Good article, for the most part. But I'm a bit at a loss to explain some of the
math in it.

 WC> snakes and whales. Explain why God would have created over 250,000 
 WC> different species of beetle. Why did God create over 2,000 different 
 WC> varieties of
 WC> fruit-fly (25% of which can only be found in Hawaii)? Why did God
 WC> create muscles that allow us to move our ears? What is our appendix 
 WC> for? *
 WC> There are some 8,600 species of birds so far described and 3,700
 WC> species of mammals. 20,000 species of fish are documented out of an 
 WC> estimated 40,000 believed to exist. Known insect species number over 
 WC> 850,000 and
 WC> this is estimated as being fewer that 1/5 or even 1/10 of the total
 WC> number in extant. The number of catalogued flowering plant species is
 WC> over 286,000 and about 4,000 more are catalogued every year. The
 WC> number of different species of fungi is in excess of 40,000. If you 
 WC> add it all
 WC> up you get over 1.6 billion different forms of life on this planet.

Hmm..

8600+3700+20000+850000+286000+40000 = 1208300 known species (assuming the raw 
numbers from the article are correct and complete)

If we account for the estimated unknowns (again, assuming the raw numbers in 
the article are good), we add 20000 fish species, and 7650000 insect species 
(using the 1/10 of the total extant number). That yields 8878300. Still not 
even remotely close to 1.6 billion. Maybe the author mistakenly double-counted 
the beetle and fruitfly numbers that he quotes (those would be included in the 
numbers for insect species, shouldn't they?). That would add 252000, yielding a
total of 9130300. Still vastly smaller than 1.6 billion, but that's the biggest
number I can come up with using the numbers that the author provides. Unless 
maybe he's projecting that 4000 new flowering plant species/yr out to some 
arbitrary time. But to get to 1.6 billion, you'd have to continue at that rate 
for 397717 years. Somehow, I don't think that's it.

Maybe he meant to say 1.6 million. I see how to get that exact number out of 
his figures, but it does at least seem to be in the ball park. It's between the
1.2million known species number, and the 8.9million high-estimate number.

Or maybe he's including some species that he hadn't previously mentioned. Like 
microbes, perhaps. He didn't give a number for those. If so, then he should 
have mentioned that. His total looks pretty ludicrous otherwise.

 WC> Since over 99% of all life forms that have ever existed are now
 WC> extinct we end up with a total species number of as high as 16 
 WC> billion.

Huh? If 1.6 billion is 1% of the total, then the total would be 160 billion.

 WC> Please
 WC> explain why your creator went to all this effort only to give one
 WC> species any special favors. How did Noah manage to place at least 3.2
 WC> billion different life forms on the ark?

Where the heck did that number come from? Even if the 1.6 billion number was 
right, why assume that there were twice that many in Noah's time?

It's still a good point, though. Even if there's only about a million species, 
the idea of getting them all aboard an ark remains totally absurd. Heck, even 
if you assume that fish, microbes, and insects didn't need Noah's help, it's 
still absurd. And you can't realistically exclude _all_ of those species. For 
example, I doubt that freshwater fish would do well in a worldwide flood with 
all that ocean water spilling out all over the place. Of course, it could have 
been highly diluted with freshwater, but then it would be the saltwater 
varieties who would be in trouble. I feel silly even speculating on the 
saltiness of the flood water. The whole flood idea is embarassingly stupid.

 WC>  * Which of Noah's
 WC> children were black? Which were Korean, East Indian, Hispanic? Which 
 WC> had blue eyes, green eyes, hazel eyes, brown eyes? Which were albino? 
 WC> Which of Noah's children had brown hair, black hair, blonde hair? 
 WC> Which of Noah's
 WC> children had syphilis, AIDS, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, polio,
 WC> smallpox? Which of Noah's children had congenital heart defects? Come 
 WC> on, big mouths, put up or shut up. Lets see this creationism of yours 
 WC> start explaining things. No one needs to defend evolution any more. 
 WC> That hasn't needed to be been done for over 100 years. If you can't 
 WC> get with
 WC> the program, get out of the game and relegate Creationism to where it
 WC> belongs, in classes on Religion, not Science. Only the irrational,
 WC> the intellectually impaired and the incredibly stupid can't see 
 WC> that evolution theories such as theory of change by decent 
 WC> through modification are the only demonstrable means of explaining 
 WC> the wide diversity of life that we observe on this planet.This issue 
 WC> makes the U.S.A. a laughingstock to the rest of the world and should 
 WC> have been dead and buried decades ago. It makes me sick to have to 
 WC> continue to fight this flood of ignorance in this day and time, but 
 WC> hopefully truth
 WC> and science will prevail and mankind will one day throw off this yoke
 WC> of myth and superstition.

A pretty good article, overall. But it would have been much better without the 
math errors. Or, if the totals are correct, it would have been much better if 
the author had provided better support for them so that they don't look so much
like errors.



 * SeM. 2.26  * A day for firm decisions!!!!!  Or is it?
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