Species/Kinds (for Peg...and others)

I refer you to my previous post on this The Kind: Comedy Gold discussing the silliness that equating kind with interbreeding leads to according to Creationism's finest bariminologists Ha ha ha! So wild and domestic can't interbreed? Dogs and wolves? Domestic Cats and the Wild Cat? Lab rats and wild rats? Domestic goats and mountain goats? Horse and Zebra? The list trots on and on and on.Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

Yes, it does. Which is yet another reason why the Ark story is silly. According to you every human on earth traces their entire genetic lineage to a handful of people 4000 years ago, as does the entire variety of life on earth. Every individual "wild cat" comes from just two individuals. Think about it. Not only did this miraculous pair somehow manage astounding evolution producing dozens of radically different species that mysteriously seperated around the globe but also somehow managed to avoid any harmful effects of inbreeding.

And do the dates of these lines match up? (Clue: it's not an affirmative).Because, ta-da, the genetics are categorically not those of a population of handful a few thousands years ago. Common ancestors are inevitable, what they are not is a point in time when there was just a handful of people. Mitochondrial Eve was not the only woman alive at that time (she might not even be an individual at all!). Y-Chromosome Adam was not the only man alive at that time. The MRCA was only one of tens of millions.Also, don't you think it's spectacularly dishonest of you to claim that the very same techniques used by geneticists are real, proper, valid science when you think they support you but reject them when they show we diverged from Chimps 6 million years ago?

According to Creationism's finest Barimimologists, they'd all be one species. I linked to some classic papers by these fine academics in a previous postGo on, have giggle or a cry (not sure which).

Since you're making this criticism of the word 'kind', you will doubtless be able to explain how 'species', 'genus', 'family', etc. meet the criteria. A clear, unambiguous definition for each please?But, of course, as we well know there is no clear, unambiguous definition of any of these taxonomic concepts just as there is no clear definition of life. Attacking the Kind concept on the grounds that it lacks a single clear definition is hypocritical at best.No, the problem with the Kind concept is not that defining it in field-applicable ways* is problematic (and, in fact, Bariminologists are much clearer about how to identify kinds than you suggest) it's that reality doesn't contain Kinds so any methodology for identifying them leads to absurdity. Hence the classic babbling I linked to earlier in this thread.Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

I'm going to drop the term Kind and start using Baramin, since the Creationist notion of Kind is so floppy it's practically equivocation to talk about it meaning anything in particular. Kinds were invented as a simple get out clause and are still used by many Creationists that way; but the Baramin is a more evolved and refined concept.The Baramin is defined: a baramin consists of all creatures descended from an original created creature (or pair thereof, one presumes). These is a further operational criteria: two creatures are of the same baramin if (but not only if) they can hybridise. Non-hybridisation does not demonstrate that they are different baramins. (So if A hybridises with B and C, C with D, and D with E; A, B, C, D and E are all in the same baramin even though B and E can't hybridise)This is a mathematically well specified concept which can divide a subset of life (that which reproduces sexually) into one or more distinct sets. The exact way that baramins divide up life can only be determined by empirical observation.If I say "cats" are a baramin and "dogs" are a baramin and you find a cat and a dog that successfully hybridise you don't prove there aren't baramins you prove that cats and dogs are in the same baramin.So, attacking the baramin concept either on the grounds that it isn't exactly defined is wrong, and attacking it on the grounds there isn't a complete list is wrong. Where next? Well, the problem for the baramin concept is that it doesn't reflect reality - there are no originally created kinds, there was no flood, all life does share a common ancestor.I'd suggest a more empirical attack is needed. Fortunately Bariminologists are doing the work for us here. Read a paper or two by these poor souls and look at the conclusions. They're absurd: searching for baramins isn't generating a clean list of sensible baramins it's producing a laughable mess that reverberates with hyperevolution and absurdity.

Why are Christians so damn ignorant of the history of their own religious ideas?The idea of the word having any special meaning at all, especially the Creationist Baramin meaning, dates only to the last century. For thousands of years of Jewish though, and almost two millenia of Christian thought no-one thought 'kind' meant anything special. They just thought it meant 'kind'; they didn't invent a special meaning for the word - that took modern fundamentalist (who, of course, carry on pretending they're reading "literally").

That evolutionary rates of change are more rapid on the smaller scale is well known. The decay in rates of change is so rapid however, that it is measurable even over observed timescales. There are at least three reasons for this:1. Measurements of change look at Morphology and, as we all know, phenotype is only partially dependent on genotype. It's thus unsurprising that phenotypic rates of change are more rapid than genotypic rates of change.
2. Even directional selection pressures are monotonically applied, the fluctuations in selection pressures due to random environmental changes are strong in the short term but overwhelmed in the longer term.
3. Short term change can exploit recombination of existing genetic variation; longer term change requires fresh mutation.Secondly, your word "incredulity" is ill-chosen. I'm not incredulous that such change could occur. It just doesn't and it certainly didn't. Our observations both of living species - their biogeography, their morphology and their genetics - and of the fossil record absolutely do not accord with the picture required by Creationism.

That is not anywhere in the Bible. There is not a single passage that states things cannot become another kind.Kind in the bible is used exactly as we'd use the term in casual conversation to mean, i.e. to mean 'type of thing' - although, of course, we can't know exactly what the scribe writing in 500-1000BC meant. Only if you're equivocating on what you mean by 'kind'.

The point Arphy is making is that rates observed in living populations don't match with rates measured in the fossil record. This isn't hypocritical; it's proof by contradiction that the fossil record is flawed.His conclusion is wrong, of course, but his* point is certainly not hypocritical.* - I'm using male pronouns. Is that correct, Arphy?

It doesn't mention it. It also doesn't mention King David pooing but I think we can safely assume he did. Just because something is not mentioned doesn't mean it doesn't happen. We have plentiful fossil records showing the transitions of species into different species, genus into different genus, etc., etc. I believe the concept of a baramin (Creationist kind) has no reality, so talking about a kind becoming a different kind has no specific meaning. We are the descendents of single celled organisms - a very different kind of thing - of worms - a very different kind of thing - of fish, of amphibia, of therapsids, of cyconodonts, etc., etc.As for being "totally different" to single celled life. Yes, and no. We're remarkably similar in many ways to even Bacteria, a little more similar to Archaea, a lot more similar to single celled eukaryotes, particularly those such as the choanoflagellates. Among whose genes we find analogues for those that in our bodies help form the connective tissues that make us multi-cellular at all.Exactly as you'd expect given the fact of evolution.

"[F]ind all these fossils..." All these fossils? There ain't no such place. Anyone with any kind of fossil collection has a little bit of it. But like a million people owning a single piece of a jigsaw there's nowhere you can find all of it. Search around and you'll find a massive number of individual fossils which won't convince you. Why won't these fossils convince you? Two reasons: a. you don't have the education to understand them and b. no one fossil can prove anything.Now (a) may sound like an insult or a dismisal but it's not. Biology is hard; you want to judge it seriously you need to spend at least a decade studying it*, you want to understand why that ridge means this or that ridge means that you need to understand way more than "oh look it's a monkey".Truth is, fossils are two a penny and all the best ones need you to understand a whole load of (a) to grasp the significance of them. Do you even know what the choanoflagellates I mentioned in my last post are? No? Then why do you think you can talk about this and say anything worth listening to?

Do you know what forams are, ICANT?Foraminifera isn't a species, not a genus, not a family, or an order or even a frickin' class. Forminifera is a phylum. A phylum! Saying there's no change because they're still forams is like saying a snake, a hamster, a bird, a whale, a sea cucumber, an eel and a frog haven't changed from their common ancestor because they're all still chordates.

Yes, dishonest of you.You claim that mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam support your story; yet, in fact, the dates for them completely demolishes any notion of recent creation. So you cherry pick the (inevitable, btw) fact there was a most recent common female ancestor and a most recent common male ancestor and because that vaguely matches with your myth and ignore the fact that the real science shows data tens of thousand of years before you claim the world was created, and you ignore the fact that according to the science they lived at times separated by tens of thousands of years and that, according to the science, they weren't the only people alive at those times.So all you've done is cherry pick a convenient fact you're going to endorse as correct whilst denying the methodology works when it goes against your mythology. That's dishonest, Peg, whether you like it or not. No, there is science, of which evolutionary science is one branch. I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

This is simply false. Writing dates back approximately 8000 years, and depending on how you wish to define writing you could make a case for 6000 years so I'll give you that. As for "language", no physical traces remain of what languages people spoke before the development of writing, but linguistic reconstructions suggest languages diverged in extant families at least 20,000 years ago. Artwork has a much longer history: we have known artworks from at least 40,000 years ago. And less certain examples that almost double that date.Settlements such as Ohalo II date to over 20,000 years ago, and there's a near continuous spread of settlements from that time towards the present, through sites such as Neve David and Abu Hureyra (where the first evidence of crop domestication comes from) through to the amazing atalhyk before we finally come within your made up 6000 year date with the first cities such as Uruk.You're simply wrong in your claim that we don't know anything about human settlements before 6000 years BP, and what's more what we do know simply doesn't correspond with your mythology. Instead we see a slow development of technologies and cultures, and not a single shred of evidence of a flood. Ignoring the inaccuracy of the term "subhumans": Neanderthals, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Australopithecus ramidus, etc., etc., etc. We don't have anything like a perfect record of extinct human ancestors; but there's more than enough of them to blow away any claim of "no link". And that's only the fossils; things get even better when you look at the genome.