Field of Science

Facebook battle over evolution

Today's Darwin's birthday. Here's his present.



On Facebook I have joined the group We can find 1,000,000 people who DO believe in Evolution before June (go here to join it).

It was created as a reaction to the creationist group we can find 1,000,000 people who don't believe in Evolution befor June.

[sic]

So how's that going for them?

Well, the pro-evolution group now has a little over a quarter of a million members. The number of members by date looks like this:



Since the goal is to get a million by June, I here add that datum, and as we can see, the increase in members per day would have to fall considerably to fail reaching that goal.



I didn't take the data for the creationist group, but for the past couple of weeks the evolutionists have had approximately 4.5 times as many members as the creationists, and if we assume that that ratio holds all the way to June 1st, then the creationists won't make it.


Here I have taken the member count from the evolutionist group and added (June 1st; 4,500,000).

This little analysis assumes that the member increase per day in both groups won't change, which is arguably a bad assumption. Growth curves like these are usually exponential, and the blue one above might be that, even though if we take out the first and last data points, then the curve looks pretty linear. Either way, it looks plausible that the evolutionists will reach a million by June, and probably much earlier (my money is on March 10th), while the creationists aren't going to make one million by June 1st. Depending on the slope of the exponential they just might, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were them.

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