Super Evolution and the Flood

mole, vole, lemming, chinchillaYou have ferret & wolverine which are both weasels which you don't have

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other

A wolverine is a weasel? I've always thought of a wolverine as this really really mean creature while a ferret is a house pet.To the rest of you people. You misunderstand my intention. I'm trying to make this list as favourable to YECs as I possibly can. Screw what the bile literally says about all kinds being saved. Let's just assume that some of them became extinct in the flood.Ok, back to the list. Try to think of the mammals that definitely can't interbreed with other mammals. Tonight, I will assume that the list we have then will be the list of mammals Noah had on his ark. I will then move on to reptiles. After reptiles, then birds. Then, hopefully by then our resident YECs will have already showed up and help us with our list. I can't wait till we get to the creepy crawly things like insects and arachnids.

I'm guessing your goal is to present a scenario as favorable to creationists as possible in order to remove possible objections. In that case you should merge "kinds" as often as seems to make sense.I think lions and tigers should just be cats.Squirrels and mice should just be rodents.Platypus should probably be monotremes, which would include the echidna.--Percy

While merging lions and tigers I can understand, squirrels and mice can't be merged. YECs also claim that there is a boundary to which kinds could never interbreed with other kinds. I'm pretty sure squirrels and mice can't breed with each other. Neither can echidna and platypus.

I guess you could read that as saying that all flesh died that moved upon the dirt, but I kinda thought it meant that all flesh died that moved upon the planet Earth. Or maybe I'm thinking of another verse altogether.I don't care enough to look it up.I does go to show that reading the Bible literally is stoopid.

Not nowadays, after all the super evolution took place, but back on the ark the rodent kind was different. The squirrel and mouse micro-evolved to their current shape from that rodent.

Give 'em a break and drop the interbreeding requirement. "Kind" has never really been defined, so why should you be the one to do it?--Percy

Percy is obviously what modern taxonomists would like to call a "lumper" (the alternative group being called "splitters"). However, I don't think "lumping" supports the YEC model under the implications of the OP. I would think, in order to make super-evolution feasible, you'd want as many starting kinds as Noah could possibly have fit on the Ark.Also note that, the more different the things are from us, the more tendency we have to "lump" them into larger and larger groups. Although people would likely call "jellyfish" one kind, jellyfish actually constitute an entire class of organisms (which would be the equivalent of citing a single "mammal" kind). I don't like this idea: science currently recognizes something like 2500 species of rodents (out of ~5400 recognized species of mammal).If you want a single rodent kind, you'd have to include prairie dogs, porcupines, beavers, naked mole rats and capybaras within that one kind. I think this is a little too inclusive to swallow, even for someone who believes in a speciation event every breeding season. Platypus and echidna are classified as separate families (sometimes orders), which is the equivalent relationship between dogs and cats. I wouldn't group these, basically on the grounds that it would be very difficult to hyper-evolve one into the other without a direct, divine intervention (for which they might as well just hypothesize a new Creation event).Side note: a baby monotreme is called a "puggle".

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Signed,
Nobody Important (just Bluejay)

I'm inclined to agree with you here. The problem with relaxing the interbreeding law is that humans and apes end up in the same kind, and Noah becomes the famed common ancestor. And we all know that in YEC circles, a "monkey" has never been known to give birth to a man, so the same must apply the other way around.Perhaps the definition of kind should be based around the idea that species of the same "kind" must have genomes more similar than humans and chimps.That might make for a very crowded Ark, though, and families like the bears and cats would probably need to be more than one kind.

Ah, so ape-hood could then be seen as an alternative explanation for the Curse of Ham (instead of the darkness of African peoples). You should post this on the "race issue" forum. Seriously, though, I think humans are allowed their own kind in YEC, on the grounds that we have the Bible and orangutans don't (or something like that). And, most YECists would object to your saying that we're anything like apes at all.Edited by Bluejay, : Grammar

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Signed,
Nobody Important (just Bluejay)

Taz,Can we combine dog and wolverine? That is if they can interbreed (if the wolf doesn't eat the dog) and have fertile offspring?

Sorry, my bad. I thought wolverine mean't wolf. I looked it up. Hey, you learn something new every day!

Good point. The biblical definition of kind is anything that decends from the same ancestrial gene pool. This makes it hard to identify as depending on how much evolution you agree with changes the amount of kinds at the starting point.The definition is clear, but the identification isn't, requiring lots of research.

I'm not a lumper. The goal isn't to devise a rational classification system - we already have one that works pretty well, it's just that creationists prefer the undefined "kind". Superevolution is the creationist proposal for addressing the space problem on the ark, so you have to balance the "fitting and maintaining all the kinds on the ark" problem with the "just how fast can evolution go" problem.So your points about which lumping might create bigger problems for superevolution than they save in space are good ones.Commenting on another decision Taz made, I disagree with removing aquatic mammals from the list, and later when we get to fish I'll even more strongly disagree with leaving them off the list, because global flooding including over the land would disrupt salinity/mineral levels everywhere. There's no way to know what level of salinity would be the result, and probably aquatic mammals would be better off than fish and other ocean/lake/pond life, but huge numbers of species of aquatic creatures would be doomed.--Percy

It wasn't meant to be an insult. I don't really think lumpers are bad people. If this is the case, perhaps the list should start in as general a form as possible, and expand as the Ark's size permits. So, instead of listing all possible small-scale kinds, we should start with worm, insect, tardigrade (plug), mammal, reptile, maybe turtle, bird, amphibian, etc., then ascertain the space we have left in the Ark to determine how much subdividing we can manage.The way we're going, we may have to come back and edit the mammal list to make room for dragonflies or parrots or something.Edited by Bluejay, : Added "small-scale"

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Signed,
Nobody Important (just Bluejay)