Excellent point and well-said, Chris. I am by no means a biologist. I teach high school English, but I do have certain biases when it comes to biology and the scientific classification of animals. You're right that Linnaeus started his classifications from a diffrent premise from current-day biologists/herpetologists. I'm not an evolutionist. I'm a creationist, and if the scientific community reclassifies animals simply to reinforce their world view that the world around us and everything that exists in it is just a happy accident, I take issue. Are we splitting Elaphe because scientists are trying to fit species into an evolutionary schema, or are they splitting it because there are actual biological/morphological differences betwixt the two? I look at the archetypal rat snake head, for example, and see very little difference between a four-lined ratsnake and E. obsoleta. I'm talking about scalation and bone structure. Of course, I don't have access to holotypes that I can examine meticulously and, therefore, must defer to the authorities' conclusions. However, as a creationist I do not accept the premise that all life comes from a single ancestor, but I'm not averse to the probability that life forms diverged into different categories within genera/species over the millenia.

[ Show Entire Thread ]