hezekiah jones

From <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Ancient+DNA%22" target="_blank">ancient DNA</a>. I doubt that they do their own research though. Legitimate scientists probably have a hard enough time obtaining specimens from natural history museums.

theyeti

Hey ex-robot. I appologize if my reply last night sounded sarcastic; I was tired and grumpy.

[Quick note: make sure to look in peanut gallery #1 and not #2. There are other good threads around that same time.]

Notice though that the problem with hybridization that I brought up is acknowledged by them in the article that you linked to:

"However, we realize today that the lack of known hybridization between two members from different populations of organisms does not necessarily by itself mean that they are unrelated."

So this isn't a very useful criteria. I think that with most animals, the ability to hybridize shows a close relationship, but it's probably not the case with plants.

Oh they do hate each other. But there is one "kind" of people that they hate even more. And that is your average biologist that readily accepts Darwinian evolution. And of course, this is not an age of the Earth conference we're talking about, or there would be some serious animosity going on. YECs will often aim far more hateful rhetoric at OECs than they will at atheists.

It is often claimed that "kinds" rougly correlates to the family level; that claim was made in the Baraminology article that you linked to. But here's the real problem. All taxonomic categories above the level of species are completely arbitrary. There are no clear criteria for placing a group of organisms within a family, any more so than there is for placing them in an order, a class, or a phylum. This is clearly spelled out by systematicists -- the only thing required for a natural group is that it's monophyletic, meaning that it's comprised of an ancestor and all of its descendants. However, there are as many potential natural groups as there are species. Therefore, there is no clear-cut definition of "family", except for something that contains some number of genera each of which contains some number of species. Thus, if the creationists are relying on the Linnaean designation of "family", then they are using an arbitrary criterion for defining "kinds", and we're right back to square one.

Yes, but understand that all evolutionary divergences start out as speciation events. dogs and bears share a common ancestor (probably Cynodictis or something similar). That ancestral species split into some number of other species, and they were similar to begin with. However, once two lineages have diverged from one another, they will become more and more different over time, not more and more similar. Thus, after great enough time, one lineage has given rise to dogs, and another to bears. Within the dogs, one lineage has given rise to foxes, and another to wolves. Given enough time, foxes and wolves could each give rise to lineages that will one day seem as different as dogs and bears. At what point is it a new "kind"? As far as mainstream science is concerned, it is a meaningless question. "Kind" is an invention by creationism and is not descriptive of anything in biology.

These sorts of changes are far above the creation of new families. You could of course, at least potentially, trace the divergence of mammals and reptiles in terms of sucessive speciation events, with each new species becoming more divergent from the sister clade than the last. In fact, such a divergence is very well documented in the fossil record. Look for a recent thread on "mammal-like reptiles" or something similar started by Jesse.

Don't hold your breath waiting for them to do their own studies. They are not interested in science, they're interested in appologetics. All they want to do is "defeat evolution" and then go home, satisfied that the Bible is true word for word. They're not interested in learning about nature, they're interested in winning converts by convincing the public that evolution is wrong. I hate to sound cynical here, but it's pretty much the truth. So "knowing what they're talking about" doesn't really apply, because they already have all the answers they need. "Baraminology" is just a way to try to legitimize what they have already decided must be true based on what's written in the Bible; it is not intended to gain knowledge of or to give useful classifications to living things. There is already a system that does that just fine, and they want to replace it.

As for the rest of your post, I think we're pretty much in agreement.

You can't of course . What scientists do is to infer the relationship of extinct organisms by using morphology, biogeography, and the time in which the organism lived. Creationists vehemently deny the time scale, completely ignore biogeography, and have yet to tell us which morphological characteristics would apply. Like I said, right back to square one.

theyeti