The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

However, the only valid inference from Scripture is that any kind created on the fifth day does not share common ancestry or evolutionary history with a kind created on the sixth day. Since creationist taxonomy is a matter of higher-order design patterns- -not of evolution--it is acceptable to categorize animals created on different days as members of a larger group. All creationists already classify flying bats, which were presumably created on the fifth day, as mammals along with terrestrial ungulates and carnivorans, which were presumably created on the sixth day. Also, the species that later diversified from the created kinds in Genesis are not necessarily bound to their original behavioral category. The original created kind that was ancestral to today’s flying swamphens (e.g. Porphyrio martinicus ) was doubtless created on the fifth day. However, after creation some members of same genus (e.g. Porphyrio hochstetteri ) became flightless. Likewise, some terrestrial theropod dinosaurs may be secondarily flightless descendants of flying or gliding theropods (Boris 2014; Paul 1988; Paul 2002; Senter, et al. 2012), which would indicate they were likely created on the fifth day. The development of modern, scientific taxonomic systems was fostered by the realization that nature displayed complex patterns beyond simple classification by environmental niche, behavior, or even gross morphology. Over time, naturalists began to realize that classifying animals according to whether they lived in the ocean or on land, for instance, only reflected part of the observable data in nature. Animals classified in one group sometimes shared features with animals in an entirely different group. For instance, it is widely known that cetaceans like whales and dolphins were once classified as “fish.” However, it seems inaccurate to portray scholars as thinking that whales were “fish” in the modern sense of the term. As far back as the 4 th century B.C., Aristotle recognized that cetaceans possessed hair, breathed through lungs instead of gills, gave live birth, produced milk for their young, and had skeletons more similar to land mammals (Romero 2012). During the Renaissance, naturalists also discovered that cetaceans’ four- chambered hearts, brains, and limb bones had more in common with land mammals than with fish (Romero 2012). Still, almost everyone called them “fish” or at least grouped them with fish in their books, since whales and fish shared the same environment. Not until the invention of modern, rank-based taxonomy by Carolus Linnaeus were whales finally classified as mammals (Romero 2012). It was not exactly that naturalists before Linnaeus mistakenly believed that whales were true fish. They just had a simpler classification system that ordered animals using less data, and their classification system had to be adjusted as more information became available. In the 1700s, Linnaean taxonomy finally recognized these deeper relationships between animals by classifying them with a rank- based system, organized by common anatomical features instead of merely gross morphology or environment. Linnaeus gave us not only consistent, uniform names for animals, but a way to categorize and describe similarities between them. A dolphin, a swordfish, and an ichthyosaur (an extinct, marine reptile) look externally similar and have (or had) similar lifestyles. While older approaches might have grouped them together, taxonomy from a Linnaean perspective, requires that we group dolphins with mammals and ichthyosaurs with reptiles because--at a fundamental level--they share many more anatomical similarities with their respective groups than with fish. Linnaeus described life as a nested hierarchy, with animals in a series of progressively smaller “boxes.” Contemporaneously with Linnaeus, Peter Simon Pallas, a German-Russian naturalist, was likely the first to describe (but not illustrate) the idea of a “tree of life” showing affinities between various groups of animals and plants. Pallas noted (Bednarczyk 2010): But the system of organic bodies is best of all represented by an image of a tree which immediately from the root would lead forth out of the most simple plants and animals a double, variously contiguous animal and vegetable trunk; the first of which would proceed from mollusks to fishes, with a large side branch of insects sent out between these, hence to amphibians and at the farthest tip it would sustain the quadrupeds, but below the quadrupeds it would put forth birds as an equally large side branch. Pallas was no Darwinist: he not only lived long before Darwin, but also believed in creationism, the fixity of species, and no environmentally-influenced variation (Bednarczyk 2010; BMNH Last Edited 2013). In 1801, French botanist Augustin Augier, who appears to have been a creationist, portrayed plant relationships using a tree. In the 1800s, Edward Hitchcock and Louis Agassiz used tree diagrams to show the history of all life and of fish, respectively. Both of these men, while not young-earth creationists in the modern sense, were vocal anti-evolutionists. Before and after the publication of Origin, these creationists portrayed current biological diversity and the fossil record using tree-like patterns that they believed to be the work of God. Darwin and other transmutationists before and after him did not create the concept of life having a hierarchical or even tree-like pattern. Rather, they looked at a pattern of life that many scientists perceived and provided a new explanation for the origin of that pattern. And, as Darwinism became ascendant, creationists abandoned their portrayal of life as a tree, evidently concerned that their iconography had been taken over by evolutionists (Archibald 2008). In today’s cultural setting, most creationists assume that portraying life using a branching pattern is an evolutionary concept. This is understandable, since the primary use of “trees of life” for over a century has been to illustrate a Darwinian, phylogenetic view of all organisms connecting to a common ancestor. In reality, it is anachronistic to treat the concepts of nested hierarchies and a tree-like pattern to life as Darwinian, since both ideas preceded Darwin and were invented by creationists to describe the pattern of creation. But many creationists have already recognized this. For instance, Walter ReMine, the creator of discontinuity systematics, noted: Any system of objects can be forcibly classified into a nested hierarchy. Some systems do not have to be forced, rather they display a nested pattern with clarity without having to be coerced. Life has such a pattern. There are no tetrapods that are not based on the vertebrate body plan. There are no amniotes that are not based on the McLain et al. ◀ Feathered dinosaurs reconsidered ▶ 2018 ICC 507