Supporting life aboard the ark

Ultimately I think the problem is that creationists fail to recognize that any system of taxa is inherently approximate; the boundaries between "adjacent" taxa tend to be fuzzy. A lot of the time it's lingusitic - we call some animals "cats" but that doesn't mean that they have some unique cat nature that separates them from their close non-cat cousins.Lingusitically I don't think we really have the leeway anymore to make up a radical new name for an incipent species radically different from its ancestors. In that sense, the creationists are right - we'll never see a cat give rise to non-cats simply because in our langauge, cats could never change enough that we would stop calling them cats.It's a problem with our words, not biology. This makes it almost impossible to communicate, and I'm sure I've failed right here.

The current thought, as I understand it, is that chordates are decended from an invertebrate species that, as juveniles, have a primitive spinal cord which they then lose as adults. This is an example of Neoteny, I understand - the phenomenon where adult members of one species posess traits that are found only in the juveniles of a closely related species. (Certain human characteristics display the same neoteny to chimp juveniles.)This, if a creationist had been observing the event along with the scientist, he or she would have likely countered "Not speciation at all, but rather a degenerate form of this invertebrate. It stubbornly refuses to become an adult." Or something similar. I think this example shows how creationist demands for evidence of new taxa is a kind of loaded question.

Or, say, humans in boats? Clearly boat technology would have been available to the antidiluveans. Surely some communities would have been coastal, with a large amount of fishing. Even if it was a very, very sudden flood somebody might have been out fishing that very night.I'd give better odds on the survival of a few men or one man in a small boat than on the seaworthyness of one huge ark anyway.