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Saturday, December 31, 2016

Reproduce according to their kind

What exactly is a species?  We know that species evolve into one another (even creationists say as much -- that dogs evolved from wolves, that horses and zebra are related, etc.)  They admit this sort of "micro-evolution."  What they say (at least the ones using Bible phrases), is that a species is a recent term and the unit that can't evolve is the "kind" -- you know, "Each after his kind."

We usually think of a species as a population capable of interbreeding and producing "viable" (themselves able to produce offspring) offspring.  This is of course an arbitrary line, but works reasonably well, at least for living creatures where you can breed them and see what happens.

The fact that living creatures fall into genera, families, classes, orders, and so on, so naturally -- occasionally the DNA, especially at the edges, has corrected a few misclassification -- but for the most part the old comparative anatomy methods did the trick with remarkable accuracy, is testimony that the history of life is one of "macro-evolution" and that the "kinds" of the creationists are meaningless and don't reflect anything real.

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