Liam

Hello all,

I'm sure it has been discussed before.. in fact I can't see how it could possibly not have been.. but as a regular at the beeb EvsC, the old "What is a kind? comes up every now and then.

So do we have a definition of one here yet? If you need to know the sorts of animals generally associated with the bible, it gives a fairly comprehensive listing in Deuteronomy, none of which would have been out of place 3-4,000 years ago in the middle East.

A kind is usually placed somewhere around the species level, until the team starts losing and the "jumpers for goalposts" have to be, shall we say.. adjusted to compensate.

The first of many questions concerning the definition is that do the YECs here regard birds as a kind,* or are the raven and the dove, for instance separate kinds**?

I ask, because if the former* there would be no need to take both the raven and the dove on board the Ark, as either would have been able to perform their specific duties without the need for the other. Or is it the latter, because if so, then that would of nessecity mean that the ark would have needed to carry breeding pairs of in excess of 8,500 different birds.

Of course, I understand that the answer may be that a bird is a bird is a bird and that a couple couple of different "kinds" would be the progenitors of the thousands of species we now have. A reasonable argument at first look, as they have a couple of wings, a couple of legs, a beak and the old avian respiratory system. Therefore they is birds.

But then you have a couple of things to explain about superfast "within kind" speciation. Such as how an ostrich can evolve (within it's kind, of course) a long flexible neck, but that a giraffe isn't able to, or that a penguin doesn't have hollow bones like the typical bird.

And, surprisingly neither are mentioned in Deuteronomy either. But then nor are Kangaroos, so as an aside, perhaps someone could explain where the marsupial kind popped up from, 'cos it's one hell of a jump from plancental mammals.. oh, and then you've got the platypus that looks a bit like a transition between the two.

I think that's enough for a first (on-topic) post .

Cheers

Liam

Coragyps

A creationist on another board I hang out on recently claimed that cows, buffalo, sheep, goats, and "probably most antelopes" were a single "baramin" or kind. But then he ran away without backing any of that up....

Baloo

The true irony being, of course, that the creationist was correct. All of these animals do fit into the same baramin. In fact, every living thing on the face of the earth fits into this baramin with them...

tgamble

It would be interesting to know if any member of that group had organs or IC systems etc. that the others don't have...

Antelopes don't have four stomachs do they? Like a cow does? Hmm, were stomachs lost or gained? What good would half a stomach be or 1.5 stomachs?

MortalWombat

So if there was only one "baramin" kind on the ark, how does he explain the fact that in order to get to the current diversity of artiodactyls would require a rate of evolution far greater than what is accepted by current evolutionary standards?

Liam

I take it by IC that you mean that good old, completely unsubstantiated, Irreducable complexity.

Digestive system = tube. In the simplest of organisms this is exactly what it is, goes in one end, the organism extracts the nutrients required and out goes whatever is left at the other end. So how, when that is pretty much the same system for all animals does it become so complex that it must have been designed.

If this tube happens to end up with a kink or whatever confered by a genetic mutation(s), that then becomes more efficient as a system (digestive enzymes, bacteria etc, become more concentrated in that particular area, thereby increasing the digestive ability of that organism in gaining fuel, and therefore energy) which then gives it a survival advantage over it's contemporaries ie. those without that mutation, then over time it is prominent in that particular population. To get another stomach, it only needs to happen again by the same process. When you have a cow that can better digest the celulose in grasses, then in a time when some environmental pressure leads to selection, those that have the advantageous digestive system, survive to reproduce while those that don't.. erm.. don't.

All you need is loads of time and occasional mis-replication of the gene, that at some stage turns out to be beneficial.

Time for a drink.. I think

Cheers

Liam

[ October 28, 2002: Message edited by: Liam ]</p>

tgamble

I meant systems that are claimed to be IC. Yystems that exist in some members of a "kind" but not others of the same kind, thus making it nessasary for it to either evolve or disappear for some reason.

IC systems exist, as long as you don't include in the definition that they can't evolve.

lpetrich

These are all in the family Bovidae in Artiodactyla. Cows (Bos) and buffalo (Bison) are in the subfamily Bovinae and sheep (Ovis) and goats (Capra) in the subfamily Caprinae; this family also includes lots of antelope-ish beasts.

This family is diverse enough to require a fair amount of evolution to produce; simply consider its variety of horn shapes.

Of course, the question of what's a baramin does not stop here. Does it include other 4-stomached ruminants (Pecora), like deer (Cervidae) and giraffes (Giraffidae)? Does it include the mouse deer (Tragulidae)? Does it include other artiodactyls?

Some nice guides: <a href="http://www.ultimateungulate.com/artiodactyla.html" target="_blank">Ultimate Ungulate's classification</a> and <a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/walker/artiodactyla.html" target="_blank">Walker's Site</a>.

lpetrich

And instead of thinking of its adaptive value, one ought to think of how some organ gets produced. That will give important clues as to why we see some features and not others.

In the case of ruminant digestion, it is a straightforward path from a simple tube. Have some parts of it be wide, have the muscles capable of pinching shut the tube in certain spots, do backward swallowing (vomiting) as a "normal" action, etc.

The ultimate in this line of investigation is finding out how one gets from genes to a gut, though I'm not sure how far the work has gotten. Fruit flies have ParaHox genes which are involved in patterning its gut, different ones specifying different parts. So something similar could be going on with ruminants. It would be interesting to see how the genetic controls work for those stomachs. The final stomach corresponds to the nonruminant stomach; are the others produced by using the same genetic mechanism or by some newly-invented one? Or some combination?

lpetrich

While we are on the subject of ruminants, why do they need to have fermentation-vat stomachs? Why do they need to have a big colony of microbes do much of their digestion? Ruminants need the same "essential" amino acids and coenzymes in their diet as does the rest of the animal kingdom; though these are not supplied in sufficient quantity by their food, these are nevertheless supplied by those rumen microbes.

And an intelligent designer that can design extra stomachs can certainly place EAA and coenzyme biosynthesis genes in the animals' genomes. It's much like the situation with aphids, whose endosymbiotic bacteria perform a similar nutritional contribution.