Baraminology and pseudoscience

I recently I found the word "baramin" in
a creationist publication, and looked it up on the web; which led me to a
Wikipedia definition for "baraminology." There I was greatly disappointed to
find, "In creation science, baraminology is a system for classifying life into
groups having no common ancestry, called ‘baramins’." This could have been stated better, but I’m OK
with it. But somehow the author(s) felt compelled to go farther with, "Like all
of creation science, baraminology is pseudoscience and is unrelated to science:
modern biological facts have shown that all life descended from one common ancestor.^[1]" I
checked out the reference ( numbered "1" in the previous citation), and found
"Science and Creationism: A View
from the National Academy of Science, Second Edition." I hope you can see a
problem here. (My fear is that you won’t, and thus stop reading. If so, you may
well be part of the problem.)

I will begin by recognizing that Wikipedia, as its name implies,
is only as authoritative as its collegial construction allows. Anybody, and I
mean anybody, can register and contribute to the construction of any article,
and its integrity depends entirely upon peer critique. (As a matter of fact, I
am under no delusion that you are guaranteed the same definition that I read,
should you follow the link a day or two later.) This works amazingly well
overall, until you come to a topic for which there is a strong political bias
such as creationism.

I am not here to argue for or against
creationism, but for an honest and, if I may, scientific discussion of science.
I will first explain what I see as illustration of the problem from this
article, then attempt to offer logical scientific justification for the demined
concept, and end with only a sentence or two on how the problem hurts science.
(I should hope that the hurt to science is obvious enough not to need more.)

The article, and any article claiming to
present facts for a rational public, should be as biases-free as possible. It
would be fair and honest to partially define baraminology as a branch of
creation science. It would be fair to link the reader to an article that states
that creation science is not considered to be true science by the broader
scientific community.  I would not even have a problem with this article
stating this, though it is not directly on the subject. To what I do object is
not offering the reader a chance to make up their own mind by even explaining
the approach that is baraminology.

I’ll start from the back end: "Modern
biological facts have shown that all life descended from one common ancestor.^[1]"
Citation [1] does not argue that biological facts have shown that all life
descended from a common ancestor. It presents a position on creationism, and
even more honestly, calls it a "view." The link for "common ancestor" defines

the term much broader with no discussion of an ultimate common ancestor; the
link for "biological facts" does address the issue, but presents "evidence" for
the position, not proof as a "biological fact." In other words, the more the
reader investigates the claim, the less credible the statement becomes. Better
to understate than overstate references to create credibility. Unfortunately,
the following corollary is also true: The less a reader thinks (checks
references), the more credible the statement becomes.

The rest of the article goes on to
present some interesting and perhaps useful facts about the Biblical origin of
the word and the historical context for its theological debate. I had to go
elsewhere to find what baraminology really is!

So what is it? It does indeed begin with
the theoretical position that the Bible is an accurate history for which
scientific support is sought. (This could be called a theological position in
that it is based on certain assumptions about the extent of God’s involvement 
in our world and that the position is never doubted by its adherents; but if we
accept that, then we would have to classify the theory of evolution in the same
way, based on the position held by many of its adherents.)

The Biblical concept is that all
organisms do not originate from one single ancestor, but that there exist many
independently created "kinds," each of which is the origin of myriad species
today and in the past. "Kind" is a Biblical term, not a scientific one, so it is
not defined scientifically. "Baramin" is the combination of two Hebrew words
(created kind), and is a focus of creationist research: If God created kinds
without a common ancestor, then systematic research should be able to identify
categories of organisms that have major gaps (boundaries) among their
characteristics such that baramins can be isolated.

The approach is to put forth hypotheses
about what characteristics might constitute those boundaries and then to collect
data to see if clear gaps can be identified. These are testable hypotheses.
That’s scientific follow-up on theory. That’s science.

Is it needed? The current classification
structure of genus (meaning general) and species (meaning specific) is bankrupt.
I don’t think that’s too strong a statement, since after hundreds of years of
use a clear definition of what a "species" is has not emerged. Take for instance
the coyote ( Canis latrans), the gray wolf (Canis lupus), and the black backed jackal (Canis mesomelas). They are classified as three different species in the
genus Canis, yet domesticated dogs of any description are all considered to be
the same species (Canis familiaris). The term virtually has no meaning. So why haven’t
scientists abandoned this antiquated classification system, developed by an 18th century
creationist, in favor of a more precise one? Because fuzzy boundaries serve
evolution theory well. If clear boundaries are discovered between
classifications of organisms, then that lends support to creationism and
undermines evolution. So science is not allowed to advance in that direction! In
order to keep baraminology as pseudoscience, we must live with pseudospecies.

This entry was posted on October 19, 2008 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Culture & society, Science and faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.