Baraminology is a system used in
creation scienceCreation science or scientific creationism is the movement within creationism which attempts to provide support for the religious account of creation according to Genesis, and disprove accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology and...
for classifying life into groups having no
common descentA group of organisms is said to have common descent if they have a common ancestor. In modern biology, it is generally accepted that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool....
, called "baramins". Its methodology is based on a literal creationist interpretation of "kinds" in Genesis, especially a distinction between humans and other animals. Other criteria include the ability of animals to interbreed and the similarity of their observable traits. Baraminology developed as a subfield of creation science in the 1990s among a group of creationists that included Walter ReMine and
Kurt WiseKurt Patrick Wise is an American 'young Earth' creationist and serves as the Director of Creation Research Center at Truett-McConnell College. He has a PhD in geology from Harvard University.-Education and work :...
. Like all of creation science, baraminology is
pseudosciencePseudoscience is a methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be scientific, or that is made to appear to be scientific, but which does not adhere to an appropriate scientific methodology, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
and is not related to
scienceScience is in its broadest sense to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome...
, and biological facts show that all life has
common ancestryA group of organisms is said to have common descent if they have a common ancestor. In modern biology, it is generally accepted that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool....
. The taxonomic system widely applied in
biologyBiology is the natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy...
is
cladisticsCladistics is a form of biological systematics which classifies living organisms on the basis of shared ancestry...
, which classifies
speciesIn biology, a species is:* a taxonomic rank or* a unit at that rank ....
based on evolutionary history and emphasizes objective, quantitative analysis.
Interpretations of Biblical kinds
The
BibleThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
mentions kinds in several passages. Genesis 1:12-25 gives an account of the creation of living things:
Genesis 7:13-16 states that there are distinct kinds of
cattleCattle are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius...
. In
DeuteronomyDeuteronomy or Devarim is the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible and of the Old Testament, and the fifth of five books of the Jewish Torah or Pentateuch....
14:11-18 varieties of owl, raven, and hawk are presented as distinct kinds.
LeviticusLeviticus or Vayikra is the third book of the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament, and the third of five books of the Jewish Torah or Pentateuch....
19:19 is concerned with kinds of cloth, cattle, and seeds. Apart from what is implied by these passages, the Bible does not specify what a kind is.
Modern versions of the Old Testament are translations of the Biblical Hebrew text. The Hebrew word מִין
min is used exclusively in a set phrase of the form לְ
l+מִין
min+possessive pronoun suffix, which is translated as
after their/his/her kind. Several other words are translated into English with the word
kind, including the Leviticus 19:19 usage: כִלְאַיֶם
kila'im. The word
min is never used in relation to humans, but the
GreekGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
word γένος
genos is used in
2 Maccabees2 Maccabees is a deuterocanonical book of the Bible which focuses on the Jews' revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes and concludes with the defeat of the Syrian general Nicanor in 161 BC by Judas Maccabeus, the hero of the work....
7:28 "... and so was mankind made likewise". The fact that
kind is used in this set phrase, among other reasons, has led to the hypothesis that it is not a referential noun in Biblical Hebrew, but derived from לְמִינֶה
l'mineh =
of him/herself, of themselves. The word "baramin", which is a compound of the Hebrew words for created and kind, is unintelligible in Hebrew.
Traditional interpretations, such as those of
St. AugustineAugustine of Hippo , Bishop of Hippo Regius, also known as St. Augustine or St. Austin, was an Algerian Berber philosopher and theologian....
,
Thomas AquinasSaint Thomas Aquinas, O.P. was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in the Dominican Order from Italy, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus and Doctor Communis...
,
John CalvinJohn Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...
, and the
VaticanThe Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, commonly known as the Pope, and is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and speaks for the whole Catholic...
, hold that the Bible makes theological and not scientific statements about reality, and that no conflict exists between science and the Bible.
A typical interpretation of Genesis, with focus upon the kinds, is that all things were created, that the ordered multitude of creation is as God intended, and that the evolutionary model "is strongly animated by [a] fundamental feeling of solidarity with the whole of creation", the latter in reference to parallel concepts of common descent and common creator. Others point out that the manner in which the earth brings forth life is never specified, which is compatible with evolution. Yet others have claimed that God may directly guide evolution. Both of these views are known as
theistic evolutionTheistic evolution and evolutionary creationism are similar concepts that assert that classical religious teachings about God are compatible with the modern scientific understanding about biological evolution....
.
History and methodology
One
literalBiblical literalism is the interpretation or translation of the explicit and primary sense of words in the Bible. A literal, Biblical interpretation is associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical hermeneutical approach to Scripture, and is used by most conservative Christians today...
creationist interpretation of the
BibleThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
is that each kind was brought into direct physical existence by
GodGod is a deity in theistic and deistic religions and other belief systems, representing either the sole deity in monotheism, or a principal deity in polytheism....
and that consequently each original animal had no ancestry, common or otherwise. Baraminology emerged from an effort by
young earth creationistsYoung Earth creationism is the religious belief that the Heavens, Earth, and life on Earth were created by direct acts of God during a short period, sometime between ca 5,700 and 10,000 years ago....
to make this interpretation scientifically appealing. The idea of a baramin was proposed in 1941 by Frank Marsh, but was criticized for a lack of formal definition. In 1990
Kurt WiseKurt Patrick Wise is an American 'young Earth' creationist and serves as the Director of Creation Research Center at Truett-McConnell College. He has a PhD in geology from Harvard University.-Education and work :...
and Walter ReMine introduced baraminology in pursuit of acceptable criteria for membership in a baramin.
ReMine's work specified four groupings: holobaramins, monobaramins, apobaramins, and polybaramins. These are, respectively, all things of one kind; some things of the same kind; groups of kinds; and any mixed grouping of things.These groups are similar in name to the concepts of
monophylyIn common cladistic usage, a monophyletic group is a taxon which forms a clade, meaning that it consists of an ancestor and all its descendants. The term is synonymous with the uncommon term holophyly...
,
paraphylyIn phylogenetics, a group of organisms is said to be paraphyletic if the group contains its most recent common ancestor but does not contain all the descendants of that ancestor.- Relation to monophyletic groups :...
, and
polyphylyA polyphyletic group is one whose members' last common ancestor is not a member of the group.For example, the group consisting of warm-blooded animals is polyphyletic, because it contains both mammals and birds, but the most recent common ancestor of mammals and birds was cold-blooded...
used in
cladisticsCladistics is a form of biological systematics which classifies living organisms on the basis of shared ancestry...
. Conditions for membership in a (holo)baramin and methods of classification have changed over time. These include the ability to create viable offspring, and
morphologicalIn biology morphology is the form, structure and configuration of an organism.This includes aspects of the outward appearance as well as the form and structure of the internal parts like bones and organs...
similarity. Some creationists have suggested that kind refers to
speciesIn biology, a species is:* a taxonomic rank or* a unit at that rank ....
, while others believe it might mean any animal which may be distinguished in some way from another. Another criterion is "baramin distance" which is based on the similarity of two or more organisms' characters and uses methods borrowed from
pheneticsIn biology, phenetics, also known as numerical taxonomy or taximetrics, is an attempt to classify organisms based on overall similarity, usually in morphology or other observable traits, regardless of their phylogeny or evolutionary relation....
. Some advocates believe that major differences in the appearance and behavior of two organisms indicates lack of common ancestry. In all cases, methods found to place humans and other primates into the same baramin have been discarded.
Criticism
Baraminology has been heavily criticized for its lack of rigorous testing and post-study rejection of data which does not fit desired findings. Baraminology is a
pseudosciencePseudoscience is a methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be scientific, or that is made to appear to be scientific, but which does not adhere to an appropriate scientific methodology, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
, and has not produced any peer-reviewed scientific research. Universal common descent, which states that all life shares a common ancestor, is well-established and tested, and is a
scientifically-verified factIn the sciences generally, a scientific theory comprises a collection of concepts, including abstractions of observable phenomena expressed as quantifiable properties, together with rules that express relationships between observations of such concepts...
. However, neither
cladisticsCladistics is a form of biological systematics which classifies living organisms on the basis of shared ancestry...
, the field devoted to investigating the ancestral relationships between living things, nor the
scientific consensusScientific consensus is the collective judgement, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity. Scientific consensus is not by itself a scientific argument, and it is not part of the...
on transitional fossils are accepted by baraminologists.
Despite voluminous evidence for evolution at and above the species level, baraminologists reject universal common descent and the emergence of new
familiesIn biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus...
and higher taxa.