Correcting my orchard post

I try to be fair with people I disagree.  On that note, I want to publish a correction to a previous post about the creationist orchard.  You can read the full post by clicking on the next link.

Creation Orchard to Nowhere

...I am unclear about the bird.  Certainly there are pre-cenozoic birds, and some that would fit into one of the avian kinds. 

Correction 3-6-14:  Originally the last sentence said that no Mesozoic bird would fit into one of the avian kinds.  However, this probably is not true.  The entire order of Psittaciformes is considered the "Parrot Kind" by Lightner.  A Cretaceous parrot was found in 1998.

Also, a fossil Anseriformes has been found.  Here, it gets more complicated.  Lightner divides the order Anseriformes into three kinds.  While the fossil appears more closely related to the family Anatidae which Lightner calls the "Duck Kind" it is unclear if Lightner would place the fossil in this group.  In fact, the initial kind estimates as a rule tend to avoid all fossils.  Also, if there were Cretaceous Anseriformes, that seems to suggest that there were Cretaceous Galliformes, because molecular data suggests that Anseriformes and Galliformes both belong to the clade Galloanserae.  Lightner, of course, believes that Galliformes coexisted with dinosaurs, but for other reasons.  While she subdivided the order Anseriformes into three kinds, she kept the order Galliformes as one created kind.  She was forced to do this, because four of the five families have examples of cross family hybridization.   

[1] Wang, Xiaoming and Richard H. Tedford Dogs Their Fossil Relatives & Evolutionary History (New York: Columbia Press, 2008) 23

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.

What are the 60 dinosaur kinds?

I keep asking about these 60 or 50 dinosaur kinds.  This was one of the main questions that led me to reject Young Earth Creationism.  What are the orders of mammalia? Google it.  You will find a debate over whether there are between 19-29 orders.  Start looking for Dinosaur kinds.  What you will not find is a debate among creationist about 60 or 50 kinds of dinosaurs.  What you will find is an assertion of it's validity and one or two examples of a Dinosaur kind.  The most common example of a dinosaur kind is ceratopsia.

The sub-order ceratopsia includes both bipeds and quadrupeds.  This transition from semi-bipedal to quadrupedal is accepted by both evolutionists and creationists.  However if we accept that the sub-order ceratopsia is one dinosaur kind, how can there be half a hundred dinosaur kinds?  That level of diversity would seem to imply that Oviraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex were the same kind or for comparison that hyenas and cats are the same kind.  That is just what Carl Kerby seems to do in his blog post, Phylogenic Charts

He gives fourteen different sub-orders and clades of dinosaurs that he terms as "one thing, stayed one thing, and never changed from, or into, anything else."

• j Deinonychosaurs. 
• h Oviraptorosaurs. 
• m Carnosaurs and Coelurosaurs. 
• n Segnosaurs. 
• o Prosauropods.
• p Sauropods. 
• q Fabrosaurids. 
• r Scelidosaurs. 
• s Stegosaurs. 
• t Ankylosaurs. 
• u Ornithopods. 
• v Heterodontosaurids. 
• w Ceratopsians. 
• x Pachycephalosaurs.

Creation.com shrinks the groups even further in their Dinosaur Fairy Tales with only eight kinds (in fairness they leave out Heterodontosaurids, Scelidosaurs, and Fabrosaurids).

• Ceratopsians
• Pachycephalosaurs
• Ornithopods
• Stegosaurs
• Ankylosaurs
• Theropods (Segnosaurs, Deinonychosaurs, Oviraptorosaurs, Carnosaurs, and Coelurosaurs)
• Prosauropods
• Sauropods

The point is that if ceraptosia is a dinosaur kind, what are the other 49?  How can there be another 49 let alone another 59?  More importantly where is the list of 50 dinosaur kinds?  In trying to find this list, I was amazed at how much evolution had been accepted by creationists as microevolution.  Also, I was amazed at how often creationists made the claim of tens of dinosaur kinds, but never backed it up.  What kind of worldview does that?  Not a worldview that I could continue to hold.  I did not only abandon young earth creationism, because of this, but it was a start.  

NYT:A Tiny Horse That Got Even Tinier as the Planet Heated Up

Rising seas, killer storms, droughts, extinctions and money wasted on snowblowers are not the only things to worry about on a warming planet. There is also the shrinking issue.

It happened to Sifrhippus, the first horse, 56 million years ago. Sifrhippus shrank from about 12 pounds average weight to about eight and a half pounds as the climate warmed over thousands of years, a team of researchers reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

The horse (siff-RIP-us, if you have to say the name out loud) lived in what is still horse country, in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, where wild mustangs roam.

Sifrhippus was not much like the mustangs or any other modern horses. It was the size of a cat, ate leaves rather than grass and counts as a horse only in scientific classification. It might have made a nice pet if anyone had been around to domesticate it, but the first hominids were a good 50 million years in the future.

Its preserved fossils, abundant in the Bighorn Basin, provide an excellent record of its size change over a 175,000-year warm period in the Earth’s history known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures are estimated to have risen by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit at the start, and dropped again at the end.

Scientists have known that many mammals appear to have shrunk during the warming period, and the phenomenon fits well with what is known as Bergmann’s rule, which says, roughly, that mammals of a given genus or species are smaller in hotter climates.

Although the rule refers to differences in location, it seemed also to apply to changes over time. But fine enough detail was lacking until now.

In Science, Ross Secord, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jonathan Bloch, of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville; and a team of other researchers report on the collection and analysis of Sifrhippus fossils from the Bighorn Basin.

They report that the little horse got 30 percent smaller over the first 130,000 years, and then — as always seems to happen with weight loss — shot back up and got 75 percent bigger over the next 45,000 years.

The fossils indicate that at its smallest Sifrhippus weighed about eight and a half pounds, and at its largest about 15 pounds.

Using fine-grained detail on both climate and body size, the researchers concluded that the change in size was, as suspected, driven primarily by the warming trend.

“It seems to be natural selection,” said Dr. Secord. He said animals evolved to be smaller during warming because smaller animals did better in that environment, perhaps because the smaller an animal is, the easier it is to shed excess heat.

Paul L. Koch, head of the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a specialist in reconstructing ecosystems and climates from many millions of years ago, said, “The paper lets us see the effect of warming on mammals where the climate change is really large.”

Dr. Koch, who was not involved in the study, said he thought that the question of whether natural selection was the cause of the changes was still open, and that the disruption of ecosystems during the warming period might have led smaller animals to migrate to new locations.

The current warming period is occurring on a scale of hundreds of years, not thousands, and scientists can only speculate on whether modern mammals will shrink.

“It’s difficult to say that mammals are going to respond in the same way now,“ Dr. Secord said. “If I had to guess,” he said, he thinks some will get smaller. And, he said, some studies have shown some birds to be getting smaller in response to warming.

If warming continues at the highest rate projected, he said, there’s another question: “Can mammals keep up?” [1]
Also for further reading:

A Visual History of Ancient Miniature Horses [Slide Show] Eight equines that paved the way for the massive modern horse

Baraminology: Creationists Re-Examine the Horse Series