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.
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