(July 20, 2014 at 5:52 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I think that even suggesting this is so is a stretch. Why? People couldn't have written about a flood that never happened? I doubt JK Rowling ever saw a magical car whisk kids of to fairy school.I think it could've been based on a real event; because of our limited sense of scope we tend to hit the hyperbole button pretty hard when things get a bit crazy. I can recall any number of times when people caught in a real-life disaster (like a tornado or hurricane) would later claim that it "felt like the end of the world." Pretty heavy stuff, for an event that might only have affected 1/100th of 1 percent of the world's population.
All you needed was for a few people to talk about a small local flood that nearly wiped out their village (all seven clay huts!) and for the cro-magnon version of Michael Bay to overhear it as he was sitting at his clay tablet, short on ideas that day.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould