Within creation science endeavor of creation biology, created kinds are the supposed original forms of life as they are believed to have been created by God. Other terms employed by creationists for this concept include "kinds," "original kinds," "Genesis kinds," and "baramin." They are asserted to be a form of clade, because they refer to common ancestry. In contrast to the scientific principles of biological evolution, followers of creation biology argue that all life on Earth is not related, but that a finite number of created kinds were created separately a relatively short time ago, and that all speciation and microevolution proceeded from those original forms. This has given rise to baraminology, which is the most popular attempt within creationist circles to classify created kinds.
Mainstream science rejects the idealization of "created kinds" and creation science in general as a pseudoscience. This is mainly because the scientific evidence for common ancestry and the relationships of lifeforms in the biosphere corresponds most closely to evolutionary biology theory rather than to creation according to Genesis. The endeavor is also rejected by the many Christian denominations which do not subscribe to the fundamentalist doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.
Definitions
The concept of the "kind" originates from a literal reading of Genesis 1:12-24:
- And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind … And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind … And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so.
In 1941, creationist writer Frank L. Marsh in 1941 proposed that the Biblical created kind could be defined in terms of reproduction. He argued that as long as two modern creatures can hybridize with true fertilization, the two creatures are descended from the same kind. This idea has been adopted to support the practice of baraminology, the attempt to classify created kinds. Creation scientists posit that kinds are a form of clade, in that a posited kind displays evidence for common lines of ancestry among its member organisms. The few creationists who work to make the classifications have not so far come up with a consistent set of rules for establishing when this criteria is met. As such, kinds do not coincide with any particular level of taxon. In some cases, such as humanity, kinds coincide with species or genus. In other cases, such as Felidae, they may be equivalent to the family level of taxonic classification.
Microbiologist and creationist Siegfried Scherer refined the criteria to state that if two creatures can hybridize with the same third creature, they are all members of the same "basic type". Thus all members of a ring species would be members of the same basic type. Scherer also updated Marsh's explanation of true fertilization:
- Two individuals belong to the same basic type if embryogenesis of a hybrid continues beyond the maternal phase, including subsequent co-ordinated expression of both maternal and paternal morphogenetic genes.
There is some uncertainty about what exactly the Bible means when it talks of "kinds". The original Hebrew word used is min, which is used to describe a variety of organisms. Russell Mixter, another creationist writer, comments that
- One should not insist that "kind" means species. The word "kind" as used in the Bible may apply to any animal which may be distinguished in any way from another, or it may be applied to a large group of species distinguishable from another group ... there is plenty of room for differences of opinion on what are the kinds of Genesis. [1]
"Creation scientists" posit that the defining element of kinds is creationist-approved evidence for common lines of ancestry among the organisms in the posited kind. The few creationists who work to make the classifications have not so far come up with a consistent set of rules for establishing when this criteria is met. As such, kinds do not coincide with any particular level of taxon. In some cases, such as humanity, kinds coincide with species or genus. In other cases, such as Felidae, they may be equivalent to the family level of taxonic classification.
Kinds in the Tree of Life
The creationist "kind" is assumed to be based upon an idea that life in the past exhibited greater genetic diversity and heterozygosity than life today, in the form of "kinds" analogous to the liger, but with what creationists describe as "a more complete and diverse genome".
The
phylogenetic tree of modern
biology which shows superficial similarities in form and function to the creationist representation of speciation but is explicitly rejected by creationists.
As the name suggests, created kinds are held by creationists to have been created intact by a deity. Creationists propose that the development of the created kinds takes place through degradation of the genome, as natural selection and reproductive isolation, inbreeding, and genetic drift caused lifeforms to adapt to their environment by the loss of capacity to adapt to other environments. Speciation is claimed to be a side-effect of a degrading genome, and most is said to have occurred during and after the rapid dispersion immediately after a global flood that is reported to have occurred in Genesis. This event is said to have caused an extreme population bottleneck that responsible for major speciation events taking place within the space of 1000 to 2000 years.
The more technically minded creationists who ascribe to a belief in created kinds actually allow for a limited evolutionary processes. However, this evolution is claimed different from the mainstream science definition because it does not allow any "improvement" beyond the quality of the original kind. Criteria for what such "improvement" entails are described in terms of information contained in the genetic code, but ways to measure the proposed information content of a genome are not agreed upon by creationists.
The creationist view is directly related to the concept that the world was created in a state of purity from which it has steadily degraded, an idea encapsulated in the doctrine of the Fall of Man.
Mainstream scientists reject the idea of created kinds, pointing to the evidence of transitional fossils as evidence of the flexibility of species boundaries. Creationists reject this view, asserting that transitional fossils between higher taxa bear only a superficial resemblance to one or the other and show gaps which they claim are not feasibly bridged by any mechanism proposed by mainstream science.
The phylogenetic tree proposed by modern biology bears a striking if maybe superficial resemblance to this creationist idealization. The differences are mainly in the timeframes and the genetic scale on which variation is described as taking place. The evolutionary tree traces common ancestory through genetic models, comparative physiology, and the fossil record for all lifeforms on the planet while creationists discount most of the research in these areas. Some evolutionary proponets evaluating creationist ideas have pointed out that the mechanisms proposed for the development of created kinds are really backdoor acceptances of the processes of evolutionary biology but with the branches of the phylogenetic tree cut off at the proposed "original" created kinds. Those creationists who believe in a young Earth and support this idea of speciation curiously believe that speciation occurred much more rapidly than evolutionary biology describes it as taking place. For example, the felidae family would have had at most a few thousand years to completely speciate on a Young Earth while mainstream biology traces back the history of cat evolution over 40 million years.
Another difference between the evolutionary models and created kinds is that the two proposals indicate a different origin for biological diversity -- mainstream scientists rely on the processes of mutation, adaptation, natural selection, and genetic drift while creationists rely on arguments relating to the degradation of a more perfectly created genome as the only possible microevolutionary process that is acceptable. Creationists also have limited most of their discussion of life's origins to the crown eukaryotes though the bulk of the genetic diversity of life on Earth is found in the other branches of the tree of life. It is estimated that upwards of 90% of the evolutionary processes that occurred in the biosphere occurred and continue to occur in microbial life rather than in animals, plants, and fungi.
Hypothesized kinds
Creationists have proposed a handful of possibilities for the created "kinds":
- Humanity — Creationists reject any and all claims of evidence for a common ancestor between homo sapiens and other great apes. Creationist Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer concluded that H. erectus/ergaster, Neandertals and H. sapiens were members of the same basic type (which corresponds to a monobaramin) Homininae with the fossils called Australopithecus afarensis, A. anamensis, A. africanus, A. robustus, A. aethiopithecus, A. boisei and possibly Ardipithecus ramidus assigned to another basic type, Australopithecinae.
- Felidae — Creationists from Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research have proposed that the original kinds were comparable to the Liger and the Tigon.
- Canidae — Similar to the kind associated with cats, it is proposed that all canines had a common ancestor.
- Camelidae — Including both the camel and the llama, which are reproductively compatible, their hybrid offspring being known as "Camas."
- Crocodylia — Including all the varieties of alligator, crocodile, and gharial.
- Elephants: African and Indian elephants can hybridize yet they are classified in the same genus.
Thus the created kind corresponds roughly to the family, and possibly even the order with the notable exception of humanity.[2]
Creationists also point to known examples of hybridization to argue that the kind is broader than the biological species, and sometimes even than the genus. For example:
- Kekaimalu the wholphin is a fertile hybrid of two different genera, the false killer whale and bottlenose dolphin. Kekaimalu herself gave birth to a calf, showing she was a fertile hybrid. Thus these creatures classified as different genera are really a single polytypic (many-type) species.
- Bos (true cattle) and Bison (American buffalo) can produce a fertile hybrid called a cattalo. Bos and Bison are thus likewise the same polytypic species although they classified as different genera.
- Brassica and Raphanus are different plant genera which hybridize to what has been given a new generic name Raphanobrassica.
- The creationist Don Batten helped create a hybrid of the fruit species lychee (Litchi chinensis) and longan (Dimocarpus longana), again classified as different genera.
A canonical list of kinds has not been constructed and such examples are extremely provisional (with the exception of humans, on which there is a strong creationist consensus).
Creation biology looks to the animals visible in the fossil record (which creationists interpret as having mostly been laid down during the flood) as evidence that antediluvian life was much more diverse than life today. They reject the dating methods of paleontologists and geologists that determine the age of fossils from the order of the fossil record and instead believe that almost all fossils were deposited in a single catastrophic flood event and were sorted out by processes associated with the flood. (See flood geology for more on this topic.)
Created kinds and baraminology
The idea of created kinds was designed with the intent of providing a scientific alternative to the modern evolutionary biology. Its development is part of the broader efforts of creation science to combat what is seen as a bias against the perceived "truth" that the natural world was created according to descriptions in sacred texts. Groups of theologians, a small number of trained scientists, and lay believers have formed organizations devoted to promulgating creationism and the particular brand of theism that opposes most of the natural sciences' explanations for natural history. Their ideas are often subject to ongoing debate and are not accepted by the wider scientific community.
The attempt to classify created kinds has been called baraminology, a neologism devised in 1990 by Kurt P. Wise from the Hebrew words bara (create) and min (kind). The term "baramin" was coined by Marsh in 1941 to represent the different kinds described in the Bible in the Genesis descriptions of the creation and Noah's Ark, and the Leviticus and Deuteronomy division between clean and unclean. Baraminology has also been termed discontinuity systematics .
Baraminology aims to use four terms to distinguish groups of organisms: holobaramin, monobaramin, apobaramin, and polybaramin.[3]
- Holobaramin — A holobaramin is the set of organisms that belong to a single baramin. In other words, it is a group of organisms that (1) shares continuity (meaning that each member is continuous with at least one other member) and (2) is bounded by discontinuity. In this sense,universal common descent in the theory of evolution would suggest that there is only one holobaramin covering all organisms. Among creationists, humans necessarily form a holobaramin, since in creationist conceptions they were created specially and would not share ancestral or genetic relationship with other animals. Evidence to the contrary is explicitly rejected.
- Monobaramin — A monobaramin is a group of known species that share continuity without regard to discontinuity with other organisms. That is, it may be either part or all of a holobaramin. So, for example, dogs could be seen as a monobaramin from the holobaramin of the dog kind which also includes wolves.
- Apobaramin — An apobaramin is a group of known species that are bounded by discontinuity without regard to internal continuity. That is, it may be one or more complete holobaramins. For example, all plants together would form an apobaramin since (in creationist theory) they were not a single kind of plant at the moment of their creation (at least fruit-bearing plants and grass can be distinguished) but there is no single holobaramin that includes both plants and animals.
- Polybaramin — A polybaramin is an artificial group of known species that share continuity with organisms outside the group and discontinuity occurs within the group. That is, it consists of parts of two or more holobaramins and should be avoided, as it is comparable to a polyphyletic taxon in conventional systematics. For example, the mammals currently alive in North America would form a polybaramin.
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