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 materials.
Why Did People Live for about 900 Years before the Flood?
Life spans suddenly began decreasing after the flood. [See Figures 244 and 246.] This “ski slope” type of decline (called an exponential decay) is one that engineers and scientists see frequently. It occurs when a system, in equilibrium (balanced) at one level, is suddenly disturbed and moves toward a new equilibrium state at a lower level.
Figure 246: 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 have speculated on the cause of this well-known decrease, but few proposals fit all the following facts. The decline:
Unfortunately, proposals that fit these facts cannot be tested experimentally, including what I will propose. However, the flood events already described fit all these facts and would have steadily reduced longevity to what we see today.
Some say life spans declined because the flood produced a “genetic bottleneck” (a population shrinkage). However, Shem avoided that bottleneck, because his genetics were fixed at his conception which was before the flood. Yet his drop in longevity was the greatest of all the patriarchs listed in Figure 246. Genetic bottlenecks also occur (a) in pioneering families or other small groups isolated for generations, and (b) in hundreds of breeding experiments with different animals. To my knowledge, no one has observed an exponential decay in those life spans.
While genetics certainly plays a role, it is not as large as we might 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.
As explained in “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” (pages 387–441), during the flood, powerful electrical (piezoelectric) currents inside the fluttering crust released a gigantic flux of neutrons within the crust. That resulted in the production of a few thousand new isotopes—unusually light (or heavy) chemical elements, because they had fewer (or more) neutrons than normal.
Carbon-14. One isotope produced was carbon-14, which is radioactive. It is decaying in your body a few thousand times each second.4 What happens when a carbon-14 atom in your body suddenly decays and becomes nitrogen? It’s not good. That nitrogen bonds differently with other tissues, producing distortion (wrinkling/aging) at the atomic level. Also, if any carbon-14 in your DNA or RNA decays, the mutated gene will function differently or not at all. These effects age you very slightly every second. Which organs finally break down or become diseased will depend partially on the genetics you inherit. (The decay of potassium-40 in our bodies has similar consequences.6)
A previous frequently-asked question (pages 523–527) concerns radiocarbon dating and the rapid buildup of carbon-14 in the atmosphere beginning after the flood. The negative exponential curve in Figure 246 is a mirror image of the positive exponential curve (line C) in Figure Figure 245 on page 524. The increase in postflood carbon-14 probably decreased longevity to a slight extent, but the sudden production of thousands of new isotopes during the flood (most of which were not radioactive) introduced a more important aging mechanism.
Misfolded Proteins. In the centuries after the flood, the thousands of new isotopes produced during the flood steadily worked their way out of the crust and into the biosphere. There they entered humans through their intake of food, liquids, and air—slowly degrading (or aging) cells by sometimes misfolding proteins. Here’s why.
Every cell in your body contains millions of ribosomes7—absolutely amazing and complex manufacturing plants that assemble your body’s proteins. These harmful isotopes you eat, drink, and inhale are sometimes incorporated into the 20 different types of amino acids that are brought into your ribosomes and hooked together (based on the instructions in your DNA) into long chains. When a chain exits a ribosome, the electrical charges on the chain and other complex effects fold it in multiple ways simultaneously. A fascinating animation of this complex folding process in a bacterium is shown at:
www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/ribo/homepage/movies/translation_bacterial.mov
A protein’s specific, three-dimensional shape determines what it does in your body. If the protein misfolds—due to light (or heavy) isotopes that either speed up or slow down an overlapping fold, the proteins external shape may not fit into its intended tissue like a jig-saw piece fits into a jig-saw puzzle. If the internal configuration is wrong, two amino acids may be too far apart to function properly. Misfolded proteins produce diseases, such as Alzheimer’s8 and Parkinson’s.
In effect, those new (heavier or lighter than normal) isotopes were mild poisons that diffused and migrated out of the crust at a rate proportional to their concentration in the crust. They began entering the biosphere rapidly right after the flood, but leveled off centuries later. Therefore, cells (and life spans) were degraded in an exponential decay pattern, immediately after the flood.
Every second, isotopes produced during the flood are slowly aging us at the atomic level, so our organs deteriorate. Which of the thousands of new isotopes are most damaging and what repair mechanisms play a role are open questions.
Cancer. Cancer is the number one killer in the world. (Heart disease is number two.) Most cancers are caused by a currently unknown random effect that produces mutations when stem cells divide.
Now in an eye-opening study published in Science, researchers report that the majority of cancer types are the result of pure chance, the product of random genetic mutations that occur when stem cells—which keep the body chugging along, replacing older cells as they die off—make mistakes copying the cells’ DNA.9
What might be driving that seemingly random effect? Each atom moving in your cells acquired a variable number of neutrons during the flood, and therefore will move slower than normal if it has extra neutrons or faster than normal if it has fewer neutrons. On rare occasions, those abnormal isotopes will foul up complex stem-cell divisions.
Date of Flood Based on Genetic Discoveries. Genetic studies give us the most likely date when these rapid mutation rates began—and therefore, a good estimate for the date for the flood: 3103 B.C.10 It is also remarkably close to 3290 B.C.—the most likely date for the flood based on astronomical information: [See "When Was the Flood, the Exodus, and Creation?" on pages 493–496.] The overlapping statistical uncertainties in each date mean that the dates are statistically indistinguishable.
These genetic studies were made possible because the cost to sequence human DNA has steadily dropped. This allowed the sequencing of 15,000 protein-coding genes in each of 2,440 individuals of European or African ancestry. It was discovered that humans carry a large number of extremely rare mutations, each of which has altered one of the bases in these 15,000 genes. (The genetic code is written with an alphabet of four characters, called bases.
Because there are so many of these unique mutations in each of us, and each specific mutation is shared by so few people, the mutations have not had enough time to spread throughout the human population. Therefore, they must have begun recently. How recently? Looking at mutations in people of European ancestry, the most likely beginning date is 3103 B.C. Looking at mutations which are generally different in people of African ancestry, the most likely beginning date is also 3103 B.C.10 Remarkable!
Scientists specializing in aging recognize some of this. 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 [misfolded] 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.11
While we may not know “why our bodies do not repair themselves better,” there is much we now know:
- The flood increased aging processes greatly.
- Thousands of new isotopes (heavy or light) produced during the flood are mixed with all that we eat, drink, and breathe. On rare occasions, these isotopes interfere with our very complex genetics and cellular machinery.
- At the atomic level, this damage occurs in a somewhat random manner, even among identical twins, because the potentially harmful isotopes we take into our bodies can become “bullets” that hit us in tiny but rapid versions of “Russian roulette,” each time a ribosome produces a misfolded protein.
- The potential damage during each roulette game is quite small; however, we each play thousands of these games a second. We, and all living things, are slowly aging.12 (Note: Aging is qualitatively different than radiation damage which produces deformities and lack of fitness.)
These genetic disruptions (mutations) would have also occurred in the descendents of the animals on the Ark. Within a few generations, the differing characteristics of their offspring would multiply the number of species on earth today. This rapid speciation right after the flood is microevolution, not macroevolution.
Human death rates increase greatly with age, but death rates vary widely among animals.13 For example, desert tortoises have decreasing death rates as they age. Nevertheless, the symptoms of aging are remarkably similar among animals and humans: wrinkled skin, slowly deteriorating movements and sensory perceptions, duller colors, loss of muscle mass, cancers, slower learning, weakened immune systems, and the buildup of amyloid plaques in brains. This is because the number of isotopes for each chemical element increased greatly during the flood, and every animal uses the same chemical elements (which no longer have standard weights). Therefore, all animals accumulate misfolded proteins which explain these symptoms of aging, but the rates of accumulation and repair vary.