Millions of Species in Thousands of Years?

With the Ark Encounter opening on July 7 in Northern Kentucky, many of the visitors will encounter the concept of animal kinds, perhaps for the first time. Kind is the biblical term used to refer to groups of living things. All organisms reproduce “according to their kind” (Genesis 1:11–12, 21, 24–25). In most instances, research has placed kind around the same level as family in our modern classification system.

Now Ark Encounter visitors unfamiliar with this concept might be surprised to learn that Noah took only around 2,000 animal kinds with him on the Ark—not millions of species. Not surprisingly, one of the many questions we’ve received about the Ark is how so few kinds could turn into so many species in just a few thousand years after the Flood.

Well, there’s an answer to this intriguing question! Our research biologist Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson and the Institute for Creation Research’s Dr. Jason Lisle have just published an extensive technical answer in our peer-reviewed journal, . The model laid out in their paper “significantly advances the young-creation explanation for the origin of species, and it makes testable predictions by which it can be further confirmed or rejected in the future.” Yes, speciation can happen more rapidly than most people think.

We’ll be posting a series of lay-level summaries of this exciting research in the coming days, so be sure to watch for those articles.

You can read Dr. Jeanson’s technical paper at .

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.