Baraminology Basics

There are nearly two million species calling our planet home, and another 59,000 now-extinct species never to be seen again [1].  Most scientists believe that all of these lifeforms can trace their ancestry back billions of years to LUCA, one or more small, single-celled organisms considered the Last Universal Common Ancestor(s) of us all.

Many associate young-earth creationism with the concept of fixity of species — the idea that all living species exist in the same form today as when God spoke them into existence. But this notion doesn’t conform with what the Bible teaches, nor with what we can observe today. Species have changed quite a bit, even in modern times. The question is how these changes comport with the evolutionary theorist’s idea of millions of years.

Thousands, not Millions

But the “fixity of species” originated with ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, not the Bible. They believed that every species existed in an ideal form and could not change its essence. Instead, when the Bible refers to the major units according to which God created living things, it uses the word Hebrew min, or “kind.” The original instances of each kind would have had incredibly rich genomes. Consider, for example, the diversity we see just within modern dog breeds: collies, beagles, poodles, and dachshunds are just a few of the 450 breeds of dogs extant today. Add to that their wild ancestors — wolfs, coyotes, dingoes, hyenas, and foxes — and it’s easy to see the original gene pool must have been deep indeed. All these dog-like creatures belong to today’s Scientifically-defined family Canidae (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151911/). All of them likely make up a single created Biblically-defined kind: the dog kind. With so much original genetic diversity, ordinary cross-breading would create today’s species in mere thousands of years.

[1] “Catalogue of Life: 2018 Annual Checklist”. 2018. 

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