John Sanford doubles down on his Genetic Entropy idiocy.

[sfs1]

It's too bad that people like Beagle Boy, Santa Klaus, sfs1 and the many other Biblical Creationist enemies here on TWeb don't do as I did - contact John Sanford and humbly ask for an audience. I'm willing to bet that he will oblige them. Then they can finally know what they are talking about.

Alternatively, Sanford could have contacted me, or any other population geneticist or evolutionary biologist, and humbly asked one of us for an audience. I'm willing to be that many would have obliged him. Then he could have avoided the silliness of his genetic entropy business. (Incidentally, I did contact Sanford by email and communicate with him that way.) Why the novice should be the one granting the audience (interesting choice of words), or why anyone should be going cap in hand and begging permission to talk to someone else is really odd.

[Juvenal]

From what I understand there are ancient records in Sumeria, and I think Egypt as well with kings have drastically longer lifespans long ago. I'm going to have to look up the source material though.

Dear C,

You'll find the "drastically longer lifespans" in the Sumerian King List correspond with pre-literate and inter-literate periods, either before the development of writing or during periods of foreign incursions that disrupted the empire. Periods with written rather than oral records trend back to believable lifespans. Periods preserved from oral histories likely include concurrent rather than consecutive kingdoms.

Moreover, the oral history lifespans denote relative prestige rather than actual age. Further issues arise from translation from the Sumerian's hybrid numbering system which is principally positional in base 60 but interspersed with 1s and 10s.

As ever, Jesse