How does noahs ark end

And God remembered Noah and the animals on the Ark. The waters receded and the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat Genesis —5. After sending out a raven, Noah sent out a dove to see if there was dry ground. But it came back having found nowhere to perch. After seven days, Noah sent it back out and it came back with a fresh olive leaf in its mouth.

And Noah knew the ground was drying Genesis — And bring the animals with you so they can be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Then Noah built an altar and offered burnt offerings to the Lord on it. I agree to the current Privacy Policy. You're almost done! Please follow the instructions we emailed you in order to finish subscribing. An attraction of Answers in Genesis. All rights reserved. But this was for vessels that were dinghies compared to the ark, and this skill emerged slowly over many centuries: nearly a millennium passed while Egyptian boat lengths increase from to feet Casson, p.

Despite this, the craft remained a prescientific art, acquired through long years of apprenticeship and experience, and disasters at sea due to faulty design were so persistent that the impetus was strong for a more scientific approach Rawson and Tupper, p. Obviously, the astronomical leap in size, safety, and skill required by Noah is far too vast for any naturalistic explanation.

Not only was the ark without pedigree, it was without descendants also. Creationists Kofahl and Segraves tell us that civilization quickly redeveloped after the flood because the survivors carried over the prediluvian culture: Noah lived years afterwards, Shem The Creation Explanation , p. During this time, people were fanning out and "replenishing the earth," carrying with them reminiscences of the deluge that would someday excite American missionaries from Sumatra to Spitzbergen.

Yet Noah's primary contribution to humanity, his incredible knowledge of naval engineering, vanished without a trace, and the seafarers returned to their hollow logs and reed rafts. Like a passing mirage, the ark was here one day and gone the next, leaving not a ripple in the long saga of shipbuilding.

As if the rough construction of the ship weren't headache enough, the internal organization had to be honed to perfection. With space at a premium every cubit had to be utilized to the maximum; there was no room for oversized cages and wasted space.

The various requirements of the myriads of animals had to be taken into account in the design of their quarters, especially considering the length of the voyage. The problems are legion: feeding and watering troughs need to be the correct height for easy access but not on the floor where they will get filthy; the cages for horned animals must have bars spaced properly to prevent their horns from getting stuck, while rhinos require round "bomas" for the same reason; a heavy leather body sling is "indispensable" for transporting giraffes; primates require tamper-proof locks on their doors; perches must be the correct diameter for each particular bird's foot Hirst; Vincent.

Even the flooring is important, for, if it is too hard, hooves may be injured, if too soft, they may grow too quickly and permanently damage ankles Klos ; rats will suffer decubitus ulcers with improper floors Orlans , and ungulates must have a cleated surface or they will slip and fall Fowler.

These and countless other technical problems all had to be resolved before the first termite crawled aboard, but there were no wildlife management experts available for consultation. Even today the transport requirements of many species are not fully known, and it would be physically impossible to design a single carrier to meet them all.

Apparently, when God first told Noah to build an ark, he supplied a complete set of blueprints and engineering details, constituting the most intricate and precise revelation ever vouchsafed to humankind. So Noah grabbed his tools and went to work. LaHaye and Morris tell us that Noah and his three sons could have built the entire thing by themselves in a mere eighty-one years p.

This includes not merely framing up a hull but: building docks, scaffolds, workshops; fitting together the incredible maze of cages and crates; gathering provisions for the coming voyage; harvesting the timber and producing all the various types of lumber from bird cage bars to the huge keelson beams—not to mention wrestling the very heavy, clumsy planks for the ship into their exact location and fastening them.

What's worse, by the time the job was finished, the earlier phases would be rotting away—a difficulty often faced by builders of wooden ships, whose work took only four or five years Thrower, p. Faced with such criticism, the creationists quickly convert the humble, righteous farmer into a wealthy capitalist who simply hired all the help he needed Segraves, p. It is estimated that the construction of the Great Pyramid required as many as , slaves; Noah could have probably gotten by with less there were, after all, "giants in the earth in those days" according to Genesis , but what he lacked in numbers he sorely needed in experienced and highly skilled craftsmen.

How did he learn when to fell a tree and how to dry it properly to prevent rot and splitting, when the larger beams might take several years to cure cf.

Dumas and Gille, p. Did the local reed-raft builder have equipment to steam heat a plank so it could be forced into the proper position? A shipyard in nineteenth-century Maine would have been overwhelmed by the size and complexity of this job, yet Noah still supposedly found enough time to hold revivals and preach doomsday throughout the land Segraves, pp.

God told the patriarch to coat the ark, both inside and out, all , square feet of it, with pitch, and, in fact, this was a common practice in ancient times. But when Noah hurried to the corner hardware store, the shelf was bare, for pitch is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon similar to petroleum Rosenfeld, p. Morris , p. Meyer reveals that all the wood recovered by arkaeologists on Mt. Ararat is "saturated with pitch" p. Thus it seems that God accommodated Noah by creating an antediluvian tar pit just for the occasion, and we have another miracle.

Finally, our farmer-turned-architect had to confront the gravest difficulty of all: in the words of A. Robb, there was an "upper limit, in the region of feet, on the length of the wooden ship; beyond such a length the deformation due to the differing distributions of weight and buoyancy became excessive, with consequent difficulty in maintaining the hull watertight" p.

Pollard and Robertson concur, emphasizing that "a wooden ship had great stresses as a structure. This is the major reason why the naval industry turned to iron and steel in the s. The largest wooden ships ever built were the six-masted schooners, nine of which were launched between and These ships were so long that they required diagonal iron strapping for support; they "snaked," or visibly undulated, as they passed through the waves, they leaked so badly that they had to be pumped constantly, and they were only used on short coastal hauls because they were unsafe in deep water.

John J. Rockwell, the designer of the first of this class, confessed that "six masters were not practical. They were too long for wood construction" Laing, pp. Yet the ark was over feet longer than the longest six-master, the foot U. Wyoming, and it had to endure the most severe conditions ever encountered while transporting the most critically important cargo ever hauled.

Clearly, God had to imbue this amateurishly assembled gopherwood with some very special properties to fit it for the voyage. So it should be clear by now why "intelligent people" somehow see a "problem" in the building of the ark. With the huge freighter near completion, the time was drawing near when its colorful cargo would clamber aboard.

We now turn to this subject to see if we can learn who and how many made the fateful trip. Genesis declares that two of each kind of animal were to be collected and brought on board. This is repeated in Genesis , and it is explicitly stated that this applied to clean and unclean beasts as well as to birds. But Genesis specifies that clean beasts and birds were to be taken by sevens.

Whatever the numbers, it is clear that no animals could be left out. Genesis states that "every living substance" that God made was to be destroyed "from off the face of the earth" by the impending flood. Genesis repeats the point and adds that only those things with Noah in the ark could survive. Creationists realize that the ark had a limited amount of room and they are aware of the large number of species in the animal kingdom. Therefore, they have employed various tactics to reduce the population needed on board.

Probably the most important tactic is to restrict the command to "kinds" rather than species and to argue that the former are much fewer in number than the latter. A kind or "baramin" in creationist jargon is the unit of life originally made by God. Within each kind is an enormous potential for variation, resulting, during the past six thousand years or so, in a large number of similar animals that scientists classify into species.

By juggling the number of kinds, LaHaye and Morris reduce the total population aboard the ark to 50, p. Arthur Jones squeezes it down to a bare bones total of 1, quoted in Balsiger and Sellier, p. Is this a valid argument? Without going into the details of genetics, it can be stated that every inherited trait, however small, is coded for by one or more genes, and each gene locus may have a substantial number of variants alleles , which accounts for the great variety observed in a given population.

Any specific individual, however, has at most only two alleles per locus—one from each parent. As James C. King writes:. There is good evidence for concluding that every message coded in the DNA exists in any sizeable population in numerous versions, forming a spectrum grading from grossly defective alleles—such as the one for albinism—at one end, through the slightly deviant, to the normal at the other end.

And the normal is probably not a single version of the message but a collection of slightly different alleles. Hence, for a trait such as human pigmentation, "we can visualize not merely a few dozen interacting loci but an array of perhaps a dozen or so alleles at each locus" p.

From this we can see that the original canine baramin in Eden would have needed a fantastic set of giant chromosomes with alleles for every trait that would someday be manifest in coyotes, wolves, foxes, jackals, dingos, fennecs, and the myriad of minute variations in hair color twenty-four genes at nine loci , height, face shape, and so forth that are seen in the domestic dog cf.

So, too, for the feline kind, within which creationists Byron Nelson p. Similar giant chromosomes would be required for the bovine kind, equine kind, and so on. In the centuries before the deluge, these strange progenitors must have rapidly diversified into their potential species, as the fossil record shows.

The equine kind developed not only zebras, horses, onagers, asses, and quaggas but Eohippus, Mesohippus, Merychippus, and other now-extinct species that paleontologists have misinterpreted as evidence for evolution. Remember that creationists hold that the flood is responsible for the burial of most, if not all, fossil species.

Therefore they had to already exist prior to the deluge. Then one day, many centuries later, the Lord told Noah to take two canines, two felines, two equines, two pinnipedians—one male and one female each—and put them aboard the ark.

The trick is, which does our ancient zoologist choose? A male kit fox and a female Great Dane? A female lion and a male alley cat? An Eohippus and a Clydesdale? Which two individuals would possess the tremendous genetic complement that their ancestors in Eden had, to enable the many species to reappear after the flood?

How could Noah tell? Creationist Dennis Wagner tells us that the original kinds degenerated through inbreeding so that their offspring would "never again reach the hereditary variability of the parent" quoted in Awbrey; my emphasis. Yet the unique couple aboard the ark needed the full genetic potential of the original kind, if not more, for a vast new array of climatic and geographic niches was opened up by the flood. Speaking of a hypothetical group of six or eight animals stranded on an island, King says, "Such a small number could not possibly reflect the actual allelic frequencies found in the large mainland population" p.

What, then, of the single pair on the ark? These criticisms apply to the eight humans aboard the boat as well Genesis and Creationists still cling to obsolete stereotypes concerning the "three distinct families of man" descended from Noah's three sons Custance, p.

In reality the ethnic complexity found throughout the world cannot be derived from the flood survivors in the few centuries since that time. The human genetic pool was reduced to five individuals—Mr. Noah and their daughters-in-law the three sons don't count because they only carry combinations of the genes present in Mr. Noah, unless creationists are willing to admit to beneficial gene mutations.

And even if, by some freak coincidence, the five people never had a variant in common, there would still be far too few alleles to account for humankind's diversity. Nearly a third of human genes are polymorphic Bodner and Cavalli-Sforzi, p. If creationists allowed beneficial mutations to produce the thirty different antigens of the A and B series in the HLA region, it would still not solve their problem.

Individuals are only heterozygous at a fairly low percentage of loci 5 to 20 percent , while the population could be polymorphic at nearly half the loci. It's questionable how viable an individual would be with a high percentage of heterozygosity Dobzhansky, Ayala, et al. Creationist Lane Lester recognizes the force of these facts, but he believes that supergenes, several genes acting in concert, would solve the problem p.

This, however, only confuses the concept of supergenes, which control several characters in an organism, not one, and thus cannot produce the observed variety in a population from two parents cf. Parkin, p. How this horizontal evolution would be realized is even more mystifying. Since each generation would receive a huge set of variants, including maladaptive recessives, a wholly random mix of oddball creatures should result, and the rapid, efficient adaptations necessary in the hostile post-flood climate would prove impossible.

How could the arctic fox branch of the canine baramin be assured that only those alleles permitting tolerance to extreme cold would dominate? Why shouldn't freshwater fish hatch offspring manifesting the genes of their saltwater relatives?

Furthermore, strangely shaped chromosomes and odd-numbered sets of them necessary to contain the excess genes usually disrupt meiotic cell division and produce sterile offspring White, pp. On the other hand, it seems puzzling that such diversification should occur at all, for the originally created kinds were "good" and their "devolution" would "reduce the ability of the animal to survive in nature" Whitcomb, , p.

The impetus for speciation is lacking in this model, and there is no reason why, say, a snow leopard should evolve when the superior, better-fit "feline-min" migrated into an alpine environment. We can only conclude with creationist Walter Lammerts that "intelligent design" was activating and controlling this entire process p. The taxonomy of kinds is another bewildering subject. The only clear thrust of creationist writing seems to be ridiculing the concept of species, a term usually rendered with quotation marks.

We respond with White that, "if we were to give up the notion of species altogether, most discussions in such fields as ecology, ethology, population genetics, and cytogenetics to name only a few would simply become impossible" p. Aside from this, the creationist baramin can vary anywhere from the level of genus to order Siegler, -or even to phylum Ward, p.

The most often-cited instance of a kind, for example, is the family Canidae, which has fourteen genera and thirty-five species Siegler, But Sciuridae squirrels has species, and the genus Rattus old world rats has several hundred.

Would creationists recognize the eighteen families of bats, with their eight-hundred-plus species, as eighteen distinct kinds, or would they make the order Chiroptera into a single bat kind? Would they distinguish the nearly thirty families two thousand species of catfish?

At the other extreme are many families with but a single species, and even higher categories, such as the orders Tubulidentata aardvarks and Struthioniformes ostriches or even the phylum Placozoa, with but one representative. Why did the creator endow rats, bats, catfish, and mosquitos twenty-five hundred species in family Culicidae with such adaptive potential but withhold this potential from aardvarks, ostriches, and placozoans, especially when we learn that "each baramin was intended to move toward maximum variation" Ancil, p.

What becomes of the science of taxonomy under this basis or when the "major categories" phyla? The theory of kinds is incoherent and confusing. Since it runs counter to all the known facts of genetics and taxonomy, the burden of proof is upon the creationists to verify it.

Where are the fossil baramins? What findings show that such ideal creatures ever existed? If complete sets of kind alleles could survive twenty-four hundred or more years of radiation before the flood, it should be possible to find specimens today with inexplicably large chromosomal complements, perhaps in undiversified families. Unfortunately for "baramin geneticists," studies have been done on such families cf.

Loughman, Frye, and Herald , and nothing extraordinary has been discovered. Still no experiments are forthcoming from the ICR to test its hypothesis. It is, in fact, "armchair science" without a shred of evidence, and we are justified in rejecting it entirely and assuming that "two of every sort" means two of every species.

Another foil used to lighten the ark is the assertion that many, in fact most, species could have survived outside the ark and, eo ipso, did. Creationists somehow do not mind that this gambit is contradicted by Scripture Genesis , So, starting with fish and marine invertebrates, the list is expanded to include aquatic mammals, amphibians, most other invertebrates, sea birds, and "land animals that could not have survived otherwise" LaHaye and Morris, p.

Morris's spectacle of dinosaurs "somehow surviving outside" , p. Whitcomb and Morris, pp. From this it is but a short step to the ancient Eastern legend that the giant Og of Bashan survived by wading after the ark! But can the great ship be so easily emptied? We can dismiss the waterlogged Stegosaurus splashing about for days as an idea as absurd as Og of Bashan's big swim; amphibians and other animals that need some terra firma can be passed by as well. Let's go directly to those creatures that spend all of their lives in the water.

Although creationists seem to think that once you're wet it's all the same, there are actually many aquatic regimes and many specialized inhabitants in each. Some fish live only in cold, clear mountain lakes; others in brackish swamps. Some depend on splashing, rocky, oxygen-rich creeks, while others, such as a freshwater dolphin, a manatee, and a thirteen-foot catfish, live only in the sluggish Amazon. In all these instances plus many more, the environment provided by the deluge waters would have no more suited these creatures than it would have the desert tortoise or the polar bear.

The salinity of the oceans would have been substantially affected by the flood; Whitcomb and Morris lamely address this concern by noting that some saltwater fish can survive in freshwater and vice versa and that "some individuals of each kind would be able to survive the gradual mixing of the waters and gradual change in salinities during and after the flood" p. We are asked to believe that a storm so vast that the tops of the mountains were covered in forty days was so "gradual" that fish could adapt to these minor fluctuations!

In reality, although some species can inhabit both fresh and saline waters, most freshwater fish dropped in saltwater shrivel and die, while saltwater fish dropped in freshwater bloat and die.

Creationist E. Norbert Smith theorizes that the denser saltwater would not have mixed with the flood's freshwater and thus both varieties of fish could have made it through. But his own experiment, in which a goldfish thoroughly mingled the two types of water in a fishbowl in fifteen days, shows how long the separation would last during the violent shiftings of the earth called for in the creationist flood model.

Arguing over salinity is, however, a moot point, for the environmental hazards of the flood had to be so great that the salt content would be a fish's least concern. We must remember that, according to creationists, the deluge, in one year's time, deposited nearly all of the sedimentary rocks present in the world today.

To get some idea of how muddy this would be, we should note that creationist flood theorists maintain that the original ocean basins were greatly enlarged to their present depths to receive the retreating flood waters Whitcomb, , pp. This volume is 1,x 10 6 cubic kilometers. The volume of Phanerozoic sedimentary rock "flood deposits" is x 10 6 cubic kilometers Blatt, Middleton, and Murray, p. The ratio of water to rock is thus 2. Try mixing two parts water to one part sand; double or even triple the amount of the water, and then stick your pet goldfish into the muck and see how long it lives!

Then, too, most of the world's volcanic activity, sea-floor spreading, mountain-building, and continent-splitting was supposed to have occurred at this time as well, filling the seas with additional huge volumes of rock, ash, and noxious gases. Undersea volcanoes usually decimate all life in the surrounding area Buljan , and their extent had to be global during this terrible year. The earth's prediluvian surface would thus have been scoured clean, and forests, multi-ton boulders, and the debris of civilization hurtled about like missiles.

Finally, this tremendous explosion of energy would have transformed the seas into a boiling cauldron in which no life could possibly survive. Accurate calculations are nearly impossible, given the creationist penchant for vagueness; but by multiplying the amount of heat generated during a typical volcanic eruption cf. Macdonald, p. Obviously, nearly any concessions, any margins of error, can be granted to the creationists within their geological framework and the flood water would remain a churning, boiling inferno, easily accomplishing God's intention of destroying the world.

Yet amidst all of this, creationist icthyologists aver that life went on as usual, with a few minor adjustments to the "gradual" changes. The salmon swam to their long-vanished riparian breeding grounds that fall as they always had; sea anemones clung to their rocky perches, which were on the beach one month and the abyssal plain the next; blue whales continued to strain for krill even though their baleen plates were choked with mud; corals, which grow in clear, shallow water, somehow grew anyway; hapless bottom dwellers, their lives carefully adjusted to certain conditions of pressure and temperature, suddenly saw the former increase by more than 5, pounds per square inch and the latter fluctuate in who knows what directions.

Backhaus tells us that "aquatic species would pay for any attempts at acclimatization with their lives or, at any rate, would not survive for very long" p. Most are highly sensitive to changes in salinity, temperature, light, oxygen, and even trace elements cf. Bond; Hill.

The conclusion is unavoidable: barring a special miracle from God, nothing but the hardiest microorganism could have survived the flood outside the ark. Of course, the omnipotent deity could have performed several million individual miracles and preserved representatives of the invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, and even dinosaurs outside the ark; but, if so, why not extend the coverage to the few remaining terrestrial vertebrates and dispense with the boat altogether?

Again, by some freak combination of luck, we may imagine one male and one female octopus surviving the disaster and somehow encountering each other between Japan and California to renew their species, but the only way Noah, as designated curator of the world zoo, could have guaranteed their persistence was by bringing them aboard.

We must conclude, therefore, that every species of the animal kingdom had at least two members within the ark. So now we are back to fitting all the animals on board. Yet creationists still have another method of saving space.

They postulate that many full grown adult animal forms were left behind and that only young and thus smaller specimens were taken or—the ultimate economy—that eggs were sufficient for the preservation of the dinosaurs John Morris, , p.

Most zoologists, however, would agree with Neill when he writes that "the mortality rate is usually very high among seedling plants and young animals; but once the critical juvenile stage is passed, the organism has a good chance of reaching old age" p. In birds, for example, as many as 80 percent die before reaching maturity Dathe —facing everyday hazards. Furthermore, the young of many species cannot survive without parental care and feeding imagine two tiny unweaned kittens shivering in their stalls!

The luckless animals aboard the ark were confronting the gravest challenge to their endurance ever known, and they needed to be the strongest, healthiest, and most virile representatives their species had ever produced; juveniles would not do.

As for the dinosaur eggs, how did Noah know whether one would yield a female, the other a male—or even that both were fertile? And since no eggs require a year's gestation, he soon would have had a hoard of fragile hatchlings on his hands. Noah's responsibilities did not end with animals, for without plants all life would perish. Whitcomb and Morris grant that many seeds were aboard the ark in the food stores p. George Howe, too, referring to an experiment where three of five species showed germination after twenty weeks of soaking in sea water, concluded that the survival rate through dormancy would have been high December However, two of these three sprouted only when their seed coats were scarified cut.

This presents a special problem. The abrasive force of the deluge would have easily scarified the seed coats, but this would have been too soon. The seeds would have sprouted under water and died. But after the flood waters receded and the seeds were exposed to dry land, what would guarantee their being scarified then? Howe's experiments failed to properly duplicate the conditions required by the flood model and hence his work offers no support for seed survival during the deluge.

In reality, seed dormancy is a complex affair and involves metabolic and environmental prerequisites for entrance into and recovery from the state as well as several forms of quiescence.

The vast majority of seeds which become dormant do so in order to endure cold temperatures or prolonged drought, and in the warm flood waters most would germinate immediately and then drown for lack of oxygen cf. The waters weren't the only thing that would bury them, however, for huge deposits of silt and lava would have been laid down as well, entombing entire forests and paving the way for coal and oil formation.

Today the surface of the ground consists of 80 percent Phanerozoic rock and only 20 percent Precambrian "pre-diluvian" , the latter found mostly in large shields and entirely absent in many areas Kummel, p. These shields themselves would have been eroded to the bedrock by the flooding "the vegetation would have been uprooted. Floating is also unsatisfactory as a means of riding out the storm. Less than 1 percent of sermatophytes produce disseminules which drift for as long as one month, much less a year Gunn and Dennis, p.

And although many debris rafts could have been torn loose during the early days of the storm, such vessels tend to break up in rough water Zimmerman, p. If somehow a few of them did, how would they know where to unload their precious cargo afterward?

Suppose, for example, that a hefty chunk was torn loose from a densely grown forest and managed to swing through a sparse desert area, where such rafts presumably wouldn't form, to pick up seeds from a few rare cacti.

After a year at sea, what is the likelihood that these seeds would be dropped in an area where the temperature, rainfall, soil, and light would be suitable for their growth? As the retreating waters evaporated, the topsoil would become saturated with salts much like the beds of dry lakes in arid regions, and all but the hardiest halophilic plants would find the ground too toxic for any growth. Seawater contains thirty-five grams of salts per liter, and most plants cannot tolerate one-tenth this concentration Levitt, p.

Finally, assuming that some seeds did reach a survivable spot, how long would their flowers have to wait before the birds and insects arrived from Ararat to cross-pollinate them? Could the many species indigenous to the New World hold on while the transatlantic trip was made? Isaac Asimov observes that the ancient Hebrews did not regard plants as alive in the same sense animals are p. Today's fundamentalists should have learned some botany since then, but they still carry on about the "hardiness" of olives Whitcomb and Morris, p.

If we are to take the deluge seriously, we must be much more skeptical about such stories. The creationists need to soak seeds in very deep, muddy water for a year and then plant them in unconsolidated, briny silt in an unfavorable climate without insect or avian pollinators to see what happens.

Have their mathematicians, so skilled at calculating improbabilities for protein formation, ever determined the odds of a seed enduring the flood and then landing in the right soil and climate rather than being swept out to sea by the retreating waters or coming down in Antarctica?

It seems that Noah needed to have not merely "many" seeds but many samples of all the seeds and spores of the ,plus species of plants in order to guarantee their survival—or else we must tally up a few million more miracles of divine preservation. We can finally begin to make some calculations. Robert D.

Barnes lists the number of living species for each phylum, ranging from the sole member of Placozoa to the , in Arthropoda pp. Using his figures, we arrive at a total of 1,, species. In addition, there are many animals that are as yet unknown. Wendt estimates that only 2 percent of all the parasitic worms are known, which would easily add another million species p. This includes as many as , nematodes, although only 15, have been described Levine, p. Ten thousand new species of insects are discovered every year, yet still only a small fraction of those in existence have been found Atkins, p.

All of those creatures were known at one time, for Adam gave them all names Genesis , and, since they exist today, they must have been on the ark.

But we shall be extremely generous to the creationists and add only , undiscovered species to our figure of 1,,—thus giving a mere 1,, species with which Noah had to contend. To this number, we must add the myriad of extinct prehistoric animals, which creationists assure us were alive at the time of the flood, making tracks in the Paluxy River, and which were known to Job afterward John Morris, , p.

This would vastly increase the numbers, since "only a tiny percentage of the animal and plant species that have ever existed are alive today" Kear, p. However, since creationists do not believe in transitional forms, we can again give them the benefit of the doubt and add to our total only the , different fossils that have been described. This brings the number to 1,, species or animal pairs that were to be boarded onto the ark.

Of course, we can't forget that Genesis particularly in the Revised Standard Version makes it clear that only unclean animals come in single pairs, male and female; the clean animals and birds come in seven pairs, male and female. That means fourteen of each clean animal and each bird. But since figures for the number of clean animals are hard to find, we will have to let creationists off the hook and ignore them.

Birds are another story. There are 8, species of birds. Since they have already been calculated into our figure of 1,, species or 3,, individual animals on the ark, we need only six more pairs of each species of bird to make it come out to seven pairs.

That brings our count up to a grand total of 3,, animals aboard the ark—two of each species, except birds which number fourteen each. This figure may seem excessive at first glance, but in reality it is so small as to be unrealistic. Many animals need more than a single pair to reproduce. Bees and other hymenopterans live in colonies and "apart from the community [they] cannot properly function or survive" Lindauer, p.

Many types of flies engage in reproductive swarming. Some birds will not mate unless they are part of a flock Conway, p. In fact, "animals which unite into colonies for purposes of reproduction are by no means rare phenomena" Wendt, p.

The whole process of mating, egg-laying, gestation, and the survival of the fragile young is a risky business that can easily be aborted by many factors, including predators, disease, exposure to the elements, and so on.

In many species of spiders, given the chance the female will kill and devour the male before they mate; on the ark, the hapless husband would have to be particularly fleetfooted or his wife would unwittingly exterminate her species! Infanticide is another significant concern and occurs frequently even among primates.

Dayflies, so named because their mature stage lasts only a few hours, form a tiny cloud of dancing males trying to attract females, with a successful mating rate of at most 1 percent Wendt, p. Even the prodigious rabbits fare poorly outside many-chambered warrens, the work of numerous individuals Andrewartha, p. Locating one's mate can also be tricky. The Sumatran rhino depends on communication points in its range, and, if it can't visit these, it loses contact with others and reproduction doesn't occur Lang.

The tick, Ixodes ricinus, mates only on a sheep which must browse through a field and by chance pick up both a male and a female tick—and even then these poor crawlers can't find one another if they are too far apart on the sheep's body Andrewartha, p. Given this perceived overestimation in radiocarbon dating, the wood the Noah's Ark Ministries International team found should have a "traditional" radiocarbon date of several tens of thousands of years if the wood is truly 4, years old, Wood said.

The wood date is "way, way, way too young. Wood thinks Noah's ark will never be found, because "it would have been prime timber after the flood," he said. You've got a huge boat made of wood, so let's use that," he said. Related: National Geographic's search for Noah's flood. Another reason scholars are skeptical of the latest Noah's ark discovery claim is that Genesis—the first book of the Bible—never specifies which peak the vessel supposedly landed on in Turkey. Stony Brook's Zimansky agreed.

The Noah's Ark Ministries International explorers are "playing in a very different ballpark than the rest of us," Zimansky said. Even if the Noah's Ark Ministries International team did find a wooden structure or even a boat on Mount Ararat, there are other explanations for what the structure might be. For example, it could be a shrine constructed by early Christians to commemorate the site where they believed Noah's Ark should be, Zimansky said.

Even in that speculative case, it wouldn't be 4, years old. Bible scholar Sasson said he thinks biblical writers intended the story of Noah's ark to be allegorical, not a true recounting of historical events.

By presenting a scenario in which humanity is punished for its wickedness, "they were trying to draw us to the notion of a God who asks us to be acceptable," Sasson said. All rights reserved. Better Explanations for "Noah's Ark" Structure? Such a move would take time, Amelan added. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.

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