via: In praise of subspecies (Aeon)
"Noah never reckoned with trinomials. Modern Creationists, grasping for footholds in the post-Darwinian world, maintain that Noah took 1,398 kinds of animal aboard his Ark, as the floodwaters gathered on the Mesopotamian plain. ‘Kind’, they argue, is a Biblical classification that corresponds to the modern ‘family’, and not, as you might imagine, to the modern concept of ‘species’. If Noah had accessed a modern taxonomic catalogue, he might have found himself with a cargo of up to 30,000 varieties of mammal, bird and reptile; if he had factored in the insects and arachnids, his Ark would soon have been foundering under the weight of about 1.1 million different species. (...)
Noah would no doubt, by this time, have been making frantic calculations about load distribution, ballast, stress and tipping balances, not to mention the logistics of food supply and waste disposal. What, he might have wondered, brushing an anole from his sleeve, is the point of all these subspecies?
He would not have been alone."
