Creationist quotes and citations reflects a greater level of academic dishonesty

I have searched the forums long searching for this specific topic, but haven't been able to find it (the search function is great, but no time to search every case of the keywords!). I would like to discuss, and hear rebuttals on the use of citations in both posted comments and in YEC lietrature.I think everyone agrees that selectively quoting a scientist to make it look like they have serious doubts about the existence of evolution is wrong. What I have seen is that most of these quotes are not independantly derived but have been repeated over and over again. The dishonesty of this transcends many levels. First, it is wrong to cite as evidence something that says nothing of the sort. Second, and perhaps the most important from a scientific viewpoint, it is wrong to cite as a source a reference that you have not personally read. To do so looks impressive, looks like you have done research, but in reality you are doing nothing more than lying to perpetuate a lie.As a scientist I know how tempting this can be. I want to mention that there are x number of caridean shrimp described. Do I want to search all of the literature, cross-reference species lists, etc.? Or is it easier to find another paper that makes this claim? And when I cite this paper do I cite it as the reference or do I cite the reference that they used that I have not seen and would take me weeks to ILL from the U of Moscow? While the latter is most impressive it simply cannot be done. I hope I am not the only scientist who has had this temptation. What is important is that it is wrong, it is intellectually dishonest, and it opens you up for attack (what if the ref you are citing is also wrongly citing the other ref?). Your reviewer may have that reference handy. The point is that you don't cite a ref you haven't seen period.So... my point is that even if there is some book coauthored by Gould and Mayr called "150 reasons evolution is false and Genesis is the true account" it is wrong to cite that refence, extract quotes from that reference, etc. unless you personally have it in your lap. Cutting and pasting a cite from AiG is NOT literature review and to claim otherwise is fraudulent.The purpose of this personal beef is that I see so many 'authorative' YEC's who talk as if they personally were reading Origin of Species, or had attended the Patterson symposium. I might believe them if they all didn't take the exact same quote, including (sometimes) the exact old Morris rewording, and present it as evidence they personally ran across. I think that if they want to be called "Creation Scientists" they should be forced to uphold the same intellectual standard as all scientists. I will even concede that they can still be scientists but do no primary research, there is a valuable need for scientists willing to study and hypothesize through metanalysis. So I propose that we stop filling in the gaps for them. When they cite a reference, even a Creationist source, we should instead reply "what about the statement Gould makes in the second paragraph from the end? What do you think of that?" Even do it with YEC pubs, I am sure half of these people don't cross-reference their literature (if that is an incorrect and insulting statement, I apologize to those that do but have personally argued with people who are unfamiliar with any YEC literature outside of a Chick tract). This would force the person to either discuss the source or admit they havn't read it.-AaronThis message has been edited by Lithodid-Man, 05-20-2004 02:29 AM

Almeyda,
Thank you for demonstrating my point! I was going to post a series of misquotes and lies cut and pasted from a YEC publication myself but you saved me the trouble. I have to ask though, do you read the topics prior to posting? This topic was about how wrong it is to cite sources that you haven't read. So you disprove me by doing the same?As an aside, I think it would be fun to start a webpage with YEC quotes taken out of context to show that Creationism is false.Bill Sardi on Sahelanthropus: "it is remarkably old, about 6 to 7 million years......and that makes it fill a 5 million year gap in time that has remained empty till now" (note selective removal of key words)"When these assumptions are plugged into Einstein's general theory of relativity, the result is an expanding universe which is billions of years old at every location" -Bruce Malone, Search for Truth(this is just terrible, but I have seen this done -taking half a sentence) "...evolution has actually occurred and the theory is true" - Kent Hovind

Thanks!

Did you find these sources yourself or did you cut and paste them from some other source? If you claim to have them from personal reference I am going to get every one from the University of Alaska ILL service and ask you details from above and below each quote. Don't look me in the eye, I am a pissed off PhD student facing comp exams in the next month. By this I mean I have to take a series of exams written by my committee members (5) that justifies my scientific knowledge and credibility. This is in opposition to people who go through a diploma mill (like Hovind) to add the PhD title to their name.This message has been edited by Lithodid-Man, 05-23-2004 05:05 AM

Almeyda- So you were what I expected you were. No more, no (maybe a little bit) less. I am saddened by this. I have suggestion for you. Read Darwin's Origin Of Species. Truly read it from cover to cover. I am sure you can pick it up from your local used bookseller for a song. It is hard reading (I am a Darwin fanatic and find his writing tedious). But do it before you criticise him. I think, if you have any thinking skills, you will see the brilliance of his work and how he tries so hard to be consistant with conventional theology.

Your point? You have to have a basic understanding of combustion engines to be a mechanic. You have to understand basic math to be an accountant. Likewise to even comprehend biology you have understand evolution. Dobzhansky's famous quote "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" sums it up nicely.I think the point you are parroting Almeyda is that somehow evolution is an independant, stand alone concept in biology. That all other sciences are in concordance with YEC etc. This that point that people like Hovind push. They make the claim that evolutionists are the only ones in science who require an old cosmos, and they have brainwashed geologists, astronomers, physicists, etc. into concluding that their evidence of a few thousand year old creation must be wrong. Geologists concluded that the earth had to be millions of years old long before Darwin. If biology didn't exist as a science YEC would be challenged by astronomical observation. Just the fact that we can observe steller evolution from start to finish by looking at the stars in various stages and observing the changes over time. Do you honestly believe that God created stellar corpses to litter the galaxy? Dead stars that appear to have went nova millions of years before creation? Sorry for going off-topic, but these 'evolutionary conspiracy' jabs need to squashed lest some unfortunate soul believe they have some credibilty.

I am going to take this piece by piece. Maybe through repitition it will sink in? Please forgive me if parts are oversimplified (I am a biologist, not a physicist). I am sorry for the length, but it is neccessary. Exactly. Because you don't understand it at all. It makes perfect sense to me and, apparently, the majority here. The first and second laws of thermodynamics both support and predict the mechanisms by which evolution occurs. Energy cannot be created or destroyed but can be changed. Whenever energy is changed (converted to work, stored chemically, etc.) there is a loss not of amount of energy but in the quality of energy. This means simply the amount of useful energy in a system declines. As organisms we are constantly striving to add energy to our open systems (eating, photsynthesizing). We are, in effect, holding off the increase of entropy in our systems by increasing it elsewhere (think of a cow as a highly organized system, as humans we turn this system into shoes, glue, and feces and at the same time maintain our bodies at equilibria). This loss of useful energy means that there is not ever quite enough to go around. A percentage of any population will not be able to absorb enough energy from the surrounding environment to both maintain equilibrium and reproduce. Those individuals either go extinct or, occassionally, find a new way to extract energy that frees them from competition. This is evolution by means of natural selection. I first learned this officially in freshman level biology, are they not teaching this in college anymore? What?!! Almeyda, explain to me the process of making parchment and distilling dyes for ink. Can you do it? Can you show that those processes were used to write the original texts of the Bible? Does not knowing the physical origins and methodology of writing invalidate the Bible in your mind?We are discussing biological evolution. By definition this includes the causes and mechanisms by which allelic frequency changes occur in a population and examinations of the sum of those changes over time as shown by genetics and morphology. I might read an article on a big bang model or an origin of life model, but they have nothing to do with biological evolution any more than ancient paper making techniques have to do with theology. Biological evolution begins with the first organism with the ability to replicate. Please try to think about this, let evolution be defined by those people who study it not by a minister who never spent one credit hour in a graduate level evolution course. As one of those 'story-tellers' I take extreme offense. You mean easy as in re-reading 150 years worth of background literature to make sure you are not re-inventing the wheel. You mean spending weeks looking at existing models and coming up with experimental designs for your organism that can potentially disprove each model. Doing this with a limited budget and limited time? You mean easy as in crash-learning on your own complex techniques in max-liklihood statistics, population genetics, or biochemistry because if you don't you know one of your reviewers will spank you on it? What about writing an article that can potentially embarrass you for the rest of your life but you have to do it anyhow to call yourself a scientist. I agonize over every step, from writing to submission to peer-review to publication. Then I really begin to worry. Tell me Almeyda, you seem to speak from experience, how easy is it to come up with these stories? Nope. That is not true, and not at all why evolution is a theory. I am sure you have been informed about the definition of a scientific theory as compared to the use in popular jargon. My argument is it is irrelevant the odds for or against either point. The universe exists and life evolves (I have seen the latter). It is a statement of faith on my part that I believe the liklihood of the first point to be very high and an inevitable consequence of universe formation. With a sample size of one universe it remains faith for me. Okay, I am exercising patience here. Have you read any of these scientists' work or at least a good solid summary of them? Linnaean classification proposed (and not entirely originally) that organisms that were closely related shared structures more in common than those not related. Exactly how organisms individually created could be related was problematic until functional evolutionary models were devised. But Linnaeus certainly laid the groundwork for phylogenetic relationships in organisms.Biology is both dependant upon and completely supports the ToE. It only supports creation if you ignore paleontology, genetics, biochemistry, ecology, ontology, and pretty much the rest of the field. To date, despite thousands of YEC posts, articles, books, etc., I have not seen one single testable coherent creationist hypothesis that explains any single (let alone most or all) major concept in biology. None. If we eliminate the diploma mill 'biologists' and high-school level biology teachers the number of creationist biologists plummets. If in those that remain we look only at evolutionary (as in by training) and organismal biologists the number approaches zero. I have personally met several cell-mol guys (cellular and molecular biologists) who are either creationists or highly sympatico. Of course, I even met a cell-mol guy who was (I am ashamed to say) a group selectionist. Saying there are thousands and demonstrating that fact are very different things.

Well, not all of it.

While reading other sections on the forum I discovered some posts by Almeyda in the forum 'Is it Science?' topic 'The religious nature of evolution...' where punctuated equilibrium is mentioned several times. The following are from messages 21 and 40: and Rather than going off-topic there I thought this reference to Eldridge and Gould was a great illustration of this topic (thanks again Almeyda!)I am going to go out on a limb and guess that these references to PE are refering to the straw man constructed by Gish, Hovind, etc. rather than the actual Eldridge and Gould (1972) paper. Please correct me if I am wrong, Almeyda. Here is a summary of what (I think) you mean by PE.PE was constructed because in the 113 years since Darwin there were no intermeditate fossils. So Eldridge and Gould resurrected Goldschmidt's 1940's hopeful monster hypothesis with some modern revisions. So Eldridge and Gould claimed that there were no intermediate fossils because evolution is directed by fantastic macroevolutions. One day a fully formed bird hatched out of a reptile egg and so on. Do I have it right?So, to continue with this topic, if this is what you believe PE is about it is clear that you have never read the original paper but are merely expressing the falsehoods started by other YECs and proclaiming (by omission of reference) them to be your own. There are two important points here. One is that it is academically dishonest to crtiticize an idea based upon someone else's criticism if you do not reference your source (This is assuming that you didn't come up with your opinion of PE as "bogus" on your own from a reading of the primary literature. If I am wrong I am sorry and welcome hearing detailed critiques). The second is the YEC's on this forum are doing themselves and their cause a huge disservice by blindly repeating the same misquotes, proposing the same strawmen, etc. from their blind and ignorant (more likely corrupt) leaders. It takes very little effort to confirm these statements. The web is filled to the brim with PDF versions of primary literature. If not there then there is the tried and true method of going to the library. At the very least look at the ideas as synthesized in more popular works and websites.By the way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Don Batten on AiG does a really nice job of summarizing PE, including mentioning that it has nothing to do with Goldschmidt. They interpret it in a creationist light, which is fine because the concept is put forth more or less fairly and well researched (I mean they represent PE fairly with all of the facts, they just draw different conclusions than I would. THAT is approaching science!). Kudos to Don Batten and AiG. (ref below)Eldredge N and Gould SJ (1972) Punctuated equilibria: an alternative
to phyleticgradualism. In: Models in Paleobiology, edited by T.J.M. Schopf. FreemanCooper, San Francisco, CA, pp.82-115.http://www.drdino.com/QandA/index.jsp?varFolder=CreationE...http://www.answersingenesis.org/...v8n2_punc_equilibrium.aspThis message has been edited by Lithodid-Man, 05-29-2004 06:00 AM