Classification of Species “According to Their Kind”

The Core Truth of Genesis Chapter 1


 

Genesis 1 repeatedly states that God created creatures separately according to various “kinds.” Today’s species show the potential variation that God designed within the original kinds, but this variety remains limited to the traits already encoded in the kind’s genome. Dogs only have dog descendants, monkeys only have monkey descendants. The Biblical account clearly states all the kinds were created at one time, and all resulting offspring are based on the original rich gene pool in each kind.

The well-publicized phylogenetic tree, often called the “Tree of Life”, is a taxonomy devised to show the presumed evolutionary relationships among different organisms. It aims to map the eight levels if organism groupings based on morphology — domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species — to evolutionary relationships based on the theory of speciation. It is speciation, say evolution’s proponents, that bridges the gap between changes within a kind (i.e., loss of genetic information) to changes across kinds (i.e., addition of new genetic information).

In contrast to evolutionists “Tree of Life”, there is no one single structure that illustrates the common lines of descent of all organism. This arises naturally out of the Biblical statements that not all creatures on Earth are genealogically related, but that living organisms were created by God in a finite number of discrete forms with  genetic boundaries to prevent interbreeding (Genesis 1:24). Thus each baramin, or kind, has its own hereditary tree.

A good way to understand how scientists classify individual organisms within specific baramins is through two standard statistical baraminology techniques: baraminic distance correlation (BDC) and multidimensional scaling (MDS). BDS is a statistical clustering method that analyzes the probability that various species pairs are related, by calculating genetic distance. MDC is a method of visualizing those distances.

One paper illustrating these methods is A Survey of Cenozoic Mammal Baramins, (Thompson, C., and T.C. Wood. 2018. A survey of Cenozic mammal baramins. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, ed. J.H. Whitmore, pp. 217–221. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship.)

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Baraminology

A Scientific Taxonomy Based on Created Kinds


With years to develop evidence of the theory of speciation by natural selection of mutations, evolutionists have yet to provide a single example of Darwin’s “descent with modification”. As a result, a new taxonomic approach classifying modern creatures—based on Genesis’ original created kinds—lead to the new discipline known as baraminology. Is there any way for a scientist to identify the original kinds the Bible claims?

Darwin’s evolutionary model depends on small, incremental changes over millions of years to yield today’s wide variety of species. But such long time intervals are imposed by Darwin’s theory itself — it’s not supported by the data. If speciation derives from ordinary genomic recombination by reproduction within a fully developed kind,  the extant variety of species could easily develop over just a few thousand years. It is just this premise examined in the article Getting Enough Genetic Diversity, by Dr. Nathaniel T. Jeanson (Answers in Genesis, July 23, 2016,

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Genesis 1

The Personal Creator

Jesus was the creative part of the Trinity


Although not generally known by those not schooled in Biblical teachings, scripture claims more than Jesus is the Son of God. It also identifies Jesus to be the Creator of All Things.

Colossians 1:14-16 states “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins: Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him [Jesus] were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”