Baraminology
Encyclopedia
Baraminology is a creationist taxonomic
system that classifies animals into groups called "created kinds" or "baramins" according to the account of creation in the book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible
. It claims that kinds cannot interbreed and have no evolution
ary relationship to one another. Baraminology developed as a subfield of creation science
in the 1990s among creationists that included Walter ReMine and Kurt Wise
.
Baraminology is considered to be pseudoscience
by the scientific community
, as the evidence for common ancestry
of all life has widespread scientific acceptance. The system for representing biological diversity widely applied in modern biology
is based on evolutionary relationships as determined by cladistics
and other phylogenetic methods. Proposed phylogenies of organisms are hypotheses of relationships that are objectively testable.
mentions kinds in several passages. Genesis 1:24–25 gives an account of the creation of living things:
Genesis 7:13–16 states that there are distinct kinds of cattle
. In Deuteronomy
14:11–18 varieties of owl, raven, and hawk are presented as distinct kinds. Leviticus
19:19 is concerned with kinds of cloth, cattle, and seeds. Apart from what is implied by these passages, the Bible does not specify what a kind is.
Modern versions of the Old Testament are translations of the Biblical Hebrew text. The Hebrew word מִין min is used exclusively in a set phrase of the form לְ l+מִין min+possessive pronoun suffix, which is translated as after their/his/her kind. Several other words are translated into English with the word kind, including the Leviticus 19:19 usage: כִלְאַיֶם kila'im. The word min is never used in relation to humans, but the Greek
word γένος genos is used in 2 Maccabees
7:28 "... and so was mankind made likewise". The fact that kind is used in this set phrase, among other reasons, has led to the hypothesis that it is not a referential noun in Biblical Hebrew, but derived from לְמִינֶה l'mineh = of him/herself, of themselves. The word "baramin", which is a compound of the Hebrew words for created and kind, is unintelligible in Hebrew.
creationist interpretation of the Bible
is that each kind was brought into direct physical existence by God
and that consequently each original animal had no ancestry, common or otherwise. Baraminology emerged from an effort by young earth creationists
to make this interpretation scientifically appealing. The idea of a baramin was proposed in 1941 by Frank Marsh
, but was criticized for a lack of formal definition. In 1990 Kurt Wise
and Walter ReMine introduced baraminology in pursuit of acceptable criteria for membership in a baramin.
ReMine's work specified four groupings: holobaramins, monobaramins, apobaramins, and polybaramins. These are, respectively, all things of one kind; some things of the same kind; groups of kinds; and any mixed grouping of things.
These groups correspond to the concepts of holophyly
, monophyly
, paraphyly
, and polyphyly
used in cladistics
.
similarity.
Some creationists have suggested that kind refers to species
, while others believe it might mean any animal which may be distinguished in some way from another.
Another criterion is "baramin distance" which is based on the similarity of two or more organisms' characters and uses methods borrowed from phenetics
.
Some advocates believe that major differences in the appearance and behavior of two organisms indicates lack of common ancestry. Others point to inter-fertility capability as a possible indicator.
In all cases, methods found to place humans and other primates into the same baramin have been discarded.
Baraminologist Roger W. Sanders advocates a subjective approach to classification over a measurement-based one:
is commonly described by biologists as the fact of evolution
. However neither cladistics
, the field devoted to classifying living things according to the ancestral relationships between them, nor the scientific consensus
on transitional fossils are accepted by baraminologists.
Despite voluminous evidence for evolution at and above the species level, baraminologists reject universal common descent and the emergence of new families
and higher taxa.
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
system that classifies animals into groups called "created kinds" or "baramins" according to the account of creation in the book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
. It claims that kinds cannot interbreed and have no evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
ary relationship to one another. Baraminology developed as a subfield of creation science
Creation science
Creation Science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology...
in the 1990s among creationists that included Walter ReMine and Kurt Wise
Kurt Wise
Kurt Patrick Wise is an American young earth creationist who serves as the Director of Creation Research Center at Truett-McConnell College. He has a PhD in geology from Harvard University.-Biography:...
.
Baraminology is considered to be pseudoscience
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
by the scientific community
Scientific community
The scientific community consists of the total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions. It is normally divided into "sub-communities" each working on a particular field within science. Objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method...
, as the evidence for common ancestry
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
of all life has widespread scientific acceptance. The system for representing biological diversity widely applied in modern biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
is based on evolutionary relationships as determined by cladistics
Cladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...
and other phylogenetic methods. Proposed phylogenies of organisms are hypotheses of relationships that are objectively testable.
Interpretations of Biblical kinds
The BibleBible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
mentions kinds in several passages. Genesis 1:24–25 gives an account of the creation of living things:
Genesis 7:13–16 states that there are distinct kinds of cattle
Cattle
Cattle are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius...
. In Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy
The Book of Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible, and of the Jewish Torah/Pentateuch...
14:11–18 varieties of owl, raven, and hawk are presented as distinct kinds. Leviticus
Leviticus
The Book of Leviticus is the third book of the Hebrew Bible, and the third of five books of the Torah ....
19:19 is concerned with kinds of cloth, cattle, and seeds. Apart from what is implied by these passages, the Bible does not specify what a kind is.
Modern versions of the Old Testament are translations of the Biblical Hebrew text. The Hebrew word מִין min is used exclusively in a set phrase of the form לְ l+מִין min+possessive pronoun suffix, which is translated as after their/his/her kind. Several other words are translated into English with the word kind, including the Leviticus 19:19 usage: כִלְאַיֶם kila'im. The word min is never used in relation to humans, but the Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
word γένος genos is used in 2 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
2 Maccabees is a deuterocanonical book of the Bible, which focuses on the Jews' revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes and concludes with the defeat of the Syrian general Nicanor in 161 BC by Judas Maccabeus, the hero of the work....
7:28 "... and so was mankind made likewise". The fact that kind is used in this set phrase, among other reasons, has led to the hypothesis that it is not a referential noun in Biblical Hebrew, but derived from לְמִינֶה l'mineh = of him/herself, of themselves. The word "baramin", which is a compound of the Hebrew words for created and kind, is unintelligible in Hebrew.
History
One literalBiblical literalism
Biblical literalism is the interpretation or translation of the explicit and primary sense of words in the Bible. A literal Biblical interpretation is associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical hermeneutical approach to Scripture, and is used almost exclusively by conservative Christians...
creationist interpretation of the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
is that each kind was brought into direct physical existence by God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
and that consequently each original animal had no ancestry, common or otherwise. Baraminology emerged from an effort by young earth creationists
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
to make this interpretation scientifically appealing. The idea of a baramin was proposed in 1941 by Frank Marsh
Frank Lewis Marsh
Frank Lewis Marsh was an American biologist, educator and creationist author. In 1963 he was one of the ten founding members of the Creation Research Society along with well-known creationists such as Henry M. Morris and Duane Gish. His papers are kept at Andrews University, from which Marsh...
, but was criticized for a lack of formal definition. In 1990 Kurt Wise
Kurt Wise
Kurt Patrick Wise is an American young earth creationist who serves as the Director of Creation Research Center at Truett-McConnell College. He has a PhD in geology from Harvard University.-Biography:...
and Walter ReMine introduced baraminology in pursuit of acceptable criteria for membership in a baramin.
ReMine's work specified four groupings: holobaramins, monobaramins, apobaramins, and polybaramins. These are, respectively, all things of one kind; some things of the same kind; groups of kinds; and any mixed grouping of things.
These groups correspond to the concepts of holophyly
Holophyly
Holophyletic is a term posited as a semantically correct replacement for the term monophyletic as used by cladists...
, monophyly
Monophyly
In common cladistic usage, a monophyletic group is a taxon which forms a clade, meaning that it contains all the descendants of the possibly hypothetical closest common ancestor of the members of the group. The term is synonymous with the uncommon term holophyly...
, paraphyly
Paraphyly
A group of taxa is said to be paraphyletic if the group consists of all the descendants of a hypothetical closest common ancestor minus one or more monophyletic groups of descendants...
, and polyphyly
Polyphyly
A polyphyletic group is one whose members' last common ancestor is not a member of the group.For example, the group consisting of warm-blooded animals is polyphyletic, because it contains both mammals and birds, but the most recent common ancestor of mammals and birds was cold-blooded...
used in cladistics
Cladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...
.
Classification methodology
Conditions for membership in a (holo)baramin and methods of classification have changed over time. These include the ability to create viable offspring, and morphologicalMorphology (biology)
In biology, morphology is a branch of bioscience dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features....
similarity.
Some creationists have suggested that kind refers to species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
, while others believe it might mean any animal which may be distinguished in some way from another.
Another criterion is "baramin distance" which is based on the similarity of two or more organisms' characters and uses methods borrowed from phenetics
Phenetics
In biology, phenetics, also known as taximetrics, is an attempt to classify organisms based on overall similarity, usually in morphology or other observable traits, regardless of their phylogeny or evolutionary relation. It is closely related to numerical taxonomy which is concerned with the use of...
.
Some advocates believe that major differences in the appearance and behavior of two organisms indicates lack of common ancestry. Others point to inter-fertility capability as a possible indicator.
In all cases, methods found to place humans and other primates into the same baramin have been discarded.
Baraminologist Roger W. Sanders advocates a subjective approach to classification over a measurement-based one:
Criticism
Baraminology has been heavily criticized for its lack of rigorous testing and post-study rejection of data not supporting desired findings. Universal common descent, which states that all life shares a common ancestor, is well-established and tested, and so this scientific theoryScientific theory
A scientific theory comprises a collection of concepts, including abstractions of observable phenomena expressed as quantifiable properties, together with rules that express relationships between observations of such concepts...
is commonly described by biologists as the fact of evolution
Evolution as theory and fact
"Evolution is both fact and theory" is a statement that appears in numerous publications on biological evolution. The statement is framed to clarify misconceptions about the philosophy of evolution primarily in response to creationist statements that "evolution is only a theory"...
. However neither cladistics
Cladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...
, the field devoted to classifying living things according to the ancestral relationships between them, nor the scientific consensus
Scientific consensus
Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity. Scientific consensus is not by itself a scientific argument, and it is not part of the...
on transitional fossils are accepted by baraminologists.
Despite voluminous evidence for evolution at and above the species level, baraminologists reject universal common descent and the emergence of new families
Family (biology)
In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...
and higher taxa.