About Us: Consensus Positions on Various Origins Topics

Uniformitarianism

We accept that the basic processes operating today have operated since being established at creation. However, we reject that the rates of those processes have been uniform throughout history, and we affirm the sometimes catastrophic impact of historical events on the history of life on earth. Specifically, we favor the more extreme catastrophism and punctuated diversification suggested by the biblical framework.

Species Fixity

Species are not fixed and each modern species was not created separately. Species fixity and created present species are Aristotelian, not biblical, ideas (see Historical Context). Although there is genetic fixity that variation cannot exceed, it is at a much higher taxonomic level. Research in discontinuities is suggesting it is at the level of conventional families, subfamilies, or small uniform orders (Wood 2006).

Origins Of Biodiversity

Modern species arose not at creation but since then. Most baraminologists accept the Noachian Flood, which was the most catastrophic geologic event in the history of the earth, as the environmental trigger for rampant diversification and speciation. However, the conventional mechanism of slow accumulation of mutations to increase genetic information is not adequate to explain these changes. At creation, each baramin was designed with latent information. that was switched on (See Wood, 2003), recombined, and fragmented as survivors of the catastrophe reproduced, dispersed, and populated the many newly available, unexploited habitats. Mutations since then have further altered the genetic composition of species.

Phylogeny

As stated in the Methods and Concepts, we find evidence that the assumption of common ancestry of all living things is an unfounded corollary of uniformitarianism. Thus, there is a polyphyletic origin of organisms: grasses do not share a common ancestor with palms or lilies, and cats were created separately from bears and dogs. Within baramins, evidences of continuity do not necessarily equate to evidences of ancestry, and the baraminological terms do not equate to phylogenetic categories. For example, a monobaramin need not be monophyletic. Cavanaugh et al. (2003) interpret the fossil equid baramin as a true phylogenetic diversification (and thus modern equids are monophyletic), but Wood (2002) suggested that the grass baramin may actually be polyphyletic (i.e. that God created two or more diverse ancestral populations within the same region of character space and with sufficient genetic similarity to allow for later hybridization).

Imperfection

Evolutionists often point to biological "imperfections" that would never have been designed by a creator. On the contrary, we understand "imperfections" as either of two concepts: (1) We do not understand the design constraints that require the structure to appear as such, and the "imperfection" may have been part of the original design and therefore not imperfect at all. (2) The "imperfection" was a consequence of the biblical Fall or Flood catastrophe. That is, God designed organisms with latent information for adaptations to survive in the now imperfect world, or some kind of degeneration has occurred that produced a pathological phenotype.

Stratomorphic Fossil Series

Baraminologists generally accept at least that some of the Cenozoic strata are post-Flood deposits and capable of preserving morphological changes accompanying the rapid diversification of that time. Thus, stratomorphic fossil series are expected and constitute an important baraminological criterion in groups having fossils. Cavanaugh et al 2003 argued from their baraminological analysis that the fossil equidae represent an intrabaraminic diversification of form after the Flood.