"Kind" refers to the originally created populations of plants and animals. Today there are efforts to find how broad these original categories are, but they do not have to correlate to the manmade taxonomic categorizations. Hybridization is one way of checking roughly where some of the baramin boundaries are. Thus the canine, feline, equine, and bovine distinctions seem to be indications of kind boundaries.
The animals that were taken on the Ark were only those kind representatives which were land-dwellers, or flew, and also had 'nephesh', or the breath of life. "Nephesh" is also translated 'soul' and thus indicates those animals with unique personalities -- and this indicates that these were the animals with complex central nervous systems, as this is the avenue through which personality is expressed. So there is a definite limit to the numbers and types of animals which were to go on the Ark.
About the idea of kind equating with species -- they used to be thought of as the same about 200 years ago. Some ideas sure hang on! But speciation is not at all the same thing as kind. An easy way to demonstrate this is by the way we use the term even now: a species of fly, or a species of monkey, or a species of giraffe, etc. There is, even in the use of the word, the understanding that species is simply a subdivision of a well-known larger group which is a group unto itself. There is never any indication of a species showing up which is so far away from any original group that it can no longer be identified with that group. This interpretation is given to some of the fossils, but we have never dealt with anything like it in our own experience. "Species" are always "species of" something -- and that something would be far closer to the Biblical kind than the concept of 'species' would be.
I hope that helps there.
As far as Galatian's caustic comments about men and primates, although he delights in blaming man, it is the Bible, in Genesis 1:27 which refers to man with the verb 'bara', which means 'created from nothing', and is ONLY used, in the Bible, with God as the subject. Biblically, God created man directly. Man is directly from the hand of God, not from the genes of animals. That's the meaning of the verb; that's the meaning of the passage. It has nothing to do with trying to artificially separate man from primates and nothing to do with liking or not liking how God did it. He did it Himself, directly -- this has to do with what the Bible says quite clearly.
So it's not a matter of evolution being insulting; it's simply a matter of evolution being wrong.
As God said to Adam:
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you will return.
Man returns directly to dust. Man does not go backwards through the animal kingdom to get there. Man was also made directly from the dust of the ground and did not have to go through the animal kingdom first to arrive at human-hood.
God knows what He is talking about; and He knows how to communicate clearly.
Did God "guide" the evolutionary process? Not according to Him! You see, if death came before Adam's sin, then the statement of Paul that death entered the WORLD (not just human beings) because of sin is invalid.
Genesis in its historic and clearly understood meaning is truly the foundation of the Bible. It also presents the truth.
It has nothing to do with liking or not liking it, or any so-called artificial distinctions among living things -- it simply says was is.
Not what man would like to pretend it to be to fit his own 'scientific discoveries.'
