Young-earth evolution: How modern creationists embrace their own undoing
Expanded from a 2015 guest post for Panda’s Thumb and Naturalis Historia, this article explores recent evolution of teachings within the ranks of young-earth creationists.
As the young-earth creationists at Answers in Genesis worked to complete their Ark Encounter “theme park” in Northern Kentucky, an impressive amount of time and energy went to the development of a new creationist zoology called baraminology. For neocreationists, the familiar system of Linnaean taxonomy (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) has far too much evolutionary baggage. To replace this, they have introduced the concept of baramins, a term for the groups of organisms purportedly created by God just a few thousand years ago.
These “created kinds” allow these creationists to advance a peculiar mix of natural selection and pseudoscience: that all modern land species today evolved from a small group of distinct animals on board Noah’s Ark. This consolidation of numerous species into smaller parent groups is driven primarily by the space on Noah’s purported vessel. The smaller the menagerie the Ark was purported to have contained, the more feasible the whole idea seems, and so there is pressure…
