Created kind

In creationism, a religious view based on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis and other biblical texts, created kinds are purported to be the original forms of life as they were created by God. They are also referred to in creationist literature as kinds, original kinds, Genesis kinds, and baramins (baramin is a neologism coined by combining the Hebrew words bará (בָּרָא‎, 'created') and min (מִין‎, 'kind')).

The idea is promulgated by Young Earth creationists and biblical literalists to support their belief in the literal truth of the Genesis creation narrative and the Genesis flood narrative during which, they contend, the ancestors of all land-based life on Earth were housed in Noah's Ark. Old Earth creationists also employ the concept, rejecting the idea of universal common descent while not necessarily accepting a literal interpretation of a global flood or a six-day creation in the last ten thousand years. Both groups accept that some lower-level microevolutionary change occurs within the biblically created kinds.

Creationists believe that not all creatures on Earth are genealogically related, and that living organisms were created by God in a finite number of discrete forms with genetic boundaries to prevent interbreeding. This viewpoint claims that the created kinds or baramins are genealogically discrete and are incapable of interbreeding and have no evolutionary (i.e., higher-level macroevolutionary) relationship to one another.

The concept of the "kind" originates from a literal reading of Genesis 1:12–24:

And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind [...] And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind [...] And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so.

— Genesis 1:12–24, King James Version

There is some uncertainty about what exactly the Bible means when it talks of "kinds". Creationist Brian Nelson claimed "While the Bible allows that new varieties may have arisen since the creative days, it denies that any new species have arisen." However, Russell Mixter, another creationist writer, said that "One should not insist that "kind" means species. The word "kind" as used in the Bible may apply to any animal which may be distinguished in any way from another, or it may be applied to a large group of species distinguishable from another group [...] there is plenty of room for differences of opinion on what are the kinds of Genesis."

Frank Lewis Marsh coined the term baramin in his book Fundamental Biology (1941) and expanded on the concept in Evolution, Creation, and Science (c. 1944), in which he stated that the ability to hybridize and create viable offspring was a sufficient condition for being members of the same baramin. However, he said that it was not a necessary condition, acknowledging that observed speciation events among Drosophila fruitflies had been shown to cut off hybridization.