Baraminology

In creation science, baraminology is a system for classifying life into groups having no common ancestry, called "baramins". Classification is based on a literal creationist reading of "kinds" in Genesis, especially the distinction between mankind and other animals. Supplementary criteria include the ability of animals to interbreed and the similarity of their observable traits. 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. The scientific alternative to baraminology is cladistics, which classifies species based on evolutionary history.

Biblical Kinds
The Bible mentions kinds on several occasions. Genesis 1:12-25 gives an account of the creation of living things:

24 And God said: 'Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind.' And it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 7:13-16 states that there are distinct kinds of cattle. In Deuteronomy 14:11-18 varieties of owl, raven, and hawk are presented as distinct kinds. Leviticus 19:19 states that kinds might interbreed. Apart from what is implied by these passages, the Bible does not specify what a kind is.

Traditional interpretations, such as those of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas , John Calvin , and the Vatican , 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 Darwinian 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 in Genesis the manner in which the earth brings forth life is unspecified, which is compatibile with evolution. .

Baraminology
Baraminology is founded upon a biblically literal young earth creationist interpretation of the Bible: that each kind was brought into direct physical existence by God and that these kinds share no ancestry. Baraminology emerged as an effort to make this view 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 the work of Kurt Wise and Walter ReMine introduced baraminology as the pursuit of an acceptable definition. ReMine's work specifies 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 monophyly, paraphyly and polyphyly used in phylogenetics

Conditions for membership in a (holo)baramin and methods of classification have changed over the years. These include the ability to create viable offspring, and morphological similarity. Some creationists have suggested that kind refers to species, while others believe it might mean any animal which may be distinguished in some way from another. Another criterion is "baramin distance" which is calculated based on the similarity of the animals' characters, using methods borrowed from phenetics. In all cases, methods that have been found to place humans and 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 to make it better fit the desired findings. Baraminology is a pseudoscience, and has not produced any peer-reviewed scientific research, nor is any word beginning with "baramin" found in Biological Abstracts, which has complete coverage of zoology and botany since 1924. Universal common descent, which states that all life shares a common ancestor, is well-established and tested, and is a scientifically-verified fact. However, neither cladistics, the field devoted to investigating the ancestral relationships between living things, nor the scientific consensus on transitional fossils are accepted by baraminologists.