According to Creationists, all the animals alive today are descended from the pairs of animals Noah brought onto the Ark before The Flood which supposedly happened 4,000 years ago. According to the first creation story in Genesis, animals were created by God according to their own “kind”. Noah was instructed by God to bring animals of each kind onto the ark, and the term kind still plays a big part in Creationist thinking today. The problem is that no one seems to know what a kind is.
Does it simply mean species? That would seem to me to be the most obvious and easy answer, except there’s no way that all the species of multicellular land organisms could fit onto Noah’s Ark. It must be something taxonomically higher. There are still too many genera of extant animals to fit into an Ark, so that’s ruled out. Could it possibly be roughly analagous to families of animals?
I have heard Creationists speculate something similar. Cats are of one kind; bears are of one kind; equines are of one kind. Those categories do correspond to taxonomic families: Felidae, Ursidae, and Equidae. The different species of bear we have today descended from one species of bear, but they are all still part of the created kind “bear”. This is what Creationists call “microevolution”, which they readily accept. What they oppose is the concept of “macroevolution”, which would be one created kind transitioning into another: Artiodactyls into Cetaceans, or dinosaurs into birds.
So I decided to conduct a thought experiment to actually quantify the implications of this. For the sake of simplicity, I am only including mammals in this exercise.
According to Mammal Species of the World there exist today 5,400 mammal species in 153 familes. If the created kind is analogous to the taxonomic family, then Noah would have brought 153 pairs of mammals onto the ark, which afterwards diversified, via microevolution, a concept undeniable even to Creationists, into the 5,400 extant species. Since The Flood supposedly occurred 4,000 years ago, this would have had to happen very quickly.
In fact, according to some simple division, there would have had to be an average of 1.31 new mammal species arising every year! Wow! Microevolution is exponentially faster than macroevolution!
Except, waitaminnitwhat??? One of the most repeated “arguments” Creationists use is that if evolution really happened, surely someone, somewhere, in all of human history would have witnessed it! Aside from the fact that we actually have witnessed it, both directly in bacteria, and indirectly through the fossil record, what about the ridiculous amount of microevolution that would have needed to occur since the Noahic Flood to account for the current amount of mammalian diversity? Surely someone, somewhere, in all of human history would have witnessed it. I mean, it happened 5,247 times in 4,000 years, and that’s completely ignoring the ridiculous amount of diversity found in birds, arthropods, amphibians, and reptiles. If that many new mammal species have arisen within the time span of recorded history, there would be a record of it.
So here’s the bottom line: If the created kind corresponds to anything lower than a family, there is simply no way representatives could of each kind could fit onto one boat. If the created kind corresponds to the taxonomic family or anything higher, there is simply no way to account for the current biodiversity we see in the natural world. There is no way the Genesis account of the Noahic Flood could have literally happened.
Sources:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i3/ligers_wolphins.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal
http://www.trueorigin.org/glossary.asp
Also special thanks to Ann K. and Jeremy B.
