I sometimes feel the urge to look up what the enemy is doing, so I went by the Discovery Institute a few days ago and found nothing worthwhile. I then looked at AiG, found nothing, and then proceeded to their "research journal". There, I struck gold.
Some of you might already be familiar with this article (I won't call it a paper, that would be disrespectful to scientists), in which the author determines 137 different "kinds" in Mammals alone. There are a few things worth noting:
1) There is absolutely no research methodology presented. The author merely lists a bunch of families/genara/species/orders/etc. in a random mix and calls them "baramins", or created kinds.
2) Nowhere is the term "baramin" defined, indeed there seems to be a squabble (in creationist ranks, I might add) over if a baramin even exists. (Hint: The answer is no.)
3) This article was noted a few times because they used the photo of a plush animal in lieu of a real animal in their article, a mistake that shouldn't occur if they were real academics.
I'll jump straight to the conclusions part of the article (there's nothing of interest in the other 45!!! pages). After I'm done with the conclusion, I'll head over to this article, which apparently forms the basis to the previous one. To avoid confusion and/or complaints that I'm quote-mining, I'll quote the whole paragraph. I'll also leave the original formatting, so as to allow for easier use of the search function.
This is an interesting paragraph, because it basically confirms that all animals, even according to the strictest creationist defenitions, are kinds only in a family, so theoretically humans should be grouped with the great apes. Apparently, the human "kind" is the only ever kind that does not adhere to this rule.
Even if the previous paragraph is considered, in which they class some as low as "subfamily", humans would still be grouped with Gorillas, Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Apparently, the human "kind" is special.
This paragraph reeks of intellectual dishonesty.
A cognitum is "defined" basically as anything that looks similar. This one sentence (from the second article) should make that clear: "A cognitum is a group of organisms that are naturally grouped together through human cognitive senses."
In other words, a cognitum is the same as what Carl Linné did nearly 250 years ago: Look at two animals and say "this looks like it's related and this is not". (By the way, baraminology is merely a refinement of that, with no objective methods at all.)
Basically what they're saying is this: If there's controversy above the taxon (in this case "family") and there's no cognitum, so if humans don't consider them related, then they're probably not.
What sort of an idiot would call this research?
If there is controversy below the family taxon and there is cognitum, then they're considered a kind.
There's also the question of how exactly anything doesn't fit the tree of life. The author is quite vague and this sentence can be understood in a number of different ways. "Within kind diversification" probably means "many species inside a kind". I'm not sure how that wouldn't fit the tree of life, because that's exactly what we'd suggest. The other ways make even fewer sense. The only way this can be understood is that the author is confused about what taxonomy, the tree of life and evolution is.
At least the last sentence is true: This [whole] thing is purely subjective.
This is a very interesting paragraph, but for only one reason. Creationists (or at least one Creationist) freely admit that there is no way to rule out the two other possibilities, those being convergence and common ancestry. As shown above, the whole "method" is subjective, so I wonder how creationists intend to prove that their hypothesis is correct.
This is especially difficult in light of the recent paper Isoletus posted. In the paper, the relationship within Laurasiatheria is confirmed by comparing genetic information.
There's also no "attempting to account for traits in [the] paradigm of universal common descent", this is simply the best fit. I often ask creationists how they account for genetic similarity or indeed identity and the most common reply is "common DNA, common designer". But there are also pseudogenes and non-coding DNA that is the same across species/genara/kingdoms, so how do they account for that? They normally don't, opting to leave that out.
I'm still laughing at the "serious attempt", (no research methodology?!?) but the last sentence really annoys me. Even if I grant that everything in the article was absolutely true, how on earth does the rest follow?
Now I'll switch to the second article. The first page and a half is basically a long list of biblical references, pointing out where "kind" is mentioned, how they got onto the ark and so on. What this has to do in a "paper" is baffling, which is the reason I don't deign it worthy of that term.
The first interesting heading is "Methods for Ascertaining Baramins (Created Kinds) - Hybridization".
Later on, he says:
Now as far as I can see, this is an "after the fact" moving of goalposts. If I had asked a creationist "is fertilization enough" fifty years ago, he'd have laughed in my face and said "yeah". It's the same thing that happened with natural selection and adaptations.
The second "tool" proposed is the "cognitum". I've already explained that term above, so I needn't repeat it here. It's basically "guesswork". Note that this is the second most useful tool creationists seem to have as a resource, at least according to this article. The next is "statistical baraminology", which is basically sophisticated "cognitum". Pick a few traits, (chosen how?) and compare them. Tada!
This here is a really weird paragraph if you think about it. Adam supposedly named the animals, so he should have some way of distinguishing among them. With no tools available to him, sight would have been the only tool available. However, that's clearly not the case now, because we sometimes have more diversity within a species than between species. We also have great similarities between other, more distantly related species, for example the Wolf and Thylacine. So IF creationists were to suggest this "method", they'd have to have the "kind" not as low as the family level, but perhaps as high as the class or phylum.
The article then goes on to suggest that "hard data" is less reliable than their guess-work and it ends on these two extremely weird paragraphs:
Now I'm curious: Is that common practice? I'm sure it is in sermons, but in research? That's why I have to assume that few creationists have actually read the articles in these magazines, or at least they've not read a serious article yet. If they would, they would have to see creationism for what it really is: Special pleading and made-up nonsense.
Some of you might already be familiar with this article (I won't call it a paper, that would be disrespectful to scientists), in which the author determines 137 different "kinds" in Mammals alone. There are a few things worth noting:
1) There is absolutely no research methodology presented. The author merely lists a bunch of families/genara/species/orders/etc. in a random mix and calls them "baramins", or created kinds.
2) Nowhere is the term "baramin" defined, indeed there seems to be a squabble (in creationist ranks, I might add) over if a baramin even exists. (Hint: The answer is no.)
3) This article was noted a few times because they used the photo of a plush animal in lieu of a real animal in their article, a mistake that shouldn't occur if they were real academics.
I'll jump straight to the conclusions part of the article (there's nothing of interest in the other 45!!! pages). After I'm done with the conclusion, I'll head over to this article, which apparently forms the basis to the previous one. To avoid confusion and/or complaints that I'm quote-mining, I'll quote the whole paragraph. I'll also leave the original formatting, so as to allow for easier use of the search function.
This is an interesting paragraph, because it basically confirms that all animals, even according to the strictest creationist defenitions, are kinds only in a family, so theoretically humans should be grouped with the great apes. Apparently, the human "kind" is the only ever kind that does not adhere to this rule.
Even if the previous paragraph is considered, in which they class some as low as "subfamily", humans would still be grouped with Gorillas, Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Apparently, the human "kind" is special.
This paragraph reeks of intellectual dishonesty.
A cognitum is "defined" basically as anything that looks similar. This one sentence (from the second article) should make that clear: "A cognitum is a group of organisms that are naturally grouped together through human cognitive senses."
In other words, a cognitum is the same as what Carl Linné did nearly 250 years ago: Look at two animals and say "this looks like it's related and this is not". (By the way, baraminology is merely a refinement of that, with no objective methods at all.)
Basically what they're saying is this: If there's controversy above the taxon (in this case "family") and there's no cognitum, so if humans don't consider them related, then they're probably not.
What sort of an idiot would call this research?
If there is controversy below the family taxon and there is cognitum, then they're considered a kind.
There's also the question of how exactly anything doesn't fit the tree of life. The author is quite vague and this sentence can be understood in a number of different ways. "Within kind diversification" probably means "many species inside a kind". I'm not sure how that wouldn't fit the tree of life, because that's exactly what we'd suggest. The other ways make even fewer sense. The only way this can be understood is that the author is confused about what taxonomy, the tree of life and evolution is.
At least the last sentence is true: This [whole] thing is purely subjective.
This is a very interesting paragraph, but for only one reason. Creationists (or at least one Creationist) freely admit that there is no way to rule out the two other possibilities, those being convergence and common ancestry. As shown above, the whole "method" is subjective, so I wonder how creationists intend to prove that their hypothesis is correct.
This is especially difficult in light of the recent paper Isoletus posted. In the paper, the relationship within Laurasiatheria is confirmed by comparing genetic information.
There's also no "attempting to account for traits in [the] paradigm of universal common descent", this is simply the best fit. I often ask creationists how they account for genetic similarity or indeed identity and the most common reply is "common DNA, common designer". But there are also pseudogenes and non-coding DNA that is the same across species/genara/kingdoms, so how do they account for that? They normally don't, opting to leave that out.
I'm still laughing at the "serious attempt", (no research methodology?!?) but the last sentence really annoys me. Even if I grant that everything in the article was absolutely true, how on earth does the rest follow?
Now I'll switch to the second article. The first page and a half is basically a long list of biblical references, pointing out where "kind" is mentioned, how they got onto the ark and so on. What this has to do in a "paper" is baffling, which is the reason I don't deign it worthy of that term.
The first interesting heading is "Methods for Ascertaining Baramins (Created Kinds) - Hybridization".
Later on, he says:
Now as far as I can see, this is an "after the fact" moving of goalposts. If I had asked a creationist "is fertilization enough" fifty years ago, he'd have laughed in my face and said "yeah". It's the same thing that happened with natural selection and adaptations.
The second "tool" proposed is the "cognitum". I've already explained that term above, so I needn't repeat it here. It's basically "guesswork". Note that this is the second most useful tool creationists seem to have as a resource, at least according to this article. The next is "statistical baraminology", which is basically sophisticated "cognitum". Pick a few traits, (chosen how?) and compare them. Tada!
This here is a really weird paragraph if you think about it. Adam supposedly named the animals, so he should have some way of distinguishing among them. With no tools available to him, sight would have been the only tool available. However, that's clearly not the case now, because we sometimes have more diversity within a species than between species. We also have great similarities between other, more distantly related species, for example the Wolf and Thylacine. So IF creationists were to suggest this "method", they'd have to have the "kind" not as low as the family level, but perhaps as high as the class or phylum.
The article then goes on to suggest that "hard data" is less reliable than their guess-work and it ends on these two extremely weird paragraphs:
Now I'm curious: Is that common practice? I'm sure it is in sermons, but in research? That's why I have to assume that few creationists have actually read the articles in these magazines, or at least they've not read a serious article yet. If they would, they would have to see creationism for what it really is: Special pleading and made-up nonsense.
