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The Monkey Trial

J

Jasher

Guest
In the 1925 Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor in the case against John Scopes, agreed to testify in the trial as a witness on behalf the Biblical account of creation. John Scopes, a public-school teacher in Tennessee was charged for teaching evolution in school. His defense attorney, Clarence Barrow questioned Bryan as follows:

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE TRIAL RECORDS.
​
BARROW: Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?​
BRYAN: No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.​
​
BARROW: You have never found out?​
BRYAN: I have never tried to find.​
​
BARROW: You have never tried to find?​
BRYAN: No.​
​
BARROW: The Bible says he got one doesn’t it? Were there other people on the earth at that time?​
BRYAN: I cannot say.​
​
BARROW: You cannot say. Did that ever enter your consideration?​
BRYAN: Never bothered me.​
​
BARROW: There were no others recorded, but Cain got a wife.​
BRYAN: That is what the Bible says.​
​
BARROW: Where she came from you do not know.​

So how would you have answered the question under oath regarding where Cain a wife?
 
One of our problems with this story is that we do not know how old Cain and Abel were when they had their fight.

Because they are mentioned without any other child being mentioned it is assumed they are the only children and the first children. BUT that is not proven in the text...Genesis 4 is about Cain and Abel, not anyone else, so no one else is mentioned until their story is over.

But if Adam and Eve had a child each year and these children started to have their own children at age 13 or 15 or so, in a very short time (out of a 900 year lifespan that is) the exponential increase would be huge with 125 years being between 9 and 10 generations, on the order of between 20 billion and 289 billion people in this model.*

While we think of them as either teens or very young men, Is it logical to think that after Abel was killed and Cain banished that Adam would wait some 100 years to have Seth? Gen 5:3 When Adam was 130 years old, he had a son in his own likeness, after his own image; and he named him Seth.

Thus it is logical that they were either about 100 years old when they had their fight over religion, or that they were born about Adam's 100th year and were 25 yrs old themselves.
If Cain and Abel were born about Adam and Eve's 100 year on earth, it might have had a very large population indeed by that time. if Adam and Eve and their unnamed, unmentioned children had kept procreating all this time...

Older men with time to mature into their beliefs would make a much more believable story that this was not just a kid's mistake and childish anger; it was a religious war. Cain was trying to supplant the religion of the coats of skins for righteousness instituted by GOD for Adam and Eve with his first fruits fertility / weather cult of the Baals and Asherah (groves).

Even if they were only 25 years old themselves by the time this religious war came to a head, how many more people were populating the earth, given exponential growth over 100 years?

*
I wrote the following to my mathemetician friend Fred:
> I am bothered not knowing how to work out exponent growth patterns. To use a simple population pattern, no twins, no deaths, let’s consider one birth a year by one person for 13 years when the oldest child also starts having children. All children start having children at 13 years old and keep having children every year. How many people are there in 125 years?
How is this for something new?>

He answered:
Yeehaw. Branching processes.
Let’s do the simplest case we can first, which we can arrive at because in the case you have here, everything is deterministic and happens in 13 year increments, so you can take one generation to be 13 years and work only in terms of generations. In generation 0, there is 1 person. Each person in the previous generation produced 13 people in the next generation, plus themselves, so, notating the number of people in generation i as N_i,

N_i = 14 * N_{i-1}

with N_0 = 1, the solution to this is N_i = 14^i.

125 years is between 9 and 10 generations, so there are between 20 billion and 289 billion people in this model.

The general program is to set up a recurrence for N_i in terms of earlier values of N, and set an initial condition (N_0). Then you are into the theory of difference equations, which is a well studied area of mathematics that just happens to be rarely taught. You also don’t have to get exact solutions via difference equations. You can just plug in numbers and work your way through:

i | N_i
————
0 | 1
1 | 14
2 | 196
3 | 2744
4 | 38416
5 | 537824
6 | 7529536
7 | 105413504

This is only possible if your expression for N_i only depends on the past, not the future. If it depends on the future as well, then you actually need the difference equations. It doesn’t usually depend on the future, but that problem does show up when calculating with boundary values in physics problems (temperature is X at this end, Y at that end, calculate what it is in the middle).

Let’s take a little more complicated case and work in terms of years. The next ingredient in such problems is using a structured population, that is, dividing it into groups so that the relations for each group are simple. In this case we are going to divide into juveniles and adults, the numbers of which we will write as J_i and A_i. The total population N_i = J_i + A_i.

The number of juveniles in a given year is given by the number that existed the previous year minus those that reach childbearing age and become adults (which is the number that were born 14 years ago, which is the same as the number of adults 14 years ago), plus those born in this year, or

J_i = J_{i-1} + A_{i-1} - A_{i-14}

and the number of adults is the number that existed last year plus the number of children born 14 years ago who have now become adults, which is again equal to the number of adults 14 years ago.

A_i = A_{i-1} + A_{i-14}

When we actually calculate this, we have to specify A_i and J_i for negative values of i. We just set that to be 0 since we assume we’re starting with a single adult that popped into existence at A_0, so A_0 = 1 and J_0 = 0. Then we can work forward the same way as before

A_0 = 1, J_0 = 0
A_1 = 1, J_1 = 1
A_2 = 1, J_2 = 2
…
A_13 = 1, J_13 = 13
A_14 = 2, J_14 = 13
A_15 = 3, J_15 = 14
A_16 = 4, J_16 = 15
...

So this is your general approach. Break your population into subpopulations that each behave uniformly, then write down recurrence relations for each subpopulation, simulate forward with the recurrence relations, and add up the subpopulations. You can do these calculations in Excel really easily and not have to worry about solving difference equations.
 
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Ted T said:
One of our problems with this story is that we do not know how old Cain and Abel were when they had their fight.
Click to expand...

Not sure how the age of Cain and Abel are relevant to the origin of Cain's wife except to infer by implication that Cain's wife was his sister.

However, the interpretation that mankind originated from a single set of biological progenitors, being Adam and Eve, therefore Cain's wife must have have been his sibling is a presumption.

However, it should be known that Cain's wife wasn't his sister for two reasons.
Ted T said:
If Cain and Abel were born about Adam and Eve's 100 year on earth, it might have had a very large population indeed by that time. if Adam and Eve and their unnamed, unmentioned children had kept procreating all this time...
Click to expand...
That sure would have been a lot of inbreeding wouldn't it?

It written that when man began multiplying that the LORD told man that the number of man's days on earth would be no more than 120 years. It is no coincidence that the physical body of Moses, whose eye was not dim, nor natural force abated ended at a 120 years of age, but that is another topic. However, it does not contradict the scripture that Adam was a 110 when he begat Seth if you believe in the gospel of being resurrected into a new body in heaven.

Ted T said:
Older men with time to mature into their beliefs make a much more believable story that this was not just a kid's mistake and childish anger; it was a religious war. Cain was trying to supplant the religion of the coats of skins for righteousness instituted by GOD for Adam and Eve with his first fruits fertility / weather cult of the Ba'als and Asherah (groves).
Click to expand...
Have you ever consider how Abel was able to fatten his herd on thorns and thistles?
 
Jasher said:
However, it should be known that Cain's wife wasn't his sister for two reasons.
Click to expand...
What two reasons would that be?
Jasher said:
That sure would have been a lot of inbreeding wouldn't it?
Click to expand...
Eve was taken from Adam.
So, it was inbreeding from the get-go.
Jasher said:
Have you ever consider how Abel was able to fatten his herd on thorns and thistles?
Click to expand...
Why?
It's obvious the land produced more than thorns and thistles.
 
Jasher said:
Have you ever consider how Abel was able to fatten his herd on thorns and thistles?
Click to expand...
Thorns and thistles are the slings and arrows of the sufferings of human life...plus Ecc 2:11 Yet when I considered all the works that my hands had accomplished and what I had toiled to achieve, I found everything to be futile, a pursuit of the wind; there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
 
Ted T said:
Thorns and thistles are the slings and arrows of the sufferings of human life...plus Ecc 2:11 Yet when I considered all the works that my hands had accomplished and what I had toiled to achieve, I found everything to be futile, a pursuit of the wind; there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
Click to expand...
Actually, like the sins under the law the thorns and thistles had to be dealt with year after year.
 
1Mind1Spirit said:
Eve was taken from Adam.
So, it was inbreeding from the get-go.
Click to expand...
If that is your interpretation of the scriptures, others interpret it as Woman was taken out of Man.

And Adam said, she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Gen 2:23
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made at the beginning made them male and female, Matt 19:4-5
But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, Gal 4:4

1Mind1Spirit said:
Why?
It's obvious the land produced more than thorns and thistles.
Click to expand...
So the LORD drove him from a garden into a garden? He drove him from the garden the LORD had planted back into wilderness from which he was made.

7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Gen 2:7-8

"...cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;" Gen 3:17-18
 
Jasher said:
If that is your interpretation of the scriptures, others interpret it as Woman was taken out of Man.

And Adam said, she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Gen 2:23
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made at the beginning made them male and female, Matt 19:4-5
But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, Gal 4:4


So the LORD drove him from a garden into a garden? He drove him from the garden the LORD had planted back into wilderness from which he was made.

7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Gen 2:7-8

"...cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;" Gen 3:17-18
Click to expand...
Adam just smiled and waved a settin' there on that sack a seeds...
You izz funny.
 
Ted T said:
Thorns and thistles are the slings and arrows of the sufferings of human life.
Click to expand...
They represent what they are, plants of the desert so to speak being herbaceous type plants that would be less than desirable to eat.

1668031010280.png 1668031039569.png

In regards to Eccl 3:13-14
13 And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.
14 I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.
 
Jasher said:
In the 1925 Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor in the case against John Scopes, agreed to testify in the trial as a witness on behalf the Biblical account of creation. John Scopes, a public-school teacher in Tennessee was charged for teaching evolution in school. His defense attorney, Clarence Barrow questioned Bryan as follows:

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE TRIAL RECORDS.
​
BARROW: Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?​
BRYAN: No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.​
​
BARROW: You have never found out?​
BRYAN: I have never tried to find.​
​
BARROW: You have never tried to find?​
BRYAN: No.​
​
BARROW: The Bible says he got one doesn’t it? Were there other people on the earth at that time?​
BRYAN: I cannot say.​
​
BARROW: You cannot say. Did that ever enter your consideration?​
BRYAN: Never bothered me.​
​
BARROW: There were no others recorded, but Cain got a wife.​
BRYAN: That is what the Bible says.​
​
BARROW: Where she came from you do not know.​

So how would you have answered the question under oath regarding where Cain a wife?
Click to expand...
Perhaps neither of the gentlemen had access to the Book of Jubilees.

Book of Jubilees
IV.
1. And in the third week in the second jubilee she gave birth to Cain, and in the fourth she gave birth to Abel, and in the fifth she gave birth to her daughter ’Âwân.
2. And in the first (year) of the third jubilee, Cain slew Abel because (God) accepted the sacrifice of Abel, and did not accept the offering of Cain.
3. And he slew him in the field: and his blood cried from the ground to heaven, complaining because he had slain him.
4. And the Lord reproved Cain because of Abel, because he had slain him, and he made him a fugitive on the earth because of the blood of his brother, and he cursed him upon the earth.
5. And on this account it is written on the heavenly tables, "Cursed is he who smiteth his neighbour treacherously, and let all who have seen and heard say, So be it; and the man who hath seen and not declared (it), let him be accursed as the other."
6. And for this reason we announce when we come before the Lord our God all the sin which is committed in heaven and on earth, and in light and in darkness, and everywhere.
7. And Adam and his wife mourned for Abel four weeks of years, and in the fourth year of the fifth week they became joyful, and Adam knew his wife again, and she bare him a son, and he 1 called his name Seth; for he said "God hath raised up a second seed unto us on the earth instead of Abel; for Cain slew him."
8. And in the sixth week he begat his daughter ’Azûrâ.
9. And Cain took ’Âwân his sister to be his wife and she bare him Enoch at the close of the fourth jubilee. And in the first year of the first week of the fifth jubilee, houses were built on the earth, and Cain built a city, and called its name after the name of his son Enoch.
10. And Adam knew Eve his wife and she bare yet nine sons.
11. And in the fifth week of the fifth jubilee Seth took ’Azûrâ his sister to be his wife, and in the fourth (year of the sixth week) she bare him Enos. 12. He began to call on the name of the Lord on the earth.
 
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