In Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism. 9: 206-227, article 18.
Abstract
Among creationists and intelligent design theorists, there is much interest in developing a theory of biological design. Evolutionary scientists have made much progress in this area by assuming living things are designed for efficiency, despite the obvious logical incongruity in their reasoning. This area of research is closely connected to the field of allometry, the study of how different parts of an organism grow or scale in relation to the size of the organism as a whole. The allometric metabolic scaling theory of physicist Geoffrey West and biologists Brian Enquist and John Brown (WBE theory) assumes living things are constructed to efficiently deliver nutrients to their constituent cells. It uses this assumption to successfully predict features of avian and mammalian circulatory and respiratory systems. Moreover, their ontogenetic extension of the theory provides a theoretical justification for the sigmoid mass-versus-age growth curves exhibited by many living creatures. It also provides a general mathematical expression for an organism’s age at maturity. Numerous empirical studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between ages at maturity (first reproduction and/or skeletal maturity) and total lifespan: the higher the age at maturity, the longer an organism’s lifespan. This link to empirical observations may ultimately enable the WBE theory (or one like it) to help explain the large sizes of many pre-Flood creatures, as well as the extreme longevity of the pre-Flood and immediate post-Flood patriarchs. Indeed, fossil data and paleo-ontogenetic growth curves, already published in the mainstream evolutionary literature, provide at least five lines of possible evidence that some animals were experiencing much greater longevity in the pre-Flood and immediate post-Flood worlds, just as humans were. Because of the potential significance of this information to the creation community, this paper also discusses these lines of evidence, while recognizing their preliminary nature and the need for further research before making a strong claim in this regard.
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Allometric and Metabolic Scaling: Arguments for Design... and Clues to Explaining Pre-Flood Longevity?
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