[Taxacom] counting the number of species on Earth ... for the Ark

[Fred Schueler]

Quoting "Ohl, Michael" <Michael.Ohl at mfn-berlin.de>:

>  baraminology (a new word for me which I never heard before. See  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraminology).

* it's been suggested that this Oxymoronic field is a bogus reply to a  
TAXACOM post by Curtis Clark: “...the Mark of the Bogus on the  
scientific creationists is their failure to address what to them  
should be the chief question in biology: 'What are the originally  
created kinds?'  For a creationist, everything else in biology must  
hinge on that.  Linnaeus realized it, but the creationists ignore it,  
because they are not biologists.  If species are independently  
created, then the differences between species (Linnaeus's 'essential  
variation') must be of a different sort than differences among members  
of a species (his 'accidental variation'). To a truly scientific  
creationist, the chief research aim should be to distinguish essential  
and accidental variation, for by doing so, one determines, out of all  
the existing variability, which were the originally created kinds,  
since fundamentally different mechanisms are presumed to be at work.   
As far as I've been able to tell, no modern creationists bother to  
address this central issue. Certainly our creationist academic  
ancestors eventually gave up trying to distinguish the two kinds of  
variation. When I get creationist students in my classes, I show them  
how important this question of variation is to them, if they want to  
be a creationist and a biologist both. I figure if they study it long  
enough, they will come to the same conclusions as our academic  
forebears.” -- Curtis Clark on TAXACOM, 30 Sept 1997.

fred.
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