Walking with Feathers II

Yesterday, I wrote Walking with Feathers about how AiG seems inconsistent since they accept some Troodons, Dromaeosaurs, and Oviraptorosaurs had feathers, but find "no evidence" that other Troodons, Dromaeosaurs, and Oviraptorosaurs had feathers.  The definition of a "kind" is only going to grow broader and therefore the number of dinosaur "kinds" is only going to shrink.  It is hard to imagine how they count fifty.  Not only is increasing diversity going to decrease the number, but increasingly dinosaurs are being called birds by Answers in Genesis and the number is only going to grow.

Given the lack of visible feathers, the data about these ornithomimids remains inconclusive. Without definitive feathers, they may just be dinosaurs. Or they may be extinct birds, descendants of the birds God made in the beginning. God made all kinds of birds on the 5th day of Creation week and land animals such as dinosaurs on the 6th. And nothing about this study demonstrates the evolution of feathers or the evolution of birds.

To be fair, as much as some creationists seem to argue for a firm line between birds, created on Day 5, and dinosaurs, created on Day 6, there is no reason why such a distinction should exist.  God could easily create a crocoduck.

Instead of invoking a back-and-forth evolutionary process of land animals to birds and (in the case of oviraptorosaurs) back to land animals, how much more sensible it is to discard evolution altogether and to accept special creation instead! Owing to the fact that the Creator was under no obligation to use a nested hierarchy of created living things, at least in every case, it is not difficult to understand why evolutionists have such problems in their attempts to force ‘nonavian’ and ‘avian’ traits into any sort of evolutionary lineage.

Also:

If you could plot all the distinct created “kinds” of organisms on a graph, based on their features, you would see that God filled the graph with a tapestry of distinct kinds. Between these different kinds God scattered mosaics.1 For instance, between deer and antelope kinds He put pronghorns; between raccoon and bear kinds* He put pandas; and so it goes...All examples of evolutionary links that have ever been claimed, such as australopithecines**(between tree-dwelling apes and earth-dwelling humans), archaeocetes (between quadrupeds and modern whales), mammal-like reptiles (between reptiles and mammals), Archaeopteryx(between reptiles and birds), and Tiktaalik and Acanthostega (between fish and amphibians) are, in fact, mosaics, not links.

*Pandas are placed in the bear kind in the recent paper on Mammalian Ark Kinds.
**Australopithecus sediba was called an earth-dwelling human by a 2010 creationist paper.

Walking with Feathers

Ken Ham posted a blog about the movie, Walking with Dinosaurs in which he quoted from an upcoming review of the movie soon to be posted on Answers in Genesis.  

The film is set in what evolutionists call the Late Cretaceous period—and the influence of evolutionary ideas is evident in the way the dinosaurs are portrayed. The Troodon, Hesperonychus, and Chirostenotes are all feathered dinosaurs that appear in the film. On many occasions Answers in Genesis has responded to the claims that dinosaurs had feathers. One of the more recent responses can be found on our website. But there’s no evidence that dinosaurs had feathers. Such claims are just the evolutionists’ way of making the evolutionary story seem true. They so want kids to believe in evolution, this claim of dinosaurs having feathers is made very often in our day—through movies, museums, books, newspaper articles, documentaries, etc.

I saw the movie today and could not help but think that there should be evidence that any member of the ceratopsian "kind" existed with the crow "kind", elephant "kind", bear "kind"... Just look at all the types of mammalian and avian "kinds" that were supposed to be coexisting and herding with ceratopsians. The evidence for a cretaceous crow "kind" is not there.

Two members of the family Troodontidae have been found with feathers. In fact, I've found a couple of articles on AiG claiming that Anchiornis huxleyi was actually a bird. If "kinds" are generally families, then why can't other members of the Troodon "kind" have feathers or simply be considered avian "kinds" created on Day 5?

Likewise other members of the Dromaeosauridae family have been proclaimed "birds" by AiG and the evidence seems to suggest that Velociraptor might have had feathers. Why can't other members of the Dromaesauridae family/"kind" like Hesperonychus have feathers?

At least two species of the clade Oviraptorosauria are considered "flightless birds" by AiG. Why would it be so great a leap for Chirostenotes to have feathers? Typing this out, it amazes me how many members of different dinosaur clades are considered birds by AiG.

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.

Rebecca Brown MD

I don't want demons running around my home...no Annabelle stop NOOOO! 



She also posted this in one of her recent facebook posts. 

"The meeting lasted 4 hours and was absolutely fascinating as the various doctors described their experiences with demonic wounds, inserts, and demonic problems in their patients. One doctor from Switzerland even brought a copy of an abdominal ultrasound that clearly showed a demonic serpent in a patient's abdomen. He gave me a copy. He wisely did not take the patient to surgery, but referred her to a church that works in deliverance."

According to the Warrens, Annabelle is supposed to kill you if you mock her.  So far, I am still kicking.  According to Brown, if you cleanse an unclean object inside your house the demon will run in your house.  Why would a demon run around your house?  Can't it get out?  Can't it get in, even if you cleanse the object outside of the house?