Created kind: Encyclopedia II - Created kind - Hypothesized kinds

Created kind - 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".
• Crocodilia — Including all the varieties of alligator, crocodile, and gharial.
• Elephants: African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) can mate and produce offspring, albeit short-lived, although they are officially classified as different genera.

Thus the created kind corresponds roughly to the family, and possibly even the order with the notable exception of humanity.[2]

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:

• Kekaimalu the wholphin is a fertile hybrid of two different types of dolphin, the false killer whale (actually a kind of dolphin), and bottlenose dolphin. Kekaimalu herself gave birth to a calf, showing she was a fertile hybrid. Thus these creatures classified as different genera are really a single polytypic (many-type) species.
• Bos (true cattle) and Bison (American buffalo) can produce a fertile hybrid called a cattalo. Bos and Bison are thus likewise the same polytypic species although they classified as different genera.
• Brassica and Raphanus are different plant genera which hybridize to what has been given a new generic name Raphanobrassica.
• The creationist Don Batten helped create a hybrid of the fruit species lychee (Litchi chinensis) and longan (Dimocarpus longana), again classified as different genera.

A canonical list of kinds has not been constructed and such examples are extremely provisional (with the exception of humans, on which there is a strong creationist consensus).

Creation biology looks to the animals visible in the fossil record (which creationists interpret as having mostly been laid down during the flood) as evidence that antediluvian life was much more diverse than life today. They reject the dating methods of paleontologists and geologists that determine the age of fossils from the order of the fossil record and instead believe that almost all fossils were deposited in a single catastrophic flood event and were sorted out by processes associated with the flood. (See flood geology for more on this topic.)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Hypothesized kinds", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki