80 Evolution and the Fossil Record
where they spout scientific-sounding words that make no sense whatsoever. The focus of
their “research” is to skim over the entire field of modern animal classification and then
imagine ways to shoehorn hundreds of individual species and genera into the smallest pos-
sible number of categories. They don’t bother to work with actual animals, or get their hands
dirty with the dissections and anatomical work that established the modern taxonomy of
organisms, or spend the years in graduate school to obtain the kind of training necessary to
understand and analyze molecular phylogenetic data, or wade into the gigantic literature of
modern systematic theory since the days of George G. Simpson and Ernst Mayr and cladis-
tics. No, that would require that they be trained in actual science, and confront the evidence
for evolution that runs throughout life. Instead, they do superficial, high school–level “book
report” types of analyses, where they cherry-pick ideas here and there from highly simpli-
fied Internet sources and Wikipedia articles. They know just enough science to pick up a
stray factoid here and there without any understanding of the caveats and methods behind
the data or the relative significance or importance of one kind of data versus another that
only comes with years of graduate study in a field.
In reality, their baramin “solution” to minimizing the number of animals on the ark cre-
ates a whole new set of problems. Not only does it concede evolution from the created kinds,
but the kinds have no basis in biology. When you examine the creationist literature or try to
pin them down, sometimes “the kinds” are species, sometimes they are genera, and some-
times they are whole families, orders, or even phyla of animals (Siegler 1978; Ward 1965)!
Creationists are so wildly inconsistent and their theories are so completely out of line with
the known taxonomy of organisms that it is clear that a created kind is one of those slippery
words that people use to weasel out of difficult spots. As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice (in
Through the Looking-Glass), “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” Nev-
ertheless, a lot of the creationist “research” focuses on just this fruitless, unscientific version
of chasing their own tails, and they even have a name for it: baraminology.
Some creationists try to squirm out of the problem by claiming that the fish and marine
invertebrates stayed outside the ark and lived through the flood. But this reveals their com-
plete lack of understanding of basic biology. To a creationist, apparently, if it lives in the
water, it’s all the same, but marine fish and invertebrates are highly sensitive to changes in
salinity, so if the oceans were flooded by freshwater, these organisms would die immediately.
If, on the other hand, these supernatural clouds rained marine seawater (a physical impos-
sibility, because salt is mostly left behind when water evaporates), then the salty world-
spanning waters would have killed all the freshwater fish and invertebrates, which cannot
tolerate high salinities. Of course, pushing the aquatic forms off the boat and into the water
doesn’t begin to solve the space or numbers problem because these forms account for only a
few hundred thousand species.
To this point we have only addressed the issue of cramming thousands of species
into shoebox-sized spaces stacked to the top of the ark. Where would they put all the
food for so many animals? How did the carnivores survive without eating their neigh-
bors? Finally, the most unpleasant thought of all: so many animals produce a lot of dung.
Did Noah and his sons spend most of their 40 days and nights shoveling it out of the
boat? Instead of evaluating a reasonable and testable hypothesis, the special pleading and
twisting of the facts of nature makes it clear that we’re dealing with an explanation that
is a load of dung (fig. 3.10).