Kreated Kinds - Just What are They?

[WinAce]

As I see it, creationists have an extreme dilemma when confronted with the sheer diversity of life. They can either define a "Kind" very specifically, which would make Noah have to take hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of creatures, or they can define it broadly - in which case, a single kind can encompass a range of variation bigger than that between human and chimp.

Case in point - the tarantula. Are tarantulas a "created kind"? Some of them have a nifty and "irreducibly complex" defense mechanism - urticating hairs (http://www.arachnophiliac.com/burrow/urticating.htm) - that they flick at opponents like spears.

http://www.arachnophiliac.com/burrow/gallery/tarantulas/hairs.jpg

Looking at these things, one can see that a single ancestral kind accounting for these 4 types of hair without creating new structures is all but impossible. The type 1 hair is simplest, but it has features the others lack. Similarly, the others have features the rest lack. If one postulates that tarantulas have a common origin, one must admit the fact that the mechanisms of evolution can work with, modify and even produce complex structures.

Such structures with a great range of variation in closely-related species abound in nature. Few would dispute that squirrels and flying squirrels share a common ancestor, and yet the latter can glide using a rudimentary wing flap. One could postulate it as the ancestral squirrel "kind", with ordinary ones losing that ability later on, but there are no indications from any line of data that they were. We would expect, for example, every squirrel to have vestigial wing flaps or something.

Any way you look at it, if you allow "microevolution" into the door and recognize that small changes can create a new species, you admit that extant species share a common ancestor.

And since extant species have complex "specified" information, useful traits, adaptations (or call it what you will) that the hypothesized ancestors didn't, you're reluctantly forced to admit that evolution can produce pointy hook barbs on hair, wing flaps and tails that can be used as aerorudders, and other things - which is one step short of admitting that evolution can modify barbed scale into a feather, a wing flap into a wing...

[Socrates]

Once again, Winace, like all evolutionary propagandists, sets up a straw man. First, creationists do NOT deny speciation, and second, he has not shown that mutation/selection has generated genuinely new information.

Micro v macro-evolution is a non-issue, since it's not the size of the changes, but the direction of the changes that matters.

Further, Winace brings up the Ark cargo yet again, although the Hebrew specifies only land vertebrate kinds. If they corresponded to today's genera, then only about 16,000 animals would need to be on board. If they corresponded to tday's families, then the number would be far less.

[WinAce]

Today @ 10:49 PM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=79133#post79133)
Socrates:

Once again, Winace, [like all evolutionary propagandists], sets up a straw man.

1. I'm surprised that quoting your post allows me to see what the moderator removed.
2. I like the term "evolutionary propagandist". I think that'll be my new title. :ahem:
3. No strawmen here - just pointing out an obvious problem with the creationist viewpoint.


First, creationists do NOT deny speciation,

Well, some do.


and second, he has not shown that mutation/selection has generated genuinely new information.

I haven't? Alright, let's have a pop quiz.

You have two species (in the same family) that presumably were produced by an ancestral 'kind' speciating. Each of them has structures not found in the other, with no indications of having had those structures previously (like vestigial or atavistic versions of the trait, pseudogenes coding for that trait, etc.)

Alright, and we're supposed to trust that those new structures, ones that are complex, specified and unique, arose from an ancestral species without an increase in whatever today's creationist definition of "information" is.

Is that the gist of it?


Micro v macro-evolution is a non-issue, since it's not the size of the changes, but the direction of the changes that matters.

Uh-huh.


Further, Winace brings up the Ark cargo yet again, although the Hebrew specifies only land vertebrate kinds. If they corresponded to today's genera, then only about 16,000 animals would need to be on board. If they corresponded to tday's families, then the number would be far less.

No, my criticism was right on target. You are familiar with the sheer range of variation in a genera or even family, right?

Your position basically requires every complex structure in every descendant species of the original "kind" to have been originally present in the ancestor, even when mutually exclusive structures are present. To say otherwise would be to admit new information was produced by its speciation. :bonk:

[Socratism]

Your position basically requires every complex structure in every descendant species of the original "kind" to have been originally present in the ancestor, even when mutually exclusive structures are present. To say otherwise would be to admit new information was produced by its speciation

I fail to see that this is the case.

Part of the problem is viewing DNA as being a "blueprint" analogous to what humans generate in order to specify how something is to be constructed.

For example it is well known that "identical" twins are not really identical. Why?

There are many other mysteries of this type lurking in the background and it will be many years before the details of developmental biology will be understood well enough for final pronouncements to be made.

As one worker in the field stated, "developmental biology is so complex as to be virtually unknowable". I would not share this view but I would say that it is going to take much longer than most think to unweave the mysteries which lie ahead. It has taken 50 years to go from the discovery of DNA to the decoding of the human genome, and the more difficult task of determining how all of it works will probably take far longer.

[NeilUnreal]

This is kind of OT, but one time I got urticating hairs from a caterpillar in my mouth (long story). It was an unforgettable and not-to-be recommended experience :help:

-Neil