Since you can’t define kinds it’s meaningless to quibble about whether natural selection has contributed to their evolution. It’s also totally irrelevant to my point, which is that it is a fact that natural selection is a mechanism of evolution and that a group of geologists would easily have been able to state as much when asked.
It is not possible to dispute something as vague as a “kind”, a word without a definition.
But regardless, since mutations in DNA accumulate over time, and since the physiology of the organism is almost entirely determined by it’s genome sequence, it logically follows that the population the organism belongs to will change over time as it’s genome changes too. And we can show that this mutational change has occurred and given rise to different species of primates, and that humans share common ancestry with other primates. Remember this post?
For example, transition bias. Since biochemically we observe most mutations to be transitions (A<->G, or C<->T), if common descent is true then species that share common ancestry should have most of their DNA differences correspond to mutations between A and G, or C and T. We find that.
As expected from the biochemical causes of mutations, the majority of differences both between individual humans, and between the human species and other primates, consist of transitions. Fantastic corroboration of the theory of common descent of primates.
A predicted pattern in differences and similarities can in that way be evidence for a historical occurrence.