The "Kind" of argument we are having

I just finished writing something and I wanted to write a little about the creationist concept of kind.  As I noted in my last blog post, Ray captioned a picture with this.

Prof Stanford: "There’s evidence of evolution in the Galapagos." Ray: "Could you give me one instance?" Prof Stanford: "Yes, we have an example from a group of birds called Darwin’s finches." Ray: "What have the finches become?" Prof Stanford: "They've become anatomically new and genetically new, recognizably different species." Ray: "So they’re still finches?" Prof Stanford: "Well, of course they’re still finches, yes."

In creationism, finches, the family Fringillidae with almost 20 genera and over a hundred species, have long been considered the same "kind".[1]  Ray seldom gives his criteria for a change of kind.  In the quote above, Ray says that still being a member of the family is not a change of kind. Just to give an idea of the kind of diversity that we are talking about, the family Mustelidae (wolverine, badgers, weasels, otters) is considered the same kind.[2]  So something could be as different as a wolverine from a sea otter and you could still say there has been no change in kind.   Sometimes there is more diversity than that.  The suborder Ceratopsia is almost uniformly considered considered a kind by creationists and it includes bipeds and quadrupeds.  So your parrot could become as big as a car, grow horns, and walk on all fours and still not be considered a change of kind (but dogs and seals are not part of the same kind?).

So what evidence would Ray accept?  Well, he has held out the crocoduck, a hybrid between two different classes of animals.  Sure toothed birds and feathered reptiles have been demonstrated to have existed, but there is no evidence to trace birds through crocodylia.  Which leads me to my next point, the evidence Ray wants doesn't exist, because that is not how nature works.  Creatures don't give birth to overtly different creatures.

Two things recently caught my eye.  One, the author of the Mammalian Ark Kinds had an interesting discussion when it came time to classify the family Bovidae.

There are 50 genera and 143 species in the family Bovidae (Wilson and Reeder 2005). Horns, which are characteristic of this family, consist of a bony core attached to the frontal bone and a hard keratinous sheath (Nowak 1999). There is considerable hybrid data within two subfamilies: Bovinae which includes cattle and Caprinae which includes sheep and goats. In fact, sheep and goats have been so commonly thought of together that the Bible has a single word that refers to a flock of sheep and/or goats: צאן (tsoan). While isolated reports of hybrids between the subfamilies Caprinae and Bovinae and between them and members of Cervidae exist, they are not well documented enough to be considered reliable (Lightner 2006c; Lightner 2007).

There is considerable diversity in this family. Most people would tend to think of sheep and goats as distinct from cattle. For these reasons it was decided to split the family and consider the subfamily the level of the kind. This probably over-estimates the number of kinds since antelope are found in more than one subfamily, but it is the simplest way to split until more information becomes available.

For fairly weak reasons, she can accept that sea otters and wolverines share a common ancestor, but not cows and goats.

Also, this was recently posted in an article on Answers in Genesis[3].

How many different created kinds of dinosaurs were there? If we define a “created kind” as animals that can successfully interbreed, we see that many different genera and species could descend from a “kind.” Speciation—the development of species—is not the same as evolution and only involves variation of genetic information already existing within each kind of animal.

However we have known for quite a while that as animals get genetically further apart, they lose the ability to interbreed.  Generally this phenomenon is known as "ring species".[4]  This occurs even within what creationists might call the same kind.[5] Ray responded to the evidence of ring species a few weeks ago noting that they are still the same kind.

A number of times she says that there’s "tons" and "mountains" of evidence, but all she offers as her best observable evidence for Darwinian evolution is birds changing into birds and salamanders changing in salamanders.