Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral districts to benefit some political party or group or politician. However, the concept is more general.

Some creationists have tried to create a science of baraminology, a science of baramins or "created kinds". Some of them have borrowed the methods of mainstream biology, but even there, they do not seem to have any good criteria for finding when one baramin ends and another begins. The closest that they come is fertility across species. That would place horses and donkeys in the same baramin, and also lions and tigers. However, that is not as precise as one might want, as is evident from ring species. This is a chain of species, each of which can interbreed with its neighbors, though no with more distant ones. This chain sometimes forms a ring, where the two ends are close to each other, and often where the chain encircles some region.

Some creationists seem to consider "worms" a baramin, though it can be hard to tell from the imprecise rhetoric of many of them. However, "worm" is more a description of shape than a reasonable taxonomic category. Do caterpillars qualify? Centipedes and millipedes? Hagfish? Lampreys? Eels? Snakes? Though Linnaeus had recognized a taxon Vermes ("Worms"), which he had used for all non-arthropod invertebrates, that taxon has long ago been banished from mainstream taxonomies.

Some crieationists supposedly go even further, classifiying all bacteria as one baramin.


Turning to our species, one finds a curious range of opinions. Creationists' classifications of hominid fossils shows creationists' differences in opinion about whether various Homo habilis and H. erectus/ergaster specimens belong to the human baramin or an ape baramin. So chimps and earlier hominid species are outside the human baramin.

I call it gerrymandering because by the standards they apply to various other species, chimps and likely more distant simian species would end up in the human baramin.

I have little to comment aside from one of those nice little observations: all life is a ring species in time.

All Earth life, anyway.