on this website (http://www.fugly.com/pictures/22788/an-arguement-for-creationism.html) today. I tried to leave a comment but their comment software was broken, so I had to respond in this blog with my comment:
Here is my comment:
This is a serious case of bad math.
The cell divisions are not geometric, they are exponential.
Every cell division doubles the previous number. Let's call each cell division "N". At time zero we had 1 cell. At 30 minutes we had 1 cell division (N), giving us 2 cells. At 60 minutes we had another cell division (N) giving us 4 cells. At 90 minutes we had another cell division (N) giving us 8 cells. At 120 minutes we had another cell division (N) giving us 16 cells. In 2 hours, we had 4 cell divisions giving us 16 cells. The equation for this is 2^N. We had 4 "N"s. So 2^4 = 16.
So let's re-do this guy's math correctly.
1 day = 1440 minutes
1440 hours divided by 30 minute chunks of time (time it takes for each cell division, or "N") = 48
So each day, 1 cell becomes 2^48 cells = 281 trillion cells.
Multiply that by 365 days per year =
1.03 x 10^17 cells
Multiply that by 3.5 billion years =
2 to the 6 x 10^13 cells.
That is a number so freakishly huge and SOOOOO much larger than 81 trillion that it actually accounts for every cell in every organism that has ever been on this earth, plus all of the cells that died during each organism's lifetime. Every blade of grass, every bactrium, every fish, every fungus, and everything else that has ever been can be accounted for by this number.
One should not try to disprove evolution with math, when one can not do proper math.
