Avian "Kinds"

I have been trying to get a post about creationism and turkeys up since Thanksgiving, but I have not been able to find a good link for a definition of primates.  If I ever finish the post the connection will make more sense.  For the last year or so, whenever I see an animal in a zoo or in the wild, I have been trying to look up the creature on creationist websites to see what "kind" they think the animal belongs.

The other night, my oldest son and I braved the cold to see Magellanic and African penguins, so naturally I was searching Answers in Genesis to see if penguins were all considered the same "kind" and were transported on Noah's Ark.  I came upon Dr. Jean Lightner's recent publication, An Initial Estimate of Avian Ark Kinds.  In preparation for their life size Ark, AiG has commissioned a study into how many "kinds" there actually were.  Lightner has already published the list of Mammalian Ark Kinds which said that sea otters and honey badgers were the same "kind", but not cows and goats. Then in a surprise publication, Tom Hennigan published An Initial Estimate toward Identifying and Numbering the Frog Kinds on the Ark: Order Anura.  Growing up, I was told that Noah did not have to worry about the frogs since they could just swim through the flood.  However, Hennigan seems to think that Noah may have tended to 140 pairs of frogs without even so much as a terrarium.

"Kinds" used to mean species, but were expanded to mean genus.  Now family seems to be the most common definition.  However in Lightner's evaluation of Aves, order seems pretty common.  Remember, she thought cows and goats may have been too much diversity.  However, she did speculate that all rodents (porcupines, mice, beavers, kangaroo rats...) may all be the same "kind".    In IEAAK, she tends more towards the latter than the former.

The first thing that sticks out is that all the ratites (ostriches, rheas, emus, kiwis, cassowaries) are divided into separate "kinds".  There is some debate over whether or not the ratites all evolved from a flightless ancestor of they evolved separately from a flighted ancestor.  The flightless hypothesis has one major flaw.  How do flightless birds transverse large oceans?  The flighted hypothesis posits that a flighted ancestor flew across the oceans and the ratites developed their similar design through convergent evolution.  Given that every ratite has a separate order and hybridization only has been observed within orders, Lightner tentatively keeps them as five separate "kinds". (Elsewhere, AiG has put emus and cassowaries into the same created "kind".)

Next, we come to our turkeys.  The entire order of Galliformes (peacocks, chickens, turkeys, pheasants...) is one "kind".  So there were no peacocks on Noah's Ark and Darwin was right about peacock evolution.

The "duck kind" is placed at the family level, family Anatidae (ducks, geese, swans...).  Weeks ago, I wrote about ICR and lovebirds, well, she places the entire parrot order, Psittaciformes (parrots, lorikeets, cockatoos...) as one "kind".  So everything from Fischer's lovebirds to Macaws came from a pair on Noah's Ark?  The "crow kind" encompasses the family, Corvidae (blue jays, ravens, magpies, crows...).

Two more things stick out.  Under the "New World Vulture Kind", family Cathartidae (vultures and condors), there is an interesting discussion about the nature of "kinds".  Some taxonomists think that Cathartidae descended from storks.  What would this mean for Avian "kinds"?

This brings up an important point, both the cognitum and statistical baraminology assume that kinds have retained their distinctiveness as creatures have reproduced and filled the earth. There is no biblical basis for asserting that this must be true. Convergent evolution can be a reasonable explanation for similarities in the creation model. It involves similar adaptive changes to a particular environmental niche, either within a kind (as different populations adapted in the same basic way) or between members of different kinds. In fact, convergent evolution fits a bit better in the creation model. Evolution (in the molecules-to-man sense) is supposed to be the result of chance processes, so there is no reason to suspect that creatures would adapt in the same ways. This would be especially true as they diverged, since previous changes should limit future options for change. With a Creator who intends for the earth to be inhabited, it is not unreasonable to postulate that creatures were designed to be able to change. This provides a logical basis for why the same types of changes can occur, whether two creatures belong to the same kind or not.

 So according to Lightner, creatures can possibly look very different and be part of the same "kind" like possibly a stork and a vulture.  Like she mentioned, this seems to fly in the face of much of creationism that assumes by appearance they can determine the original kind.  Kent Hovind famously said that any five year old could tell if something was the same "kind".  Further, Lightner seems to have a slight misunderstanding about evolution.  Mutations are random, natural selection is not.  If you put different animals under the same selective pressures, the same type of mutations will likely be selected.

Finally, Darwin thought that Galapagos finches adapting to the different flora on each of the islands provided evidence for evolution through natural selection.  As a response, creationists generally postulate that the entire family of finches, Fringillidae, is one created "kind".  However, Lightner has gone a step further than that.  She places the entire super-family of Passeroidea which includes Fringillidae as one created "kind".  She bases this on the ability of different families to hybridize.

However, perhaps the most astounding group identified based on interspecific hybrid data is Passeroidea. Encompassing Old and New World sparrows, various finches and related birds, this represents an amazing amount of variety in the nearly 1500 species. It is clear that this diversity didn’t arise since the Flood by the standard naturalistic explanations of neo-Darwinism, that is, chance mutations and natural selection (Lightner 2013)!

 Even for Lightner who could potentially see two rodents come off the Ark and produce all rodents, this amount of variation in such a short time is too much for "the standard naturalistic explanations of neo-Darwinism".  According to Lightner, perhaps these birds were clean animals and Noah brought fourteen of them instead of two, giving them a head start.  Also perhaps, this diversity was predestined as some form of design like in theistic evolution.

Lightner notes a couple of times that convergent evolution is a problem for the Theory of Evolution.  Evolution is a theory that is based on observation and convergent evolution has been observed since the start.  This brings me to her next criticism.  Sometimes the predictions made
by morphologic, physiologic, and molecular traits do not always line up exactly.  With the advent of molecular evidence, taxonomists can now more finely tune their phylogeny and identify analogous traits among other homologous ones.

I'll leave you with this.

The idea that the family is the typical level of the kind is challenged by some of the findings here. Perhaps it is higher in even more cases than the hybrid data indicates.

The definition of "kind" is only going to grow broader as taxonomists provide more and more evidence that animals share a common ancestor.   The problem creationists will continue to run into is trying to justify why chickens and peacocks can be the same "kind", but not humans and chimpanzees.