[extropy-chat] Surviving a flood...

[David Lubkin]

At 03:02 PM 1/6/2004 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:

>The biblical authors must have been descendents of
>Noah, as all the rest of the people of the known world
>are presumed to have drowned.  And the more limited
>view of the flood that I am suggesting seems likely,
>since Chinese and African peoples either survived--the
>more likely conclusion--or evolved subsequently from
>Noah's descendents.  Given the large number of Chinese
>people compared to semites (ie spawn of Noah), I would
>have to go with survived and prospered rather than
>evolved, migrated, prospered and reproduced like,
>well, er,... Chinese).

Noah had three sons, Shem, Japheth, and Ham, whose descendants populated 
the Earth.

According to the Bible directly, the Semites were the descendants of Shem. 
Abram, later known as Abraham, was Shem's great^7-grandson. Abram's two 
kids, Isaac and Ishmael, each got to be a "mighty people" and began the 
Jewish / Arab feud.

Japheth was less blessed, as the middle son, but still respected. He is 
considered the father of the Greeks, who the early rabbis admired. Greek 
was the only language it was acceptable to translate the Bible into, which 
is probably part of the reason why the Christian Bible was in Greek.

Ham was cursed, for making fun of his father's naked, drunken stupor. He 
was deemed the father of Ethiopians (through his son Cush, whose grandson 
was Sheba, as in Queen of), Egyptians, and Canaanites, who were relegated 
to eternal servitude as punishment. Devout colonial American slaveholders 
justified themselves with Genesis 9:25-27.

Nobody explained where Asiatic people came from, although the web abounds 
in more recent explanations.

Which indirectly leads me to a biology question:  how is it that a horse 
and a donkey -- different species, with different numbers of chromosomes -- 
can produce offspring?  What are the limits of cross-species mating, 
besides incompatible hardware, e.g., horse and gerbil?  Given species x, y 
and gestational periods g(x) and g(y), respectively, what will the 
gestational period of an x carrying an x/y hybrid be?


-- David Lubkin.