[Avodah] Mitochondrial DNA and the Mabul

[Lisa Liel]

On 9/21/2012 3:00 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:16:54PM EDT, I wrote:
> : All of which assumes things about mutation rates etc... that need not
> : have been true before the mabul.
>
> The pasuq seems to imply that the spin and the tilt of the earth was
> involved in the mabul, as it invokes the [six] seasons, day and night
> in 8:22 -- od kol yemei haaretz ... lo yishbosu." (See Rashi ad loc.)
> The tilt causes the seasons, so a shevisah of the seasons implies that
> the mabul changed the earth's tilt.
>    

There's also an interesting fact from comparative linguistics. Akkadian 
is the language of Assyria and Babylonia. It's a semitic language, with 
many, many cognates in Hebrew. The word quššu (if the 3rd and 4th 
letters don't display for you, they're the letter s with an inverted 
caret (^) above it, which is how the sound of our tzadi is 
transliterated in Akkadian) in Akkadian means "cold". It also means 
"winter". And yet the obvious Hebrew cognate kayitz means "summer". 
While it's true that there seems to be a connection to the Hebrew keitz, 
so that the opposite meanings might be based on starting the year at 
different times, most evidence supports the fact that the Assyrian and 
Babylonian years began in the spring. So the words seem to imply that 
seasons changed at some point.

> According the Seforno, they didn't just halt during the mabul, the seasons
> didn't exist until after the mabul. And before the mabul, the sun was
> over the equator, and the whole world was in perpetual spring. Rabbi
> Yitzchaq in Bereishis Rabba 34:11 also says that all weather was like
> that between Pesach and Shavu'os. The Seforno adds that earth's orbit
> was also different. Crops grew better, and the resulting better nutrition
> explains the multi-century life spans.
>
> This in turn would do who-knows-what to the van allen belt a torus (bagel
> shaped) field of electrically charged particles held by the earth's
> magnetic field -- and thus the poles, the spinning core of the earth,
> etc... are involved in its maintenance.
>    
We know for a fact that the Earth's magnetic field has switched 
directions more than once, and the Van Allen Belt survived that.

But there are other possibilities as well. The Saturnian Configuration 
(http://www.sis-group.org.uk/silver/cardona.htm) is considered a 
crackpot theory, generally, but that's because it's equally unprovable, 
and goes against the uniformitarian hypothesis in a big way. I'm not at 
all convinced by it, but there's nothing about it that's impossible.

Numerous scientists have hypothesized that gravity was weaker when 
dinosaurs walked the Earth, because some of the dinosaurs were, due to 
the cube-square law, too big to move or keep their heads up. What would 
be involved for that to be the case? What other things that we consider 
"laws" would have had to have been variable? Again, it's hard to say.

And then there's Neal Adams' Expanding Earth theory 
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kL7qDeI05U), which suggests that the 
Earth was about half its current size initially, and that the upper 
techtonic plates fit together perfectly, covering the entire sphere of 
the earth.

Lisa