This reminds me of Genesis 1 in the King James version, which has
"after his kind" and "after their kind" so many times, such as in Gen. 1:11-12
(courtesy of <http://www.shef.ac.uk/~schm/bible/01_gen.html>, since I don't
have a King James Bible in my office): "And God said, Let the earth bring
forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after
his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the
earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree
yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it
was good."
Anyway, using the data that Joel gave, one might conclude that these
verses are at least 99.9999% accurate, which is fantastic! So if these verses
are interpreted to rule out evolution, I would say that even with evolution
they are highly accurate statements, and one should focus on the fact that they
are almost always true, rather than on the exceptions. Would we really have
expected God to inspire the writer to write the awkward phrase, "herb yielding
seed after his kind (except in less than 0.0001% of the cases)"?
However, there is a point I am curious about. When I looked up these
verses in the New Revised Standard Version of The New Oxford Annotated Bible, I
didn't find the idea of "after his kind" at all, but rather "plants yielding
seed of every kind" and so forth. Does this mean that the "after his kind"
translation in the older King James was not the best translation?
Don Page