Define "Kind"

So have you come up with an objective way of determining degrees of relatedness among animals within Kinds?What about the degree of relatedness *among* Kinds, or do you deny that there is any?My point is, we have no a priori reason to weight similarities in behavior more heavily than similarities in morphology. That is a subjective judgement you are making. And by the way, behavioral traits work very poorly as criteria for relatedness. They are too
phenotypically flexible (this complicates objective measurements) and far too variable within lineages to be very useful as distinguishing features *of* lineages. They also tend to be very poorly conserved over time compared to morphological traits or others that are more directly linked to genetics.

OK. My point is this. Science has to remain an objective process. We can't have predetermined ideas about how things MUST work. Science has developed very objective procedures for quantifying (

That's fine Faith, you are free to 'like' anything you want.
But science eschews the subjective and demands objectivity.
In science, subjectivity implies inherent bias.For example, I might say I want to study weevil evolution.
I also like to study behavior so I am going to catalogue all the behaviors of my group of weevils and rank their relatedness according to the number of behavioral similarities.That would be a rather subjective approach because I have decided a priori that behavior is going to reveal relatedness without any evidence to support that assumption. A better (objective) approach would be to say I am going to examine a series of non-transcriped DNA segments cut at random with some enzymes and see how much sequence similarity there is between them. This is a more objective approach because I am not deciding before hand that any one section of NT DNA is any more important than any other. But I know that the longer the different species have been separate, the more changes they will have accumulated in these sequences *simply by chance*.We have to have objective means of measuring relatedness.
There is nothing objective about the term 'kind'.
Rather it seems to be subjectively defined as 'things that look pretty much the same'.This message has been edited by EZscience, 02-21-2006 02:06 PM

We aren't trying to overrule God. It is the opposite
Creationists are trying to overrule science with the Bible.
And how is that objective? Just because someone puts forward an 'idea' doesn't mean that scientists should drop everything to go and test it.
First it must be shown that the idea has sufficient merit to warrant investigation. This is where the 'idea' of a kind fails.
It is the responsibility of the idea's proponents to produce some evidence of its merit. And again, you can't seem to.And Darwinism did not eliminate the Bible as a source of anything.
The Bible simply is not a science text, nor was it ever intended to be used as one, I suspect.

Don't you think it's possible that the idea of kind was put forward by the author(s) of the Genesis, whether inspired by God or not, to simply to account for the obvious differences they observed in living things because they lacked any deeper framework of biological classification?How can you be so sure that 'kind' is a meaningful distinction among living things, or that God intended it to be used as such ?
This seems to be your inference, but I seem to recall only a single passing use of the term in Genesis.

OK. No room for further debate there.
So there are kinds of organisms that were originally defined by God.
Do you think God would be upset with us for coming up with other, dare I say more operationally useful, ways of categorizing His living things?
Because the concept of kind hasn't proven to be very useful yet.
On the other hand, the Linnean system has been very useful.
Did you know Linneaus was a devout Christian who felt he was doing God's work in coming up with an objective system for cateloging His Creations?ABE: Point being, Linneaus did not feel compelled to retreat to use of the term 'kind' - the subject of his whole life's work suggests that he considered the term grossly inadequate.This message has been edited by EZscience, 02-21-2006 02:49 PM