It's Always Sunny - evolution versus Christianity

[Huggy Bear]

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remember kind = species

So each species must produce offspring "whose seed is in itself", in other words, fertile.

For example a wolf and a dog can produce fertile offspring, but a horse and donkey cannot, and therefore would be of different "sorts", meaning the wolf and dog would qualify as belonging to the same "sort" and Noah would only need to take one of each.

This means Noah didn't need to take very many animals on to the ark at all, he just took a few and evolution did the rest

While I'll congratulate you on being one of the very few willing to use the "kinds" argument that actually goes on to define what a kind even is before making the argument, I also need to say that your knowledge, either of interbreedable species, or the dimensions of the ark, is fairly limited if you think the number of species he'd need to take was just "a few." We're still talking in the order of at least a million species, and that's just within the insect kingdom.

For that matter, how did Noah know these lines of demarcation? Did he have to breed every species of animal with every other, just to see whether they could produce offspring and what "kind" they belonged to? Are you even aware how hybridization works, when you assert this to be the case? For example, you are aware that a horse and a donkey can produce offspring (making them the same kind and thus making one or the other a redundant pairing for the ark) yet that offspring will be infertile (meaning that using your definition of kind would render those species that produce hybrid offspring extinct)? Have you factored in the major genetic drift involved in making it so that one of the parents of an entire lineage of animals would be an entirely different subspecies of animal, and thus fifty percent of the genetic material would not match the species intended for preservation?

This is the problem with these insipid ark apologetics: they might "work" in the broad strokes, but in the end you're still defending a story written by people with no concept of genetics, biology, or evolution: those gaps in their knowledge will hobble the story no matter how hard you ad hoc to make it seem reasonable. In this case, all you've done is added a huge new task for Noah, revealed your own ignorance of the basics of cross-breeding, and failed to make the story any less literally impossible.

... I mean come on, science even tells you that a bunch of animals went extinct all at once, but when the bible says it, it's ridiculous.

Couple things. A: when science mentions mass extinction events, they do not imply that the extinctions happened "all at once." Rather, they describe an entire era of time in which an unusually large number of species went extinct within a comparatively short span at a biological time scale (read: much longer than forty days) due to verifiably accurate environmental events. Which leads me to...

B: the reason the flood claim is ridiculous is not that it describes a mass extinction, that's pure equivocation. No, the reason the bible's claim is ridiculous is that we can demonstrably show that it could not have happened. Geology shows us continual deposits in many areas that would be impossible were the area ever submerged. Anthropologically, we find many civilizations that continued on, rather rudely, without ever realizing that they'd been completely wiped out in a flood, almost as though it had never happened at all. Biologically, we know for a fact that two examples of a species, no matter how you bend to redefine the criteria, could not sire an entire species (let alone the multitude of species that you're asserting here) due to the well established problem of genetic bottlenecking and, frankly, simple fucking logic (the carnivores need meat. The only meat around just so happens to be the only breeding pair of every possible animal. If the carnivores eat anything at all, suddenly the plan starts going to shit.)

So... hey. Is there anything else you want to be wrong about here?

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One quick point

Are you even aware how hybridization works, when you assert this to be the case? For example, you are aware that a horse and a donkey can produce offspring (making them the same kind and thus making one or the other a redundant pairing for the ark) yet that offspring will be infertile (meaning that using your definition of kind would render those species that produce hybrid offspring extinct)?

*emphasis mine*

This is incorrect, I stated that "a wolf and a dog can produce fertile offspring, but a horse and donkey cannot, and therefore would be of different "sorts"".

Before I address your post in full, explain your version of how life came to exist and subsequently evolve.
A horse and donkey are NOT of the same kind because they cannot produce fertile offspring.