Noah's Ark and the animals

My 15 yr old daughter posed a question to me that I cannot answer. I was hoping someone here could.


If Noah only took 2 dogs, a male and a female, then how come we have so many species today? You would think we would just have one breed of dog.

My ultra religious parents gave me this answer but I dont buy it.."they interbred and mutated to create the different species."

reply to post by k21968


Your daughter is very smart and it is so fantastic that she is questioning everything that she has been taught. My son is the same. I just love the questioning minds of the children that are coming through now as they are no one's fools.

The answer is... there was no Noah's Ark and there was no great flood.

I guess that you take the story literally, that Noah built a sea worthy ship and took 2 of every kind of animal. That's a huige task. To do it correctly, you would need to take every kind of cat, lion,tigers, cheetahs, etc, birds, sparrows, parrots etc. Besides, how do provide proper nutrition for every beast? If the lions eat the lambs.....?

If you believe the story, but take a little imagination with it, could it have been that God helped Noah collect DNA from every species and that the Ark was a DNA holder? Then God worked his magic and repopulated the planet, just the way he created the Garden of Eden.

How would your 15 year old take that logic? I mean, just cuz nobody else knew about DNA back then, doesn't mean that Noah may not have been taught and helped in the gathering of it.

I thought the wolf was the ancestor of all dog breeds.

Fantastic question but the answer your parents gave is mostly correct. Oh, except that the Christian faith also does not seem to believe in evolution, several processes of which were used to theoretically recreate new species. My doubt lies in the quantity of time it would take to recreate the multitude of species that would have existed before the flood.

most dogs are a type of wolf so breed a wolf and a dingo or wild dog etc you get your answer also i see dogs trying to hump cats and even my leg LOL so they'll go with anything should make a good breeding program

reply to post by k21968


The answer is that there was no Noah's Ark and that it's a fairytale.

Originally posted by snowspirit
I thought the wolf was the ancestor of all dog breeds.

It is, human's domesticated them and bred them into all the different dog breeds.

reply to post by Australiana


If that's how you're going to.be then you should just exempt yourself from this discussion, her daughter is very intelligent and she also has the right to raise her daughter in whatever fashion she feels fit to. Her daughter as well as she can decide for themselves without your unecessary comment. In fact the Noah story has been scientificly proven, though it is not thought to have been a world wide event.

Originally posted by k21968
My 15 yr old daughter posed a question to me that I cannot answer. I was hoping someone here could.


If Noah only took 2 dogs, a male and a female, then how come we have so many species today? You would think we would just have one breed of dog.

My ultra religious parents gave me this answer but I dont buy it.."they interbred and mutated to create the different species."

So tell her the truth, that it is a fairytale. Otherwise, think of some incredible story that makes not one bit of sense scientifically. Better yet do what always happens when a young child or newborn dies and no good explanation is at hand, so people shrug, and say, "It was God's will." That "explanatiion" always seems to satisfy most religious people. After all, God is the one in charge and he must of had a very good reason to take an innocent, right?

reply to post by k21968

In the original source material for the Deluge story, we can see the Ark was more than likely an underwater boat (Su-Le-Le), so it may have been a submarine shape built by "Noah" (real name is Utnapishtim.. most favoured servant of Enki)

This Enki character, and his sister Nin-Hursag (later known as Ninurta and Isis) was responsible for the manufacture of the human form. A theory suggests they did so by learning about DNA and using that knowledge to create a mix to bring about the worker. In which case it is not such a stretch of the imagination to think the "Ark" carried dna material for the animals of the effected area rather than two of every kind of animal on the face of the planet. There is some evidence to suggest the manufacturing side of the story is correct, although many will argue without seeing the evidence once in their lives... can't blame them, the british museum keeps some things hidden well away.

I think the Deluge was more likely a large Tsunami instead of a world-wide deep Flooding. There is evidence to show the lands of ancient Sumeria were covered by a deep layer of silt at some time, so it had been inundated by ocean.

Many academics will attack these perceptions, some won't. I think it more plausible than thinking of the history only as Mythology as it makes a lot more sense than any other theory of how the Adamma (modern man) came to be.

I'd go with the truth

I've posted this before but here it is again.

She should've also asked why a "god" would kill innocent humans or animals if they touched "god's" means of conveyance.

In other words, when "god" came down onto Mount Sinai, he descended from the heavens in great smoke and fire and made the ground quake. Kinda like our space shuttle creates great smoke and fire and makes the ground quake.

Then "god" told Moses to make a perimeter around the "mountain" and that no one should touch it. And that anyone, whether it be man or animal, will surely die if they touched it. But why would you die if you touched a mountain? Why kill innocent animals for touching the mountain? Because it wasn't a mountain that "god" descended in or on. The "mountain" was "god's" spacecraft. And the spacecraft's propulsion created the smoke and fire and made the ground quake. And that same propulsion likely had radiational properties that would kill any living thing if they got too close. Hence killing man or animal.

"God" and the angels ascended and descended the heavens in spacecraft called chariots, amongst other terms used in the bible. Those intelligent beings created us in their image and likeness through genetics.

Now we can talk about Noah's ark. The logistics of building a wooden boat to carry some of every living thing on this planet is almost unthinkable. Not to mention the food requirements of every animal and insect. It would be virtually impossible.

The ark was a spacecraft with the DNA of every living thing on this planet. This planet could be wiped out and all life could be restored again with ease.

Now, to find the DNA samples of mosquitoes and spiders and destroy those samples.

It is such a let down to see people shoot down ideas simply because they don't agree with them. Why not try and actually answer the question instead of attacking a belief? There is world wide confirmation of a flood story, written in stone and told amongst a great many of peoples. Prove to us that it didn't happen, ranting over.

How about the genetic stock of those creatures had the parent dna to all other breeds. Along that line of thought, the same can be said of humans, everyone, all breeds came from Noah and his sons. As it stands right now, we are making great strides in genetic research, if there was a flood even and a "God" of some type, is it really a stretch to think that this "God" had a better grasp on genetics than we do right now?

reply to post by QuietSpeech


Two animals is not enough to keep a species alive. Widespread belief in ancient times does not make the story factual.

This thread is hilarious. So many people can't answer a simple question, so they write it off as a fairy tale. Ironic, since they always say Christians write off something they don't understand as, "God did it." I also find it ironic that people will argue about 2 dogs coming from Noah's Ark, but also support dogs coming from a far off ancestor, who came from slime, who came from an organism, who came from a single cell.

Anyways, OP, to answer your question - first, keep a few things in mind. One, there is only one species of Domestic dogs today, Canis Familiaris, (scientifically speaking, which are supposedly descendants from the Wolf species).

There are, however, somewhere between 300 to 400 different breeds of Dogs.

Now, to start off, we'll talk about the genome. Two genomes (male/female) can have 4 different alleles (variety of a given gene) between them for each gene locus.

There are probably some 30,000 genes in a wolf/dog, and if every gene locus were heterozygous (two different alleles), then for each gene there are 10 possible pairs of four types of allele (if the alleles are A, B, C, D; then the possible pairs can be easily calculated: AA, AB, AC, AD, BB, BC, BD, CC, CD, DD; for n types of allele, the number of possible pairs is n(n+1_/2).

Anyways, with sexual reproduction, this amounts to a potential # of different genotypes in the descendants of 10^30000 (Oddly enough, there are thought to be 10^80 atoms in the Universe.. Right). So, it appears only 2 wolves/dogs could produce quite a few descendants before the pattern would have to be repeated.


So, it seems likely that there would have been plenty of genetic potential to produce all the members of the dogs that we see today. And, to be generous, if we added degenerative changes due to mutations (which Evolutions love to champion), we have more than ample capacity in two animals to produce all the varieties of dogs/wolves/jackals that we see today.

reply to post by Lionhearte


Two animals is not enough to continue a species, the lack of genetic diversity will eventually cause the species to become sterile and die out.

My young son a few years ago also asked me a similar kind of question. He said that he knew that Adam and Eve had children, I think he said their names were Cain, Abel and Seth (all three were boys). But then he asked me how did Adam and Eve's boys have their children? Who did they have sex with to have their children Daddy?

I am sure that I read somewhere, long ago that Adam and Eve did have daughters, but quite a very difficult answer to give to quite a young child, especially when trying to teach the wrongs and rights within their lives. Very hard to give an answer without sounding incestuous.....

I just said, 'I dunno, ask your mom.' Funnily enough, she had the same answer, 'I dunno, ask your dad.'...........

Originally posted by Nosred
reply to post by Lionhearte

 

Two animals is not enough to continue a species, the lack of genetic diversity will eventually cause the species to become sterile and die out.

False. Genetic code contains the make-up that you will ever see in an Animal. Dogs are adaptive, they can adapt to survive in the Arctic, or survive the blistering heat of the Desert. They can be tall as a Great Dane, or small, like a Chihuahua. However, will you ever find a Dog that is as tall as a building? A dog as small as a Flea? A dog that can survive -100 degree temperature, or 300 degree heat?

No, it's all written in their genetic code. Selective breeding just determines which ones the owner wants to exhibit in the offspring by finding parents with that trait.

The dogs that were on Noah's Ark had the genetic DNA of their parents, and their parents' parents, and their parents' parents' parents.. and so on.