Baraminology and the Flood
Presented for your amusement as a relief from all the very deep philosophy: a fine example of the cargo cult science of young-earth creationist baraminology. That label “cargo cult science” refers to attempts to ape the surface features of science, perhaps in hopes of gaining a similar degree of prestige. Think of Ann Gauger in a white lab coat, standing in front of a green screen.
Our example today comes from Kurt Wise, perhaps the most famous of the scientifically trained creationists — Harvard degree in paleontology with no less an advisor than S. J. Gould. Specifically, this publication:
Wise, Kurt P. 2009. Mammal kinds: How many were on the ark? Pages 129-161 in T. C. Wood and P. A. Garner (eds.), Genesis kinds: Creationism and the origin of species, Issues in creation #5. Wipf & Stock, Eugene, OR.
As we shall see, one of the attributes of cargo cult science is the very careful handling of assumptions; their implications must be considered only in so far as they contribute to the desired conclusion, and any inconvenient consequences must be ignored. Wise actually does better than most, and is willing to let the data take him farther than most, but not so far as to endanger his beliefs.
The central task of baraminology, and the one that has most interested me, is the attempt to identify the created kinds. Wise proposes a novel method for this using the fossil record. But first, some assumptions, which must be granted for the sake of argument.
We must first suppose the literal truth of the entire Genesis story, including a strict timeline. Life, including all the kinds, was created over a week about 6000 years ago. These various kinds contained the potential to develop — one should not say “evolve: — into a great many species very quickly, which they proceeded to do. Around 1500 years later, there was a great Flood that covered the world, killing all terrestrial animals (at least) other than those preserved by Noah on the Ark. And Noah carried a few individuals of one species of each created kind; thus each kind suffered a severe bottleneck in the Flood: not only was each species reduced to a few individuals, but each kind was reduced to a single species.
Directly after the flood, the kinds re-diversified into new species (or quickly went extinct, in many cases). Traditionally in baraminology, the kind has been roughly identified with the family, thus the cat kind is considered to include lions, cheetahs, domestic cats, etc., 30+ living species and a fair number of extinct ones, all from an original pair of cats on the Ark. (Wise is willing to go much further than that, as we will see.)
There are also a number of assumptions about the stratigraphic record. The record can be divided in two: Deposits of the Flood, including the entire Paleozoic and Mesozoic and unspecified portions of the Precambrian, and deposits of the post-Flood, the Cenozoic. The K-T boundary represents the end of the Flood. Within these strictures, Wise accepts the worldwide correlation and sequence of rocks. It just all happened a lot faster than mainstream geologists think. And here’s the timeline, a combination of Wise and other papers in the same volume. Deposition gradually decreases in rate as time goes by, slowing to roughly modern rates around 650 years after the Flood, and the entire Tertiary is compressed into that time.
Wise’s final assumption is that the fossil record is very close to complete, at least at the level of mammal kinds.
And here we arrive at a test for kind status. As soon as a kind gets off the Ark and has had time to increase to a reasonable level of population, it should be represented in the fossil record. Wise figures that 30 years or so should be enough time, so that every kind should be represented in the fossil record by the end of the Lower Eocene. Taking a standard classification of mammals, he assigns kind status as the lowest taxonomic level having any representative by the end of the Lower Eocene.
This results in some interesting developments. The approximate level of the kind is not the traditional family but superfamily and suborder. For example, Wise considers Feliformia and Caniformia to be single kinds. The former includes cats, mongooses, civets, and hyenas, while the latter includes dogs, bears, weasels, raccoons, and, most interestingly, seals. By similar reasoning, he also supposes that whales are descended from terrestrial mammals aboard the Ark. This is much more evolution — sorry, diversification — than most creationists are willing to swallow. Wise, to his credit, doesn’t shy away from that.
Now, there is one group excluded from this method. Can you guess which one? Yes, it’s humans. Wise supposes that, given their long post-flood life spans, no human died until long after the Lower Eocene, and thus there could be no human fossils.
The fact remains that, given his assumptions and specifically excluding hominids, his method for determining kinds is perfectly valid. The assumptions are correctly followed where they lead. So where does this become cargo cult science? It’s in the failure to consider other implications of the scenario.
Wise completely ignores the Flood sediments. Under his assumption, every mammal kind (including humans, incidentally, which had a large pre-Flood population) should be represented in the Paleozoic and/or Mesozoic record. But this would imply that there are at most three or four kinds of placental mammals. And that’s being generous; many paleontologists think that no Mesozoic fossils represent placental mammals, which would make them at best a single kind.
Here’s another corollary that Wise does not consider: any species that appears both before and after the K-T boundary must be a separate kind from any other. While this applies to very few mammals, it would be useful for other taxa.
Speaking of other taxa, it’s clear that most kinds — tyrannosaurs, gorgonopsians, stegocephalians, palaeodictyopterans, and so on — became extinct too soon after the Flood to leave any fossil record at all. It isn’t clear why YHWH felt it necessary to put them all on the Ark, only to abandon them immediately after, but I suppose He moves in mysterious ways, etc.
We will not even think about plants, aquatic animals, forams, and such. They aren’t important, and Wise’s line of reasoning depends entirely on the Ark.
One final tidbit: if we accept the K-T boundary as the end of the Flood, and accept further that the Ark grounded on Mt. Ararat (which most creationists do), we have a conundrum, as Mt. Ararat is a Pleistocene volcano, which formed, by the chronology above, several hundred years after the Flood ended.
If anyone can tell me how to insert a better graphic than this, I would appreciate it. I just took a screenshot of a table from Word.
Incredible. Phantasmagoric, even.
I haven’t read Wise stuff recently but i’m surprised at how it agrees with mine.
Seals being in a post flood kind is not common for YEC thinkers.
Even the k-pg (t) boundary is not common.
By the way YEC never says Mt Ararat. The bible just says the mts of ararat which was a nation. (Uratu). Well known when the bible was written. The error came later by Arabs etc
hyenas are in the doggy group. there is a youtube video about a African wild dog called SOLO where it , after lost its wild dog group, became member with a hyena group. this showing it sees hyenas as just a type of dog. Not a type of cat as now classified.
The important point also is about the clean/unclean division on the ark.
Dinos would be unclean and mammals would be clean. So the post flood ratio would replace the opposite ratio in the pre flood world or a equallity.
the fossil record shows it was a unclean dominance before the flood.
The bible was here first. its a witness in good standing.
So KINDS is insisted by it and will work better for classification then the incompetent classification of lumping critters together based on traits that obviously are universal as needed..
I sometimes think that if it said in the Bible said that Abel’s mother was a mole rat and his father was a dingo, there are people who would believe it.
The only thing that couldn’t be in there is anything resembling natural selection. That’s where they’d draw the line.
There actually is a “literal” interpretation of Genesis that allows for evolution. The only organisms YHWH directly creates are humans. For the rest, he delegates to the land and the water, so why couldn’t the land and the water do it through evolution?
As for pre-flood kinds and rapidity of extinction, I had thought that was all well-established previously:
“You’ll see green alligators and long-necked geese,
Some humpty-backed camels and some chimpanzees,
Some cats and rats and elephants but sure as you’re born,
You’re never gonna see no unicorn.”
What did the Dinos eat on the Ark?
Maybe Noah&Co. ate the dinos on the Ark and that’s how they became extinct?
Why do Christians reject the Jewish tradition of interpreting the Torah according to Midrash? Because that’s how Jews interpret it and we don’t hear about any of these scientific problems in relation to them, whereas Christian literalist fundies compound the embarrassment.
Erik,
Much simpler idea. Skip it. Keep the Plato, the Aristotle, the Occam, the Abelard, the Descartes, the Leibniz, the Hume, the Brentano and all the rest–right up to Russell and Wittgenstein and Quine and Putnam and Dretske, etc. And, of course, all the natural scientists and mathematicians. All the actual thinkers get to be in there: even the Augustines and Anselms and Plantingas–so long as they are required to leave the bullshit behind.
Forget about the Arks, the flying monkeys, the guys with elephant heads, and the water-walking. Don’t need any of that to be “expounded” or “interpreted” in some way that’s supposed to make some modicum of sense. Just forget about it. Move on. Be an adult.
As GBS said, if you really need a religion, find a newer and a better one.
walto,
Skip what? The Bible?
Sorry, but all the names you mention thought the way they thought (namely, effectively and brilliantly) precisely because of their preoccupation with the Bible.
Plato was preoccupied with the Bible?
Plato and Aristotle appear sole exceptions in walto’s list, but are correctly mentioned inasmuch as the most authoritative Christian philosophy is Aristotelian Thomism.
Well, let’s not forget the counter-tradition here: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bakunin, Dewey, Deleuze, Sellars, Meissalloux, Brassier . . . I always find it interesting and unfortunate that “the Western tradition” in the canonical form casts a Christianized shadow back over antiquity (and modernity) so that the radical naturalistic alternatives to Plato and Aristotle — which have been there from the beginning — get relegated to a footnote or two, that Spinoza is overlooked in favor of Leibniz, and the radical materialists of the French Enlightenment are classified as mere philosophes rather than genuine philosophers.
There’s also, it should be added, the Skeptical tradition that runs from Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus all the way through Cicero, Montaigne, and Hume.
What’s the difference of philosophes and philosophers? To me they look exactly the same, except one is in French, the other in English.
And do materialists have scriptures? Is it good this way or not? Why?
Excellent observation.
It’s pretty traditional too, implied in Midrash.
I agree, IMO It’s the YECs that have forsaken the literal interpretation and embraced the “scientific” thinking of the Medievals and Greeks.
Amen,
To clarify I would add that Plato and Aristotle were preoccupied with the Christian God of the Bible as he reveals himself in nature and reason.
peace
ok, but we can’t leave out the counter-counter-tradition either.
I’m still waiting for the atheist critique of Judaism here at TSZ. Why is it always “The Christian God” or The Christian Bible” when they want to attack God and Scripture.
Midrash and Lection in Matthew
Interestingly, whenever Christian morality is to be attacked, they bring up certain details of Law of Moses.
When the issue comes to gender equality, Orthodox Judaism comes in for as much of a critique as any of the other strands of patriarchy disguised as spirituality. Hotshoe used to raise that point often at TSZ before she/he decided to leave.
The main difference, though, is that Judaism is not — unlike Christianity — a religion of conversion. Jews don’t go around trying to convert gentiles to Judaism, or arguing with them about why they should be Jews. The Chosen People is an exclusive club. Either you’re born into it (via matrilineal descent) or you chose to convert. Since Jews don’t try to impose their views on others, Judaism doesn’t irritate atheists as Christianity does.
That’s my perfectly anecdotal observation, anyway.
As I was taught the difference in English-speaking schools, the philosophes were unsystematic pampleteers and propagandists, whereas philosophers are supposedly more systematic and theoretical.
Personally, I think of that as just the anti-radical (and really anti-Spinozistic) bias of the American education system.
For Spinozists, to put the point with deliberate paradox, our scripture is the universe. I think that’s good. I think that there’s something basically authoritarian about elevating any piece of writing above all the others.
I have no objection to the idea that there’s a lot of ethical and spiritual wisdom in the Hebrew Bible, in the Gospels, and in Paul’s letters. But I don’t think they are inherently superior to the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran, or the poems of Rumi, Hafiz, Goethe, or Rilke.
Aristotle? Hume? Brentano? Dretske? Quine? What a lot of bullshit you do sling.
That’s utter bullshit too. Not any more deserving of ‘refutation’ than the other load. (Or the Hindu load or the Muslim load.)
Didn’t mean to leave any of those guys out. All the adults are welcome.
Sounds like the Bible is unnecessary.
I still have no idea what the list means when we are to leave the bullshit behind. What bullshit? In your list, nobody is a materialist or physicalist and, according to your ordinary standard, they must inevitably carry a load of bullshit. You’ll have to define bullshit now.
That’s the continental vs analytical prejudice. As if no continental philosopher was able to analyze anything.
Why is that good? And in what way would you say it’s a paradox? And what’s wrong with authoritarianism?
I have these immediate objections:
– You are implying that when the universe is your scripture, then nobody else pays sufficient attention to the universe. That’s false.
– Focus on the universe, if it means primacy of the empirical, is philosophically suspicious. It ignores the essential/accidental distinction.
That’s right, but the point is that, for ethical and spiritual wisdom to have some ground, there must be scripture. And scripture cannot be commonplace, it must be unmatched. Otherwise it would be folklore or poplore. The universe doesn’t give you that.
The universe doesn’t give you ethical and spiritual wisdom. It doesn’t tell you how things could be or should be. It only tells how things are. Lion eats deer – lion happy, no more deer. That’s it. It doesn’t tell you if there’s anything wrong with this picture.
Amazing how short a time it takes to completely derail a thread. When the only on-topic post is Byers, you know we have a problem.
John Harshman,
To be sure, but then it’s kind of hard to figure out how to respond to Wise’s just-so story. Unless he has actual evidence for all of the bizarre rates of change that he proposes (and radiometric dating plus heat issues strongly weigh against), it’s not all that different from Cinderella or some other story.
The most magical component of the whole endeavor is how “common design” and “common descent” happen to leave the exact kinds of evidence. Unlike any design we’ve ever seen.
Glen Davidson
Scripture worship.
There’s the truckload of bullshit right there. Turns out you didn’t need a definition after all!
Sorry, but it’s just so silly.
I blame walto. And the mods.
The mods are supposed to be able to detect potential thread derailing posts and are supposed to send them to Guano.
I was hoping to attract a creationist or two. I was directed to Wise by a creationist on this very site. And I meant a moderately coherent creationist, not Robert Byers. Where’s Sal Cordova when you need him?
Salvador is here, he probably has you on Ignore for being a troll. 🙂
I suck.
Oh wait, that’s ad hominem, isn’t it?
Shit.
lol
For the tale of young fossils in old rocks?
Coherent writing doesn’t necessarily improve creationism.
Glen Davidson
Actually, the bias I was alluding to was about how the French Revolution is taught in American public high schools.
Seriously?
I am in no way implying that. That “implication” is just in your own imagination.
Firstly, it doesn’t mean primacy of the empirical. Secondly, I am not ignoring the essential/accidental distinction. The essential/accidental distinction has all sorts of pragmatic uses. I just don’t think that it conveys anything of metaphysical significance. In that regard I am not ignoring it but actively denying it.
Must scripture be written? If so, then would you say that animistic hunter/gatherers have no scripture? What then?
The Stoic sages who urge us to adopt a cosmic point of view on ourselves would surely say that while it is true in one sense that the “universe doesn’t give you ethical and spiritual wisdom,” nevertheless contemplating oneself sub specie aeternitatis is a nice cognitive trick for overcoming anxiety and achieving tranquility.
From the OP:
That award should probably go to Isaac Newton.
I’m at a loss. Erik neither said nor implied that scripture must be written.
Did they calculate the survival value of one over the other?
True, he did not. But since most examples of scripture are holy texts, it seemed like an appropriate question to ask Erik as to what he thought.
Not to mention the rather obvious etymology of ‘scripture’.
Yes, seriously. You said, “I think that there’s something basically authoritarian about elevating any piece of writing above all the others.”
Question #1: What makes you say it’s authoritarian rather than authoritative?
Question #2: In your view, what’s wrong with either one?
If you’re not implying that, then the alternative philosophy (according to your terminology) is not special or distinctive in dealing with the universe. Thus the mainstream (or non-alternative) philosophy deals with the universe just as well, and there’s no reason to prefer the alternative to the non-alternative on this basis.
Emphasis mine.
Like an atheist does not ignore God, but actively denies God, right? The issue with atheism is that they have nothing better to substitute God with. Just like your commitment to anti-foundationalism: If there are no foundations, then what is there to be committed to? You have to be committed to something and what else is that something than, gasp, a foundation!
Similarly, you cannot deny essential/accidental distinction without tacitly smuggling it in with pretty much anything you say.
If you knew the nature of scripture, you would not be saying this. For example, I regularly compare and contrast scripture with folklore. This should give you a clue, but you are constantly denying clues, if not ignoring them.
Is folklore necessarily written? Is it originally written? No, it’s not. This is a feature it shares with scripture. I won’t give you more clues right now. Digest this one first.
Except that the universe as it appears implies or contains no eternity. Eternity is in the spirit. I don’t know much about Stoic ontology/cosmology, but they have to have first principles or something like this (as distinguished from the here-and-now universe), and something like spirit among them.
Mung,
Did Newton deny what he himself had established scientifically in favour of his religious beliefs?
No?
Then he’s nothing like what we call creationists today, who deny scientifically established data points in favour of their beliefs.
Case in point, Ann Gauger. Her own research contradicted her public claims. But her claims did not change.
Claim Newton as one of your own, if you like, but his scientific work was just that, science. Unlike the unholy mess coming out of you and yours.
What the ‘I’m writing down what I’m pretending to hear so I can gain power over the less imaginative’ one?
Do you really ever need him?
Very similar to how evolutionary biologists make very careful assumptions that are considered only in so far as they contribute to the inference of universal common descent. Is universal common descent cargo cult science?