12 grams of carbon contains 6.022 × 1023 carbon atoms. One carbon atom out of a trillion (1012) is carbon-14. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years. When carbon-14 decays, it becomes nitrogen-14. Therefore, a 160-pound person experiences 2,500 carbon-14 disintegrations every second!
Note: There are 31,556,736 seconds in a year, and the number 0.693 (-ln 0.5) converts half-lives to rates of decay.
What happens when carbon-14 atoms in your body suddenly decay in a random manner and become nitrogen? It’s not good. Those atoms bond differently with other tissues, producing distortion (or wrinkling) at the atomic level. Also, if any carbon in your DNA or RNA suddenly becomes nitrogen, the affected genes may not work properly. Both effects age you very slightly every second, with clocklike precision, but which organs finally break down or become diseased will depend partially on the genetics you inherited. The negative exponential curve in Figure 210 is a mirror image of the positive exponential curve (line C) in Figure 208 on page 431. Did that postflood carbon-14 increase cause decreased longevity? Perhaps.
What about the few thousand other new isotopes produced during the flood that slowly worked their way into the biosphere over the centuries?1 Those isotopes sometimes produce defective proteins in trillions of your cells. Here’s why. Most cells in your body contain tens of thousands of ribosomes—absolutely amazing and complex manufacturing plants that produce your body’s proteins. The new isotopes you eat, drink, and inhale are sometimes incorporated into amino acids that are brought into your ribosomes and hooked together (according to the instructions in your DNA) into long chains. When that chain exits a ribosome, the electrical charges on the chain fold it in multiple ways simultaneously. That tight, very specific, three-dimensional shape determines what the protein will do in your body. If the protein misfolds—due to light (or heavy) isotopes that either speed up (or slow down) a particular fold—the protein will be defective and an organ in your body might suffer. These defects build up over time, so your proteins steadily, but imperceptibly, degrade. An animation of this complex folding process in a bacterium can be seen at:
www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/ribo/homepage/moves/translation_bacterial.mov
Every second, isotopes produced during the flood are slowly aging us at the atomic scale; therefore, our organs deteriorate. Which of the thousands of new isotopes are the chief culprits (mild poisons) and what mechanisms and repair systems play a role are open questions.
Scientists are starting to recognize some of this. For example, Dr. Thomas Kirkwood, Director of Aging and Health at Newcastle University in England, writes:
Many scientists believe that the aging process is caused by the gradual buildup of a huge number of individually tiny faults—some damage to a DNA strand here, a deranged protein molecule there, and so on. This degenerative buildup means that the length of our lives is regulated by the balance between how fast new damage strikes our cells and how effectively this damage is corrected. The body’s mechanisms to maintain and repair our cells are wonderfully effective—which is why we live as long as we do—but these mechanisms are not perfect. Some of the damage passes unrepaired and accumulates as the days, months and years pass by. We age because our bodies keep making mistakes.
We might well ask why our bodies do not repair themselves better. Actually we probably could fix damage better than we do already. In theory at least, we might even do it well enough to live forever.4
In addition to asking “why our bodies do not repair themselves better,” we should ask why our cellular machinery started malfunctioning.
- The new isotopes (heavy or light) produced during the flood are mixed with all that we eat, drink, and breathe. On rare occasions, these “strange isotopes” interfere with our very complex cellular machinery. (Such disruptions during the first few generations after the flood may have produced different characteristics in the various created kinds—microevolution.)
- At the atomic level, this damage accumulates in a somewhat random manner, even among identical twins, because the “strange isotopes” that we take into our bodies become “bullets” in tiny but rapid versions of “Russian roulette.” The potential damage during each roulette game is extremely small; however, we each play thousands of games a second. We, and all living things, are slowly aging.5 But aging is qualitatively different from radiation damage which produces deformities and lack of fitness.