of them were. And, given the strength of the human sex drive, it also seems very unlikely that all these patriarchs were choosing to postpone marriage thirty or forty years after reaching sexual maturity! This seems to strongly suggest slower growth and development, as suggested by Cuozzo (1998b). If the pre-Flood patriarchs did not reach sexual maturity until roughly 65 years of age, this fits with empirical evidence that age at sexual and/or skeletal maturity positively correlates with lifespan, i.e., the longer an organism takes to reach maturity, the longer its lifespan. Studies have demonstrated this to be true in general for terrestrial vertebrates, including birds and reptiles (de Magalhães et al. 2007, Ricklefs 2010a), as well as particularly true for bivalve molluscs (Abele et al. 2008, Ridgeway et al. 2011, Moss et al. 2016), fish (Genade et al. 2005, Lee, Monaghan, and Metcalfe 2013), and birds and mammals (Ricklefs 2010b). A good overview is provided by Marchionni et al. (2020). There is also evidence (de Magalhães et al. 2007, Ricklefs 2010a, Ridgway et al. 2011) that larger body size at maturity is positively correlated with greater longevity, although there is conflicting evidence in the case of bivalve molluscs: Ridgway et al. (2011) found a weak but statistically significant correlation, but a larger study by Moss et al. (2016) did not. For the time being we do not attempt to explain these general observations, rather we simply accept them as empirical facts. In general, greater longevity seems to be positively correlated with greater ages and sizes at maturity. Because the WBE ontogenetic growth model makes predictions about the time for an organism to attain its maximum size (Appendix D), it or a similar theory could shed light on this issue and yield insights into pre-Flood and immediate post-Flood environmental conditions. With this in mind, I discuss below five possible lines of evidence for extreme animal longevity in the pre-Flood and immediate post-Flood worlds. C. Possible paleo-ontogenetic evidence for extreme animal longevity The WBE ontogenetic theory provides a theoretical justification for why animal age-versus-mass growth curves exhibit an almost-universal ‘sigmoid’ shape (Fig. 7). Biologists have long-used the similar-looking empirical Bertalanffy growth curve (1938) to describe the linear growth of an organism: (14) Here, L(t) is the length of a major body dimension of the animal, say height or length. L∞ is the animal’s body length at maturity. The parameter is a measure of how quickly the animal grows, and t0 is the (theoretical) age at which the animal has a size of zero. Eq. (14) indicates a period of rapid juvenile growth followed by a slowing or stopping of growth at adulthood. Although the mathematical form of Eq. (14) is not identical to that of Eq. (13), this period of rapid linear growth clearly corresponds to the steeply-sloped portion of Figure 7, whereas the period of very slow growth corresponds to Figure 7’s plateau. The WBE ontogenetic theory does not tell us anything about how long an animal will live per se. It simply describes how the mass of the animal varies as a function of time. However, we have already noted that there is considerable empirical evidence that both higher age and larger body size at maturity are positively correlated with greater longevity in extant animals. This is a particularly intriguing observation in light of the large body sizes of many pre-Flood creatures. We now briefly discuss five possible lines of fossil evidence (already published in the mainstream evolutionary literature) that animals, as well as humans, were experiencing much greater longevity than do comparable extant animal forms. However, before doing so, we need to address possible objections to such comparisons. In order to determine whether or not living animal representatives are shorter-lived than their pre-Flood ancestors, we need to compare ontological data from both before and after the Flood. In many cases, it is not possible to perform a true species-to-species comparison, as many fossil species are now extinct. However, the examples below involve comparisons between creatures with similar body structures, even if they have been grouped in different species or genera. Moreover, it is possible to use a calculated "index of growth performance" (Pauly and Munro 1984) to compare growth rates between different species, provided the species have similar body shapes (Killam et al. 2021). Also, given the “over-splitting” tendencies of many taxonomists, it is quite likely in many cases that different but similar species actually belong to the same Genesis kind. Hence, we should not let this prevent us from making reasonable comparisons, even if they are not necessarily intraspecific. Such a comparison implicitly assumes that paleontologists are accurately identifying and counting growth bands in shells, bones, and osteoderms. Or at the very least, it assumes that any systematic error in counting growth bands in pre-Flood fossils will be the same as any systematic error in counting growth bands in post-Flood remains. Note that the bands do not even necessarily need to be annual. As long as growth bands formed in the pre-Flood world represent the same units of time (years, months, or days) as in the post-Flood world, it is possible to compare pre- and post-Flood lifespans, even if we are unsure of the precise units of time that each band represents. I think we can be reasonably confident in these reconstructions, but I recognize the need for creationists to study their underlying assumptions more deeply before making strong claims in this regard. 1. Larger animal sizes Many creationists (e.g., Beasley 1990) have long-suspected that the giant sizes of many extinct fossil forms were linked to greater past longevity. Earlier in this section I cited, for extant animals, positive correlations between greater body size at maturity and greater longevity. If such a correlation held for extinct forms as well, then the large sizes of these fossil forms may be indirect evidence that they were long-lived. The particular case of sauropod dinosaurs is discussed in Section VD. 2. Long-lived and slow-growing bivalve molluscs Sclerochronology is the counting of growth bands in hard remans to infer details about an organism’s growth and ontogeny (Moss et al. 2021). A number of studies suggest that molluscs in the preFlood and immediate post-Flood worlds were experiencing much greater longevity than their modern-day counterparts. Kirby (2001) constructed growth curves for Miocene, Pleistocene, and Recent HEBERT Allometric and metabolic scaling 2023 ICC 215
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