Noah's Ark - viruses, germs, and bacteria
From PhiloWiki
How were all viruses, germs, and bacteria preserved?
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Christian views - Fundamentalism
Viruses, germs, and bacteria may have been capable of surviving in harsh environments in the past than now. Some may have lain dormant. Others may have survived in their hosts without causing desease.
- Resources are needed. Feel free to find and add resources.
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Secular views
The literal interpretation of Noah and his Ark detracts from the validity of the Bible.
- "Many diseases can't survive in hosts other than humans. Many others can only survive in humans and in short-lived arthropod vectors. The list includes typhus, measles, smallpox, polio, gonorrhea, syphilis. For these diseases to have survived the Flood, they must all have infected one or more of the eight people aboard the Ark.
- Other animals aboard the ark must have suffered from multiple diseases, too, since there are other diseases specific to other animals, and the nonspecific diseases must have been somewhere.
- Host-specific diseases which don't kill their host generally can't survive long, since the host's immune system eliminates them. (This doesn't apply to diseases such as HIV and malaria which can hide from the immune system.) For example, measles can't last for more than a few weeks in a community of less than 250,000 [Keeling & Grenfell, 1997] because it needs nonresistant hosts to infect. Since the human population aboard the ark was somewhat less than 250,000, measles and many other infectious diseases would have gone extinct during the Flood.
- Some diseases that can affect a wide range of species would have found conditions on the Ark ideal for a plague. Avian viruses, for example, would have spread through the many birds on the ark. Other plagues would have affected the mammals and reptiles. Even these plague pathogens, though, would have died out after all their prospective hosts were either dead or resistant."
