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Yes, using my definition of kinds one could try to put man and the chimpanzee into the one kind.
As a *postulate* we would of course state that this was not the case.
I'm not interested in what one could do, but in what you are proposing, which is that humans and chimps do not share a common ancestor. (Unless I've misunderstood you here.)
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Empirically, human-specific genes aside
What human-specific genes do you mean?
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one then has to note that the millions of SNPs in coding and regulatory regions that distinguish man and chimpanzee are doing something very important (to human intelligence for example).
Technical notes . . . "Millions" is an exaggeration: there are fewer than 100,000 amino-acid-changing substitutions between human and chimpanzee, and the bulk of these are probably of little effect. The number of regulatory changes is pretty much a matter of guesswork at this point, but a number on the same scale seems likely. Also, differences between species are not SNPs; SNPs are polymorphisms, that is, variant alleles within a population.
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One cannot argue that this combination of SNPs could evolved easily unless one assumes evolution a priori.
Why not? The number of substitutions is smaller than what one would predict for neutrally evolving DNA, based on the observed mutation rate. That is, we know mutations are occurring at a certain rate, and there's nothing special we know of that prohibits functionally important mutations from occurring. So why couldn't this combination have evolved easily?
Getting back to my original question, however: if humans and chimpanzees do not share a common ancestor, why do their genomes look so much like they're descended from a common ancestral genome? Why does human chromosome 2 look exactly like a fused pair of ancestral chromosomes, chromosomes that are still separate in chimpanzees? Why do the differences between the two genomes look so much like they're the result of accumulated mutation, with larger differences in regions of high mutation rate, and with more differences corresponding to mutations that happen more easily?
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