Originally posted by bbarr
Can you tell me more about this criterion of yours? You think that two entities being able to interbreed is sufficient for their being of the same kind. So, by your criterion, lions and tigers are members of the same kind, right?
Let me elaborate, if you will.
There is a distinction between what we see today, and what was originally created. New critters appear all the time. This is evident in any litter of puppies. The big question is, 'what will we get this time?', because the two parents bring different sets of genes. The question is especially interesting if the parents are much apart in appearance. Experiments are done and new flowers that have never been seen before are frequently produced.
From the creationist point of view, this is possible because all of the information required to produce the new variants was there, contained in the
original 'created kind'.
As breeding progresses, different characteristics are
unveiled, some of which inhibit further breeding, except within those new, more particularly defined groups (call them species if you will). I think we agree that a chihuawa and a great dane are both of the same canine 'kind', but I think that in the natural world, they would have a hard time reproducing! Lions and tiger, and the lynx and my two housecats for that matter, I believe, all arose from the same original 'created kind', but have since diverged to a point where they either can't or simply won't, breed with each other. I am not up on whether lions and tigers can or not. I should think that the original pair of the feline kind looked like something else altogether! Maybe.
In humans we know that various races can reproduce with each other, but often for psychological reasons (prejudice in particular), they do not. So, separate groups (we call races) develop. (Why don't we separate various animal groups by a term like 'race'. Or why don't we call our various races 'species'? Just wondering.) And even when two desparate humans want to, they sometimes cannot because of the physical differences. I'm thinking of a humongous man and a tiny woman (pelvic size itself might inhibit a succesful birth). In that case the tendency would be for the giants to stick with each other and the tinies with themselves, encouraging and strengthening the separate lines all the more.
The word kind, used in the Bible, means something right? I think it makes sense to see it as the basic distinguishing unit of the
original flora and fauna. And I have no problem with the ensueing development of the plethora of wildlife and plantlife we find today on that basis.