Created kinds

Mainstream science rejects the idealization of "created kinds" and creation science in general as a pseudoscience. This is mainly because the scientific evidence for common ancestry and the relationships of lifeforms in the biosphere corresponds most closely to evolutionary biology theory rather than to creation according to Genesis. The endeavor is also rejected by the many Christian denominations which do not subscribe to the fundamentalist doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

Definitions

The concept of the "kind" originates from a literal reading of Genesis 1:12-24:

And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind … And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind … And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so.

Microbiologist and creationist Siegfried Scherer refined the criteria to state that if two creatures can hybridize with the same third creature, they are all members of the same "basic type". Thus all members of a ring species would be members of the same basic type. Scherer also updated Marsh's explanation of true fertilization:

Two individuals belong to the same basic type if embryogenesis of a hybrid continues beyond the maternal phase, including subsequent co-ordinated expression of both maternal and paternal morphogenetic genes.

One should not insist that "kind" means species. The word "kind" as used in the Bible may apply to any animal which may be distinguished in any way from another, or it may be applied to a large group of species distinguishable from another group ... there is plenty of room for differences of opinion on what are the kinds of Genesis. [1]

Kinds in the Tree of Life

The creationist "kind" is assumed to be based upon an idea that life in the past exhibited greater genetic diversity and heterozygosity than life today, in the form of "kinds" analogous to the liger, but with what creationists describe as "a more complete and diverse genome".

of modern biology which shows superficial similarities in form and function to the creationist representation of speciation but is explicitly rejected by creationists.

As the name suggests, created kinds are held by creationists to have been created intact by a deity. Creationists propose that the development of the created kinds takes place through degradation of the genome, as natural selection and reproductive isolation, inbreeding, and genetic drift caused lifeforms to adapt to their environment by the loss of capacity to adapt to other environments. Speciation is claimed to be a side-effect of a degrading genome, and most is said to have occurred during and after the rapid dispersion immediately after a global flood that is reported to have occurred in Genesis. This event is said to have caused an extreme population bottleneck that responsible for major speciation events taking place within the space of 1000 to 2000 years.

The more technically minded creationists who ascribe to a belief in created kinds actually allow for a limited evolutionary processes. However, this evolution is claimed different from the mainstream science definition because it does not allow any "improvement" beyond the quality of the original kind. Criteria for what such "improvement" entails are described in terms of information contained in the genetic code, but ways to measure the proposed information content of a genome are not agreed upon by creationists.

The creationist view is directly related to the concept that the world was created in a state of purity from which it has steadily degraded, an idea encapsulated in the doctrine of the Fall of Man.

Mainstream scientists reject the idea of created kinds, pointing to the evidence of transitional fossils as evidence of the flexibility of species boundaries. Creationists reject this view, asserting that transitional fossils between higher taxa bear only a superficial resemblance to one or the other and show gaps which they claim are not feasibly bridged by any mechanism proposed by mainstream science.

The phylogenetic tree proposed by modern biology bears a striking if maybe superficial resemblance to this creationist idealization. The differences are mainly in the timeframes and the genetic scale on which variation is described as taking place. The evolutionary tree traces common ancestory through genetic models, comparative physiology, and the fossil record for all lifeforms on the planet while creationists discount most of the research in these areas. Some evolutionary proponets evaluating creationist ideas have pointed out that the mechanisms proposed for the development of created kinds are really backdoor acceptances of the processes of evolutionary biology but with the branches of the phylogenetic tree cut off at the proposed "original" created kinds. Those creationists who believe in a young Earth and support this idea of speciation curiously believe that speciation occurred much more rapidly than evolutionary biology describes it as taking place. For example, the felidae family would have had at most a few thousand years to completely speciate on a Young Earth while mainstream biology traces back the history of cat evolution over 40 million years.

Another difference between the evolutionary models and created kinds is that the two proposals indicate a different origin for biological diversity -- mainstream scientists rely on the processes of mutation, adaptation, natural selection, and genetic drift while creationists rely on arguments relating to the degradation of a more perfectly created genome as the only possible microevolutionary process that is acceptable. Creationists also have limited most of their discussion of life's origins to the crown eukaryotes though the bulk of the genetic diversity of life on Earth is found in the other branches of the tree of life. It is estimated that upwards of 90% of the evolutionary processes that occurred in the biosphere occurred and continue to occur in microbial life rather than in animals, plants, and fungi.

Hypothesized kinds

Creationists have proposed a handful of possibilities for the created "kinds":

• Humanity — Creationists reject any and all claims of evidence for a common ancestor between homo sapiens and other great apes. Creationist Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer concluded that H. erectus/ergaster, Neandertals and H. sapiens were members of the same basic type (which corresponds to a monobaramin) Homininae with the fossils called Australopithecus afarensis, A. anamensis, A. africanus, A. robustus, A. aethiopithecus, A. boisei and possibly Ardipithecus ramidus assigned to another basic type, Australopithecinae.
• Felidae — Creationists from Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research have proposed that the original kinds were comparable to the Liger and the Tigon.
• Canidae — Similar to the kind associated with cats, it is proposed that all canines had a common ancestor.
• Camelidae — Including both the camel and the llama, which are reproductively compatible, their hybrid offspring being known as "Camas."
• Crocodylia — Including all the varieties of alligator, crocodile, and gharial.
• Elephants: African and Indian elephants can hybridize yet they are classified in the same genus.

Creationists also point to known examples of hybridization to argue that the kind is broader than the biological species, and sometimes even than the genus. For example: