Life Compression, Five Million Starfish, and a Young Earth?
A fun thought exercise in logic and critical thinking. How much life can earth simultaneously support?
Life is estimated to have started on this planet around 4 billion years ago.
That's a long time. It's hard to even fully grasp that length of time.
A little over half a billion years ago there was a period called the Cambrian Explosion. This was the rapid diversification and expansion of life into much more complex forms.
Still though, half a billion years? How does one even begin to think about that length of time?
The evidence is a big problem for Young Earth Creationists (YEC) in every possible way, but the specific way I want to focus on here is that of life compression.
Life compression is where YEC's must take half a billion years of complex life and squeeze it all into just 6,000 years. That's about 0.001% of the original length of time.
Let's look at an example to help illustrate why this is such a logically problematic position.
The earth has probably hosted at least ~one quadrillion starfish over roughly half a billion years. (This is likely a massive under-count of starfish, but let's be generous) In the YEC model, those one quadrillion starfish must have had to live solely during a 6,000 year time span.
As you can probably forsee, this comes with a big problem. The resources (food and habitat) for starfish are only so large.
If YEC is true, there would be an increase in the density of the living starfish population by around 100,000 over what the old earth model suggests.
Starfish Density
Let's make this more understandable. Let's say that the ocean floor has about 50 Starfish per square mile on average at any one time.
Under the YEC model, that same ocean would now need to simultaneously support 5 million starfish per square mile for the evidence to fit within just a 6,000 year period.
That's pretty far-fetched right? Do you think we can go take a look right now and find 5 million starfish per square mile in our ocean? Is there even enough food within that square mile to support 5 million starfish?
Now let's think of all the sea life that lives on the ocean floor. Slugs, snails, crabs, urchins, worms, sea cucumbers, corals, etc. Multiply all of that by 100,000.
Whoa.
Is there even physically enough ocean floor for that all to fit without creatures having to literally live on top of one another?
Although later life forms will have a lower multiplier, we can do the exact same thing for every plant, every bug, every ocean creature, every land animal, bird, and insect.
You wind up with an earth that physically cannot even come close to supporting this. The sheer quantity of simultaneous life necessary to make Young Earth Creationism fit the evidence is plainly impossible.
A Failed Apologetic
Apologists might say things like "well we don't have that many fossils, so we'll only count the fossilized creatures towards that total number."
They say this to get out of their predicament, but it doesn't work. Clearly many creatures were eaten. That's undeniable. Then another massive chunk simply didn't get fossilized. It is highly unlikely for any creature to wind up becoming a fossil, as the perfect storm of factors required is extremely uncommon.
This rarity of fossilization cannot be logically explained as only occurring during the flood either, as that was only around one year in length. This rarity is acknowledged even by Young Earth Creation apologists.
It is an impossible argument then to appeal to only those fossilized creatures as the sole 1:1 record of all past life.
Waste
Next up, consider the vast quantity of bio-waste generation that would occur with an earth that highly populated. Literally, just think of the sheer volume of shit that would be generated.
Could the earth's microbiome support such an immense undertaking?
Disease
Yet another thing to consider with the YEC proposal is disease. (I mean…animal excrement is everywhere, so it's a natural concern 😅)
Every living thing suffers from disease, even plants. We know that the more densely packed life becomes, the more easily disease spreads.
This compressed-life scenario would be ripe for any disease to tear across the globe, decimating entire species. It simply defies basic common sense.
Even More Compression
The last thing I want you to consider is the YEC division of modern vs prehistoric species.
YEC apologists will say that all these strange and weird species that the old earth model says lived millions of years ago, had to have lived before the flood. It was the flood that wiped them out, and that's why we see no records of them in modern history.
This "strange and weird" list includes dinosaurs, large prehistoric birds like the Dromornis, and the Carboniferous period's gigantic bugs. (Those bugs will give you nightmares)
All of these creatures must, in the YEC model, live in only a ~1,600-year period between creation and the flood.
Now we have all of this pre-modern life that must live in just that 1,600 year period. That means our compression is actually much worse during these 1,600 years!
Keep in mind humans are supposed to be proliferating like gangbusters during this time period too. Right alongside, and perhaps literally rubbing shoulders with, the T-Rex, the Dromornis, the Saber-tooth tiger, etc.
This planet simply cannot support the quantity of life needed to allow all past-lived life to be compressed into such an incredibly short timeframe.
A Failed Model
This thought exercise brings me to the logical conclusion of...well...logic itself I guess.
If you had a scale that kept spitting out incorrect and inconsistent numbers, you’d throw it away.
If you had a weather channel that literally never once got anything right, you’d stop watching it.
If you had a neighbor who kept predicting the outcome of sporting events, but was never once correct, you’d quit listening to him.
If you had a tax man that kept incorrectly calculating and predicting your tax return, you’d get a different tax man.
If you had a doctor that kept incorrectly diagnosing your issues and predicting your course of recovery, you’d get a different doctor.
This is Young Earth Creationism.
It’s the same thing.
Young Earth Creationism never correctly predicts anything. It always needs work.
It just never nicely fits with what we find in the real world. If it wasn't attached to the Bible, this would have been discarded ages ago simply due to being such a poor predictive model.
Quit trying to force this square peg into the round hole of reality. That’s not giving up on God. That’s embracing the ancient wisdom of common sense.
I guess it fits nicely with a specific interpretation of the Bible. So, there's that.
This thought exercise is simple. It is a very basic way you can objectively discard the idea of Young Earth Creationism as simply untrue.
The crazy thing is it doesn't need to be true for God to be real. If you've been told or feel otherwise, you are living under a false dilemma fallacy. I'm so sorry. That must be awful.
If God created life, and designed human cognition and intellect, it would want us to actually employ those abilities. It would not require us to abandon our divinely given mental faculties in pursuit of maintaining the plausibility of a historically-literal interpretation of a very human book.
This logic doesn't require one be highly degreed to understand. It doesn't require one be a scientist. It doesn't require a background in biology or a statistics class.
A YEC must have an incredibly anxious lifestyle. To always live in defense mode and have to go seek out the apologetic smoke screen to obscure reality must be exhausting. At any turn you may (and will) encounter real-world contradictory evidence.
I'm too tired for that. Aren't you?
Peace
Thanks for writing this. The biomass problem is just one of the many, many scientific and intellectual gymnastics that YEC needs to perform.
How did you come by your starfish estimate? It strikes me as somewhat arbitrary/possibly circular