Howdy.
In another thread one poster made reference to another's usage of the word
"man" or
"mankind" and asked him why he used that phrasing. It seemed to the other poster that this was similar to using the term
"kind" as YECs do when talking about the ark story. The poster then explained that he used the term
"man" to describe anything in the genus
"homo." So what he was saying (even though he didn't mean to) is that
"homo" is a sort of Biblical
"kind."
The classification of a species usually relies on the ability of an organism in a species to interbreed with other organisms of the same species. If two organisms can't interbreed then they are of a different species (you know, and they are of opposite sex and reproduce by sex, and are sexually viable). Even though some individuals of what we classify as species can interbreed, say members of the cats or dogs, and some others. Yet we put them into separate species for whatever reason.
In this regard, the Linnean heirarchical classification system seems to be largely arbitrary in many places, especially to a non-biologist such as myself. So that the term
"genus" (maybe even other types of division) really
could be supplanted by the term
"kind".
My question is this:
Why continue to bother with the heirarchical Linnean classification system when sometimes it seems that assignments to certain genuses and species seem arbitrary and use the same type subjective classification used to assign species to a certain "kind"?
What I mean is this: Say a paleontologist discovers an extinct species of bear. What is the difference between how he assigns this fossil to the genus "Ursus" and how a creationist would assign it to the kind "bear" (or some other name)?
Should we start using this Phylocode or some other non-heirarchical scheme?
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