To repeat, there is no transition between "kinds of animal" in the theory of evolution. And rest of your post kinda falls apart from this simple misunderstanding.
your post is interesting but the above comment is just wrong
evolution *requires* all life coming from a common ancestor
it's change over time...there's no other way to interpret change over time as "transitions between kinds of animal" in laymen's language
The problem is "kind" does not really mean anything exact. You could also say, in biological evolution, "kinds" can only evolve into new "kinds". The "cat kind" can not evolve into the "dog kind". Also, what ever new "kind" the "cat kind" may evolve into, they will also remain "can kind" at the same time. And incidentally, this kind of "evolving into new kinds" is exactly what is shown both by fossil record and by phylogenetic analysis.
People who talk about "kinds" and evolution together don't usually grasp this. Then there's the inevitable degeneration into talking about cats evolving into dogs, when one tries to explain the basics of phylogenetics.
you're just being pedantic on this point....stop it....it makes us all stupiderer
I suppose you could say such transitions happened when different "kingdoms of life" appeared (we really have no clue how exactly that went down, just wild speculation),
yeah...that was GP's point...
life changes over time...that's the "origin of species"...that's the theory, in laymen's terms...
you're overcomplicating it to make yourself be "right"
There's no point in this discussion, unless you define "kind". As long it is undefined, everything is just handwaving.
If we cut through the irrelevant, as far as I can see, those who talk about "kind" mean "the different types of life that were created separately". These kinds really would be totally separate. Too bad the observations of nature tell us, there aren't this kind of separate "kinds". There's just one tree of life sharing the same DNA-protein encoding scheme, just one "kind", making the whole term redundant.