>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?
I can't answer that, but it is worth mentioning a way to look at "after
its kind" that I believe I saw (don't have it in front of me) in the
interpretation chapter of van Till et al.'s _Portraits of Creation_. The
suggestion was that this was not making a statement about fixity of
species or other taxa (even leaving aside the silliness of identifying
"kind" with any modern scientific taxonomic classification), but rather
serving to emphasize the *orderliness* of God's creation. This was
contrasted to some of the mythologies of nearby cultures in which there
were all sorts of bizarre man/beast and beast/beast hybrids.
I also like the previous point that "after its kind" is true in
evolutionary theory -- children are almost always a lot like their
parents, even during the course of evolution.
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| Dr. Allan H. Harvey | aharvey@boulder.nist.gov |
| Physical and Chemical Properties Division | Phone: (303)497-3555 |
| National Institute of Standards & Technology | Fax: (303)497-5224 |
| 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80303 | |
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