#THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE 3 DARWIN FULL#

In fact, if creationists were presented with only the eight “ancestral” species depicted above, they would likely group most or all of them into a single baramin based on their obvious similarities. Creationists claim that the various “baramins” all have intrinsic, essential differences that render them totally unique and distinct from one another, but the presumed ancestors of each of these groups are all very, very similar.

#THE INCREDIBLE MACHINE 3 DARWIN FULL#

The depicted representatives of Canidae (canines) and Felidae (cats) have specifically been identified by Answers in Genesis others have been selected from the largest, most “advanced” extinct members of the clade or superclade known from full fossil skeletons. One of the largest such postings, “ Mammalian Ark Kinds” by retired veterinarian Jean Lightner, organizes the majority of Order Carnivora into eight distinct “baramins”: felines, civets, dogs, hyenas, bears, mongooses, weasels, and red pandas.Įach species most likely to be identified by AiG creationists as representative of the “original created kind” within each of their “baramin” groups (see footnote for more). The Answers in Genesis website has repeatedly posted large, detailed lists of various species, families, and orders with attempts to organize them into baramins. Ironically, this problem is perhaps nowhere more apparent than with the very clade (the technical/evolutionary equivalent of the term “kind”) to which cats and dogs belong: Order Carnivora. Unfortunately for the young-earth model, the push to minimize the number of animals riding on the Ark has exposed a major problem with this view.

Their most well-known example of “kinds” is the difference between cats and dogs, where they explain that the diversity of dog breeds is the result of “microevolution” from some original dog/wolf kind, but that dogs will never “macroevolve” into cats.

These definitions beg the question by assuming such things as discrete “kinds” exist, but creationists are nonetheless insistent that while adaptation or speciation within a particular “baramin” is observable (and, indeed, necessary in order to account for the present observed diversity of life), there is never any overlap between separate kinds. In response, creationists (particularly the young-earth crowd) protested that while “microevolution” was a viable, observable process in biology which they accept as “change or speciation within a kind”, the notion of “macroevolution,” or “change between kinds”, remains impossible. Although early opponents of Darwinian evolution categorically denied that speciation or natural selection were possible at all, advances in genetics and biology made this position completely untenable. One well-known hallmark of modern young-earth creationism is the dogma of separation between “microevolution” and “macroevolution”. The smaller the menagerie the Ark was purported to have contained, the more feasible it seems, and so the “baraminologists” at Answers in Genesis have gone to great lengths to explain how the vast array of species today could have been represented by a relatively low number of ancestral pairs. This consolidation of numerous species into single “baramin” groups is driven primarily by the space on Noah’s purported vessel. **Īs the strict young-earth creationists at Answers in Genesis work to complete their Ark Encounter “theme park,” they have expended an impressive amount of energy organizing the millions of species of land animals alive today into a handful of small groups they call “baramins.” They claim these groups represent the original created kinds of which Noah would have brought pairs onto the ark.

Please welcome David MacMillan* as a guest author today on Naturalis Historia.

The incredible machine 3 darwin