Henry Morris on created kinds
Yesterday, I posted a review of creationist thoughts on created kinds that go back nearly a hundred years in an effort to demonstrate that the idea of rapid, post-Flood diversification is not a novel theory that creationists just dreamed up recently. In that review, I skipped over Henry Morris's contributions pretty quickly because I was looking exclusively at The Genesis Flood and because I was not trying to compose a comprehensive rebuttal. I was literally writing from memory and "shooting from the hip," all the while supplementing my recollections by quotes from a few books that I knew discussed created kinds and biological change.
This morning, a kind reader has just alerted me to a Henry Morris article on created kinds from September, 1988. It was originally published in Creation magazine in volume 10, number 4. Morris clearly relies pretty heavily on Frank Marsh (who had released Variation and Fixity in Nature in 1976), but he also very clearly endorses rapid post-Flood speciation and broadly defined created kinds. In Morris's own words:
Man’s attempt to classify plants and animals is sometimes arbitrary. Therefore, the original kinds may have been in some cases what we now arbitrarily define as species; in others as genera. In many cases, in view of the high probability of rapid variation after the Flood it may well have been what we now call the ‘families’ (dogs, cats, horses, bears, etc.). This is an area for potentially important creationist research, through studies of hybridization, post-Flood paleontology, genetics, and molecular biology. In any case, we can be sure that such variation definitely was within the limits of the kind, whatever precisely that may have been.
Thanks to the editors at CMI, you can read the original article right here. I really love their editorial comments on why they posted such an old article: "Although this article by Dr Morris—often called ‘the father of modern young-earth creation’—is now about 30 years old, we are reposting mainly for historical reasons, largely to counteract anti-creationist revisionism. This article shows that leading creationists have long taught that the biblical ‘kind’ is much broader than a biological species."
Have you read my book? You should check that out too!
