What do the fossils say?

[mindlight]

Mindlight - since you're a creationist can we get a definition that most creationists can agree on for two terms?

Information and kind. What's a kind (or type). A species? A family? A phyla? Where's the line? Is the elephant mouse a rodent kind or an elephant kind (hint, it's more closely related, genetically, to the elephant but looks a lot more like a mouse... at least I think I'm picking the right animal here).

To be created "after their kind" (Gen 1 v 25) is the key phrase here.
God has set boundaries such that elephants do not become giraffes, dogs do not become cats but alsatians and poodles are family etc. No other merely natural process is required to explain creation than a special act of God.
The broad categories were creatures of the sea, creatures of the air and creatures of the earth.
The types are set in the mind of God so to look at the physical construction materials is a secondary consideration or to abbreviate the attempt to define the creature in purely naturalistic terms is to reduce the creature to something less than God has made it. Before the creation there was nothing , not even star dust. As with Solomons observations and categorisations that does not mean it is a fruitless task and much can be learnt from it.
So the definitive information describing the essence of each kind of creature is something that belongs to the Creator but to search for understanding of each type is something that wise men have done for thousands of years.
My criticism of scientists who speak with such confidence of transitional forms is that they have only abbreviated and limited evidence to build their theories on and the creature as it truly was is forever lost at the distance at which we examine it. That they disregard the boundaries which are our experience of the world today as it is and as we see it between different types of creatures and they postulate an alternate process to special creation. The creature remains known only to God.

 

[The Barbarian]

The Institute for Creation Research, citing John Woodmorappe's "ark feasibility study," says that the "Biblical kind" is about at the level of family in scientific taxonomy.

Woodmorappe confirmed to me in email that was his opinion.

Of course, that means humans and chimps are the same kind...

 

[shernren]

To be created "after their kind" (Gen 1 v 25) is the key phrase here.

Astronauts and NASA mission planners see the earth going around the sun, all the time.

And biologists and epidemiologists see new strains of bacteria and other life forms emerging all the time.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the ordinary person sees the sun rise and set, or dogs give birth to dogs and not cats, in their lifetime.

"After their kind" is as phenomenological as "sunset" or "sunrise". And it deserves to be taken just as literally.