A somewhat amusing dig at those who take the six-day creation story literally (Young Earth Creationists) - such as the folks responsible for the unintentionally hilarious Creation Museum (tip richarddawkins.net). But also keep in mind that most Christians do not subscribe to this view.
By the way, it would have been great to mention or visualize spontaneous creation of species (just popping out from nowhere) over the course of Earth's history. I always find it amusing when creationists assert that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics (i.e. that the entropy always increases), but ignore the fact that their alternative method actually violates all sorts of laws, including the 2nd law and energy conservation. By the way, for clarification purposes, the point about the second law of thermodynamics is based on a misunderstanding of the law and also of evolution. Here check out 5 major misconceptions about evolution.
In 2005 Kurt Wise, creationist paleontologist who did his degree under Stephen Jay Gould, gave a talk on baraminology, the study of Biblical created kinds. The link to the MP3 is dead now but I'd downloaded it earlier. Here's a transcript of parts of it. (The ellipses cover a few sentences intervening between the transcribed parts. The last 6 paragraphs are a continuous quotation.)
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So horses are changing,we believe, after the Flood, producing a number of species. Actually 150, 200 species. Two horses, getting off the Ark, producing hundreds of species following the Flood.
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Created kinds are approximately at the level of families.
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If that's the case, then when Adam named the created kinds, specifically the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, not doing the oceans and not doing the plants, I'm thinking, I'm estimating he's only naming about a hundred critters.
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Furthermore, the Ark, I'm estimating, carried only about three ... aside from insects, which we can stick into one room, the Ark is only carrying probably 350 kinds of animals. In other words, I suggest only about 1,000 critters were on the Ark, besides the insects, of course."
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Within created kinds we've got some interesting things appearing. Because camels -- modern camels -- are within the camel created kind, but the earliest camels, as near as we can tell, getting off the Ark, in the oldest fossils, don't look like modern camels. They don't have humps, they don't have all the designs for lilving in the desert. That doesn't come until deserts appear, which comes significantly after, probably 200 years after the Flood before we start getting deserts. And so we don't have those designs. So where'd they come from?
We also don't have C4 photosynthesis, we don't have hypsodont [dentition], which are high crowned teeth that animals that eat grass have to have special teeth because the grass has silica in it that wears your teeth down. We don't have blowholes in whales until later in the record. These are things that appear later. We think that they appear within created kinds because they're designed into organisms in the creation, but are not expressed until they're needed, which would be in many cases after the Flood.
So it suggests that carnivory, the designs for being a carnivore, the designs for having thorns, are built into the original creation but but not expressed until they're needed. This is one of the most exciting areas of research in creation biology right now, is figuring out how this works.
Baramins, created kinds, are very different in the number of species they have. Plants and insects seem to have thousands of species per created kind. Mind boggling! Whereas within mammals, it's only about a hundred species per created kind so far as we can tell. And with humans it's only one species. So we have different sized created kinds.
We also realize that this diversification, this creating ability of species, has to happen in a very short time. We've got -- the Bible's mentioning in Job and Genesis, lions and camels and wheat. These are things that were produced later. And so that means that all those species had to have been in place by the time of Abraham and Job, even perhaps before him. So we're saying that this diversification, these thousands of species, hundreds of species, are produced within 200 years of the Flood.
So the concept we have right now of the Flood is that, you know, Abraham as he was growing up, every time he looked outside of his house, he's going to see a different species this week than has been seen on the planet -- nobody's seen this species on the planet earth..
And to think that no one noticed and recorded all those thousands and thousands of new species popping up all of the place in the 200 years following the Flood! Amazing! Second Law be damned!
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ReplyDeleteRBH: This is a great find! "Baraminology" - !! Didn't know about this specific term. Phew - Gould is feverishly turning in his grave right now.
Thanks for the transcription.