Woe unto those who depend on the bible for their knowledge of evolution

[Whateverist]

Just came across this video which contrasts biblical notions of "same kind" with modern (though poorly defined) notions of species.  The former are obviously beset with even more problems with coherence than are attempts to define what separates species.  Pretty funny to hear Hovind giving voice to biblical notions of "same kind" being able to "bring forth" offspring getting shot down through simple examples.

[Angrboda]

Just came across this video which contrasts biblical notions of "same kind" with modern (though poorly defined) notions of species.  The former are obviously beset with even more problems with coherence than are attempts to define what separates species.  Pretty funny to hear Hovind giving voice to biblical notions of "same kind" being able to "bring forth" offspring getting shot down through simple examples.

A while back, when I said in the comments of an evolution post that there were no good “ring species,” a few readers asked me what I meant by that. “What about the salamander Ensatina eschscholtzii? Or seagulls in the genus Larus? Aren’t those good ring species?” My answer was that those had been shown not to be ring species in the classic sense, but there was still one species that might be a candidate: the greenish warbler Phylloscopus trochiloides around the Tibetan Plateau.

But now that one, too, has been struck off the list of ring species, leaving no good cases. Its removal from the class is documented in a new paper by Miguel Alcaide et al. in Nature (reference and link below), in a group headed by Darren Irwin, a professor at the University of British Columbia and including my next-door Chicago colleague Trevor Price.

There are no ring species

Given the discussion in the text, I'm not sure that this is a break for creationists so much as it is just a clarification of the facts. However, it's worth noting that both the concept of species and its application to fossils presents problems that may be as insurmountable as those faced by the concept of kinds. It's been suggested that the common house cat and the Bengal tiger are the same kind and theoretically could interbreed and so fit the definition of microevolution occurring within a specific kind. As far as I know, it's not been demonstrated that they can't. So the inability of the two would seem to be an example of functional reproductive isolation rather than actual reproductive isolation. The chihuahua and the Great Dane would be a similar example. They don't interbreed because of physical differences, but that doesn't mean they are genetically incompatible and therefore separate species.