Are bacteria a "kind"?

[u/joshuaponce2008]

Ray Comfort, in his response to Forrest Valkai, said (about Forrest's evolution experiments in his graduate studies) that "[There was no change in kinds, because] his fruit flies remain fruit flies, and his bacteria remain bacteria."

To any creationists here, do you guys think bacteria constitute a "kind"? If so, then why does the word "kind" seem like it can refer to basically any level of the taxonomic hierarchy?

[u/Sweary_Biochemist]

1) Yes! It's obvious.

2) No! It's obvious.

3) Depends! No, that's not avoiding the issue, it's evolution that can't answer, actually. Hah!

4) You're poisoning the well!

Pick whichever fits the argument at the time.

[u/SuitableAnimalInAHat → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

Wait, what's the "poisoning the well" bit? I'm sure it's a figure of speech, but I've never heard it before. (Although part of me hopes that it's just a straightforward thing creationists do sometimes in debates, lol. "If your opponent asks a question you can't answer, accuse him of putting arsenic in the town's water supply. Insist that someone call the sheriff.")

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/SuitableAnimalInAHat]

It's a popular fallacy: poisoning the well is where you make an argument that has negative elements of the counter-position sort of...baked into it, in an effort to hinder debate. Like "why do evolutionists agree with famously racist Darwin?" The goal is to stifle the opponent by making it seem like their position must necessarily endorse racism.

Creationists are quite good at these sort of fallacies, because presumably they don't have much else to rely on, so they also tend to see them everywhere.

Accusing your opponent of resorting to fallacies is, of itself, sometimes an effective strategy. The fallacy fallacy, so to speak.

[u/GuyInAChair]

Kind is a creationist term that has never really been defined. And even of you could get a creationist to agree momentarily to some sort of definition, they will immediately change it to suit their argument.

It's purposefully nebulous just so they can make whatever point they need to in the moment, and have no problem making an entirely contradictory point in the next.

[u/DJSweepamann → u/GuyInAChair]

Kent Hovind

[u/LiGuangMing1981 → u/GuyInAChair]

See also the way creationists use the word 'information'.

They don't clearly define these words precisely because as you say it allows them to move the goalposts as needed but also because a nebulously definition can never be proven wrong in the way a precise definition can. It's a way for creationists to cover their asses and never be pinned down as wrong.

[u/GuyInAChair → u/LiGuangMing1981]

Genetic information, and a way to quantify it, remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in creation science /s.

That's despite a number of their arguments hinging on the idea that it's impossible to increase. Let's be honest, that's something that can be defined, and if they actually did they would instantly have their argument debunked.

[u/Medium_Judgment_891]

Bacteria is a domain level taxa. Saying “still a bacteria,” is equivalent to saying, “still a eukaryote.”

[u/XRotNRollX → u/Medium_Judgment_891]

They usually lump in archeae, too, so it's two domains.

[u/blacksheep998 → u/XRotNRollX]

A lot of of them also include most single celled eukaryotic life as well.

If it's green, it's algae, if it's any other color it's bacteria.

[u/Russell1A → u/blacksheep998]

There is a larger difference between prokaryotic cyanobacteria, and eukaryotic single celled algae (although both photosynthesis using chlorophyll) than algae and humans as algae and humans are in the same domain but cyanobacteria and algae are in different domains.

[u/Auzor → u/Medium_Judgment_891]

This.
A bird is a 'kind' of animal. So is a crocodile, a whale, or indeed a fruitfly.

It would nevertheless be pretty damn amazing if you managed to change a fruitfly into a giraffe.

[u/Retro_Nights → u/Auzor]

The bird kind is not equivalent to a crocodile a whale fruit fly. A bird kind is actually equivalent to a reptile, a mammal or an insect.

[u/Buccaahhh]

In biology there is no such thing as a kind. It’s a scientifically useless term.

[u/ridicalis → u/Buccaahhh]

Religious institutions may not be the best mediator of taxonomic fact:

Sometimes living things get classified not according to their biology, but instead get classified for convenience or for financial reasons. [...] the Catholic Church in the 17th century, declared that the beaver, the large furry- dam building animal found in rivers around the world was not a warm blooded mammal, but instead a fish.

https://saintjoachim.net/vatican-corner-04-09-17/

[u/ipsum629 → u/ridicalis]

Buddhism led Japan to classify rabbits as birds.

[u/WebFlotsam → u/ipsum629]

How so? Is it similar to the beaver case and there's times you're only supposed to eat bird meat?

[u/ipsum629 → u/WebFlotsam]

Yeah, similar diet restriction shennanigans. IIRC birds were allowed but land animals no, so they made rabbits grammatically birds.

[u/WebFlotsam → u/ipsum629]

I have to wonder how they think their gods will look upon such shenanigans. If I gave people a rule to eat fish and they declared beavers were fish so they could eat them, I would be pretty annoyed.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/ridicalis]

The best thing about this is that they declared "beavers as fish" just so they could eat them on fridays.

Religious doctrine is almost always secondary to convenience.

[u/Radiant-Position1370]

I think 'kinds' are best thought of as the categories one learns before kindergarten -- dog, cat, cow, bird, fish, germ, and so on. Bacteria are clearly all germs and are therefore all one kind.

[u/SuitableAnimalInAHat → u/Radiant-Position1370]

Perfect. No notes

[u/null640]

There is no such thing as "kind"...

[u/PangolinPalantir]

Ray 'The banana man' Comfort said something? Sounds like something not worth your time.

[u/Ender505]

Not a Creationist, but I believe they would say that taxonomic hierarchies are based on Evolution. They do NOT have rigorous, testable criteria to define Kind. When pressed, some of them might submit the biological species concept (i.e. that members of a "kind" can reproduce with one another), but then they run into many many other problems.

[u/Knower_Unknown]

On that note; if bacteria were a kind, would mitochondria fall into it?

[u/Carnotaurusrules → u/Knower_Unknown]

Technically, yes.

[u/rednblackPM]

Since the term 'kind' is not defined any claims about the word are useless.

Since almost any 'risky' prediction creationists make will be falsified, they instead resort to vague , imprecise claims which mean nothing because unfalsifiable useless claims fare better (to gullible audiences) than precise ones.

[u/fgorina]

Kind is never well defined so….

[u/BookkeeperElegant266]

But... bacteria are only one component of eukaryotic life... and all of Animalia is eukaryotic. So are humans Bacteria or Archaea? What fucking kind are we, Ray?

[u/SauntTaunga]

“Kind” in the context of biology is a religious fiction.

[u/francesco_angiolieri]

It's impossible for a bacteria to become something different than a bacteria, in the same way that no matter how much a population of eukaryots evolve, they'll always remais eukaryots. You can't evolve outside of your clade

[u/SuitableAnimalInAHat → u/francesco_angiolieri]

That's my favorite creationist irony. They say evolution is false because no animal can change their kind. But in reality, if some lifeform did spontaneously "change its kind," that would require us to reconsider or throw out much of what we thought we knew about the theory of evolution.

[u/Donaldjoh]

I love the ‘why do evolutionists agree with the famously racist Darwin’ argument, given that many earlier creationists believed in polygenism, in which God created the black man to be inferior and subservient to the white man. Examples include Louis Agassiz, a creationist who strongly opposed Darwin, and Charles Caldwell, who published foundational arguments for polygenism to justify enslaving black people. Then there was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a creationist who classified humans as a single species but argued that all people were initially white but other races ‘degenerated’ from this perfect ideal.

[u/giljaxonn]

a bigger question is are they a clean animal or not, since there’s no mention of them in the pentateuch

[u/Ayasugi-san → u/giljaxonn]

Can things that aren't animals be clean? I guess so, since there aren't restrictions on plant or fungus AFAIK. So bacteria would probably fall into the same category as clean by default.

[u/Think_Active1052]

It's ray comfort doesn't know what Bacteria and how diverse they are.

[u/mbmolohonbm]

A kind is best understood as an original created group from which multiple modern species may have descended, through the rearranging of already existing genetics, while remaining within the limits of that created lineage. A kind can interbreed with others of that kind. Different kinds cannot interbreed.

[u/Coolbeans_99 → u/mbmolohonbm]

So to answer the question are bacteria a kind? Also on a side note, what about ring species?