Of Creationists and Quotations

This thread is one (of two) that represents a continuation of the off-topic discussion on horse phylogeny begun in the New Abiogenesis News Article thread. In this post, post #66, bart enters the conversation with a lengthy list of quotations from evolutionists allegedly calling into question the stated phylogeny. When called on this blatant appeal to authority, bart over-reacts (from post #87), claiming that the simple phrase quote mine represented dishonest tactics designed to intimidate readers. He also states, truthfully, that I didn’t see the point in researching exhaustively the specific quotations he cited and proving they were spurious. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, the thread was closed (it was seriously off-topic by that point) before I could respond.The list of quotations in post #66 does, however, present an opportunity to examine creationist use of argument by quotation. Rather than pointlessly arguing with bart on his quotes, using them as examples of quote mining tactics may be more illustrative. (Note: a reply to the substantive arguments made by bart in messages #87 and #88 will be forthcoming in a separate thread.)I want to make one thing perfectly clear from the outset. The following is not an argument for or against creationism. It is an argument against a specific set of tactics used by a certain subset of creationists. It should be noted as well that I recognize these dishonest tactics are not used by all, or even the majority of creationists on this board.

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Quetzal writes: "And yet another lengthy quote mine from ol' bart. When are you going to learn that "argument by spurious quotation" and "appeal to authority" doesn't cut it? You been reading the infamous "Quote Book" again?"

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Bart: The key word above is "quote mine". This is a typical anti-creationist attack that dogmatic believers in Evolution mindlessly use to ridicule, browbeat, and insult creatiionists for the purpose of instilling fear and distain in the less informed and/or lurkers reading the postings by creationists. This type of intellectual pressure is known as 'Brow Beating' and is used to intimidate readers and pressure them to stay in the evolutionist camp.

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Quetzel's sophistical attack is akin to the school bullies of elementary and junior high schools whose bad mistreatment of physically weaker students causes other students to ostracize the picked on students and to rally around the bully for fear they will be singled out next for humiliation. These type sophistries are the fodder of evolutionists postings, and this forum has been no exception.

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To begin with the message that prompted this reply (message #87), note the massive over-reaction to a single, two-word phrase — quote mine. This is quite plainly a pure rhetorical device that attempts to claim a moral high ground. This type of verbal attack strategy is often used in arguments where the individual making the attack has no actual argument. It attempts to shift the burden onto the other party by placing them on the defensive. Note the semantically loaded terminology: mindlessly ridicule, browbeat, intellectual pressure, bully, instilling fear and disdain in the less informed. Let’s be serious for a moment. How does dismissing tactics which are logically unsound to begin with — argument from authority - equate to brow beating, bullying, etc? How can someone intimidate a reader on an Internet board? Threaten them with eyestrain? In any event, this verbal assault is simply meant to derail attention away from the actual point of contention: the use of lists of quotations in lieu of evidence.So what is bart objecting to so strenuously? A quote mine is simply a misuse of primary sources — searching through the works of your opponents (in this case, evolutionists), and lifting stretches of words that appear to support your position if taken out of textual or historical context. Here’s an example I came up with myself, in less than five minutes: Does anyone really believe that Dr. Dawkins, a confirmed and quite vocal atheist, would actually state that God intervened to place a soul in humans to make them different from animals? And yet these are in fact his words. No one can argue that Dawkins didn’t write them. If you did not know Dawkins, didn’t know what he was commenting on, and didn’t have the before- and after-text, any normal person would assume that the quotation was no more than it appeared to be — an affirmation of the existence of souls and the special place of humans in nature/God’s plan. Only by examining the context can we make heads or tails of what Dawkins is really saying:

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(from a discussion of the Pope’s tentative agreement that evolution doesn’t violate Catholic doctrine, which Dawkins actually calls obscurantist):

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Never fear. As so often in the past, obscurantism comes to the rescue:

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‘Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seen irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being.’

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In plain language, there came a moment in the evolution of hominids when God intervened and injected a human soul into a previously animal lineage. (When? A million years ago? Two million years ago? Between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens? Between "archaic" Homo sapiens and H. sapiens sapiens?) The sudden injection is necessary, of course, otherwise there would be no distinction upon which to base Catholic morality, which is speciesist to the core. You can kill adult animals for meat, but abortion and euthanasia are murder because human life is involved." (from here).

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As you can see, Dawkins is discussing the Pope’s interpretation, not espousing anything himself. In fact, Dawkins dismisses the Pope’s attempt to inject a soul into humans as a desperate attempt to keep the faith while still trying to accommodate doctrine to modern science. That was NOT obvious from the initial quote.I chose this rather extreme example from a well-known author to illustrate one of the most common quote mine tactics — taking a sentence or even paragraph out of a larger body of work in isolation without providing the background and context necessary to make sense of the quotation. It becomes even more difficult with lesser-known authors or secondary sources (a quote of a quote from some other work), which are amenable to this type of wholesale misrepresentation. And this, of course, is one of the primary reasons why argument from authority is a fallacy: it is extremely easy, even inadvertently, to misunderstand or misrepresent the source.
The tactic is especially effective if you intersperse comments with quotes that — if taken completely out of the context in which they were written or without background explanation (for instance, what the book it was lifted from was about or what the author’s ACTUAL conclusions were) — lead the reader to make an unwarranted connection. This also provides plausible deniability — the quote miner can simply state they didn’t deliberately draw the connection. If called on the misquote, the user can blame the reader for the misinterpretation. We have a prime example in bart’s post #66. Note well the structure:

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Evolutionist and Professor G.A. Kerkut stated in his book 'Implications of Evolution', concerning the horse series:

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"The evolution of the horse provides one of the keystones in the teaching of evolutionary doctrine, though the actual story depends on who is telling it and when the story is being told. In fact, one could easily discuss the evolution of the story of the evolution of the horse."

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Taking the entire skeleton into account, the Hyracotherium is a lot closer in appearance to the modern Hyrax than it is the the horse. Like Hyracotherium, the Hyrax has four toes on the two front feet and three on the hind legs. The two are about the same size in height and have the same number of ribs. Evolutionists like to show sketches of Hyrcotherium standing like a horse, but sketches could just aas well be drawn to show hyracotherium in the same posture as a modern day hyrax as the legs of both are very similar. It is possible that Hyracotherium is unrelated to the modern day Hyrax, but then, it would then be even more possible that it is not ancestral to the modern day horse. Especially since it coexist in the fossil record with a much more horse like creature that stood 3 to 4 feet high. I can't remind this horses name, but it is on display at AMNH where it is shown to be contemporary to hyracotherium.

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With the actual quote from Kerkut highlighted, note how carefully the following paragraph is placed so as to draw the conclusion that Kerkut is calling into question the evolution of the horse. He isn’t however — he’s discussing (at least in this quoted passage), how the understanding of that evolution has changed. Kerkut’s entire 43-year-old book outlined his idea of the polyphyletic nature of all life (vice the monophyletic view currently held). He proposed a General Theory of Evolution (which was what the book was about — a General (macroevolutionary) and Special (microevolution) theory.) From the actual book:

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There is a theory which states that many living animals can be observed over the course of time to undergo changes so that new species are formed. This can be called "The Special Theory of Evolution" and can be demonstrated in certain cases by experiments. On the other hand there is the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. This theory can be called the "General Theory of Evolution" and the evidence that supports it is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything but a working hypothesis. It is not clear whether the changes that bring about speciation are the same nature as those that brought about the development of new phyla. The answer will be found by future experimental work and not by dogmatic assertions that the General Theory of Evolution must be correct because there is nothing else that will satisfactorily take its place. (pg 157)

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Note that he’s arguing an epistemology — just like Patterson (see below), another one who’s often misquoted by creationists — not antievolution. This is another insidious example of creationist tactics — attempting to make an evolutionist seem to support creationism even though the work they’re quoting from has the opposite intent.This brings me to another interesting creationist tactic. Scientists spend a great deal of time dealing with and discussing problems or disagreements with one hypothesis or another. I would say this is part of their job description. Creationists often quote the problem while failing to note that — in most cases — the scientists quoted are either arguing for a different interpretation or presenting a hole or discrepancy in a hypothesis in the form of problem — solution. The creationists either omit the actual different interpretation or omit the solution part of the equation, focusing only on the statement of the problem. Here’s a classic example from bart’s post:

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"There was a time when the existing fossils of the horses seemed to indicate a straight-lined evolution from small to large, from dog-like to horse-like, from animals with simple grinding teeth to animals with complicated cusps of modern horses . . As more fossils were uncovered, the chain splayed out into the usual phylogenetic net, and it was all too apparent that evolution had not been in a straight line at all. Unfortunately, before the picture was completely clear, an exhibit of horses as an example . . had been set up at the American Museum of Natural History [in New York City], photographed, and much reproduced in elementary textbooks."*Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate (1960), pp. 225-226.

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(Those pictures are still being used in those textbooks.)

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Is Hardin arguing against evolution, or even the evolution of the horse? Nope — Hardin is talking about the fallacy of orthogenesis (the idea of linear descent with one species replacing another in an unbroken chain), a late 19th Century idea. Note the key phrases: there was a time, as more fossils were uncovered, and before the picture was completely clear. There has been a lot of scientific criticism of the overly-simplified early versions of the horse phylogeny, their unfortunate introduction into basic science texts, and an embarrassing AMNH mistake that took place in the mid-19th Century! Note also the very out-of-date reference. We are supposed to believe that NO additional information has been generated - no new fossils, no new evidence; no new textbooks have been introduced — in over 40 years? Note also bart’s unsupported assertion carefully inserted after the highlighted section (the actual quotation) — we are to assume that NO corrections have been made since 1960 in science curricula or textbooksAs another example, bart’s second horse series quote, this one from Colin Patterson:

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THE HORSE "STORY", Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist British Museum of Natural History, "There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff." Harper's, p. 60, 1984.

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Interesting that the only place this quote can currently be found is on creationist websites. The original Harper’s (Harper’s Bazaar?) is unknown and unavailable to check — another use of unverifiable secondary sources. However, that aside, read the quote carefully — what is Patterson, a cladist, proponent of and prolific writer on evolution, REALLY writing about? Note that not once does he even mention Hyracotherium. Is he, instead, saying that the entire horse lineage is false, as bart would have us believe? Or is he discussing specifically the 50-year-old exhibit in the museum downstairs as illustrative of an erroneous approach to representing evolutionary descent? Which, by the way, if the dates are correct, was put together in the 1930’s.The reality is he’s taking to task those who engage in one of his pet peeves: making up what he terms just so stories. Patterson is ACTUALLY arguing epistemology — cladist vs systematist - from his strong stance on the necessity of avoiding making unsupported claims. He maintained that, because of the nature of the fossil record, it was a fallacy to proclaim this or that fossil was the direct ancestor of the another. Patterson’s life-long battle was against evolutionary systematists who assume ancestral relationships in the designs of their trees. On the other hand, he was a firm proponent that a lineage could be determined by cladistics — just not necessarily the specific organism in an A begat B series. It was the nature of the story telling that Patterson objected to — not evolution. It’s the various permutations of this argument of Patterson’s where he’s most often misrepresented or misquoted.So what does Patterson REALLY think about Hyracotherium specifically? Why don’t we let him tell us himself? It certainly sounds, from historical context at least, that Dr. Patterson is very much unopposed to Hyracotherium as a transitional to the equiid lineage. Even so, there are 24 years of additional data which Dr. Patterson was unaware of when he wrote this. There IS a legitimate question concerning Hyracotherium and its position in the basal perissodactylae. I will discuss the evidence in my next essay — stay tuned.As with the above, bart’s Gould and Milner quotations are also amenable to this kind of in-depth analysis. In all cases, they show either misrepresentation, misinterpretation, or misunderstanding of what the authors are attempting to portray or discuss. The Milner quote is an especially interesting example of another quote mining tactic — mixing two unrelated quotations, and misattributing one to boot. Let’s take a look:

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Bart writes:

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"Marsh's 'Horse Evolution' is still presented as fact to students today! A fossil exhibition was staged at the American Museum of Natural History. "The exhibit is now hidden from public view as an outdated embarrassment. Almost a century later, palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson re-examined horse evolution and concluded that generations of students had been misled." Encyclopedia of Evolution - Richard Milner

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Note the misplaced quotation marks (at the beginning, no close quote, and the start of another which is closed at the end). Partially this probably stems from a sloppy cut-and-paste. A quick perusal of creationist sites (for example, here and here) reveals that the first quote mark is erroneous — the first two sentences are actually commentary on the citation from Milner. Unfortunately, because of the incestuous nature of creationist quote mining, I have been unable to determine whose comments those really are. My guess would be the creationist FW Cousins, whose original Creation Research Quarterly article started the whole mess in 1971. Be that as it may, we are obviously supposed to assume that the entire paragraph was written by Milner, which is not the case. Reading in context without the commentary by the unknown creationist author, we can see that Milner is discussing an amusing and at the time no doubt embarrassing incident in the early history of the AMNH that took place in the mid-19th Century! Note well that Milner specifically states almost a century later George Gaylord Simpson. So when did Simpson re-examine the horse series? 1951! Unless my math is off, that means the AMNH exhibit was put together in the 1850’s. In other words, Milner is commenting on an old story — an orthogenesis story at that - in the history of science, not on anything current for the last half century. The way this quote is structured however, is at the least misleading — we are meant to assume that the embarrassment is recent, hence calling into question modern interpretations and data.The late Stephen J. Gould is probably one of the most commonly mis-represented evolutionist writers. I don’t know what it is about him that attracts this — possibly because he was so prolific a writer for a popular audience. bart provides us three quotes from Gould’s last popular book, Full House. The first, doesn’t even address the horse series directly. Note the ellipses — a key sign of out-of-context quoting. To understand what Gould is trying to say here, however, it is necessary to understand what the book is about. Gould’s overall premise is a not-so-subtle argument against the common misconception that evolution proceeds from the simple to the complex, with humans at some ultimate pinnacle of evolutionary development. Rather, humans are on a not-so-important side branch of a great bush of life. As is usual with Gould, he is arguing against what he terms man’s arrogance of place (he spends the latter half of the book making the case that bacteria are in fact the pinnacle of evolution) and arguing against the idea of stately progress — not because scientists presume that, but rather to correct a lay public misperception. The book attempts to make the case that variety, vice complexity, is the true measure of achievement. He uses the horse series examples as an illustrative of the contingent, drunkard’s walk mode and tempo of evolution. In the above passage, and in the next two bart quoted, he is arguing against the tendency for people — including scientists (e.g., Gaylord Simpson) — to discuss evolution in the sense of overall trends. Here’s an excerpt from an interview in which Gould lays out one of the key premises of "Full House":

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People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends -- because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. The point of my latest book, Full House, is to show that we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend. (from here.)

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Gould is not calling into question the horse series — he’s calling into question the way it was (is) portrayed.The next quote presented points up an additional problem with quote mining: use of out-dated, obscure references:

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"The popularly told example of horse evolution, suggesting a gradual sequence of changes from four-toed fox-sized creatures living nearly 50 million years ago to today’s much larger one-toed horse, has long been known to be wrong. Instead of gradual change, fossils of each intermediate species appear fully distinct, persist unchanged, and then become extinct. Transitional forms are unknown."
B. Rensberger, Houston Chronicle, Nov 5, 1980, sec. 4 pg 15.

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The difficulty here is that the Chronicle requires a paid subscription to access their archives, making it problematic to confirm or verify the actual, 22-year-old citation. In this case, whereas we can’t directly address this particular quote, we can examine the author’s other writings to see if there is at least indirect confirmation. Boyce Rensberger is a fairly well-known science journalist and was most recently the Department Head of the Knight Science Journalism Foundation at MIT. However, his official MIT biography doesn’t indicate that he ever worked for the Chronicle:

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Rensberger came to MIT in 1998 after having been a science writer or science editor for some 32 years, beginning in 1966 at The Detroit Free Press. His career has included long stints at The New York Times (1971-1979) and The Washington Post (1984-1998). Rensberger also was head writer of a PBS science series for children, "3-2-1- Contact!" From 1981 through 1984 he was senior editor of Science 81 - Science 84 magazine, a popular but now defunct monthly published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At The Post, he created and edited the paper's monthly supplement, "Horizon: The Learning Section" which uses journalistic-style articles to teach science, technology and history to readers of all ages. Rensberger has written four popular science books, most recently Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell. (from here).

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Of course, thre's nothing to say he didn't write an article for the Chronicle, but it of course raises the question as to whether the quote is valid — without access to a good library there’s no way to check. Another piece of evidence concerning this quote (beyond the fact that Rensberger has been writing mainstream science articles for 35 years), is a much more recent article that specifically discusses the horse lineage. Obviously either Rensberger has changed his mind, or the original quote provided by bart is false. Or maybe it’s a completely different B. Rensberger who writes on science topicsJ.B. Birdsell (the next quote) is an anthropologist. Congratulations bart, I simply don’t have the references to show that this one is out of context. Birdsell’s textbook is out of print — it appears the last edition was published around 1981. I would be curious as to the context if anyone has one: what was a discussion of horse lineage doing in a textbook on anthropology?And last but not least, the famous Gaylord Simpson quote that started this whole argument:

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Even Gaylord Simpson came around to the truth:

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"The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the heart of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature... The evolution of the horse family, Equidae, is now no better known than that of numerous other groups of organisms..." George Gaylord Simpson, Life of the Past, 1953

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Besides being significantly out of date by half a century, this is a prime example of out-of-context quote mining. From Cox’s essay referenced on the previous thread: Note the huge chunk of key explanatory text that has been omitted by bart, marked by ellipses. As well, note the carefully truncated last sentence which omits another key explanatory phrase. Once again we have a scientist arguing against orthogenesis, and 50 years ago at that, and not as bart would have us believe, against the lineage itself.As to the Coffin and Berlinski quotes, those were deliberately omitted. After all bart claims the quotes are from evolutionists. Coffin is a YEC, and Berlinksi is a vocal anti-darwinian of uncertain philosophical origins. Since neither are evolutionists, their inclusion on bart’s list is an attempt at misdirection.A quote mine is a quote mine is a quote mine. No attempt at bluster, obfuscation, or misdirection is going to rescue this type of fundamentally dishonest and intellectually lazy argument.For the readers who’ve made it this far — don’t ever expect me to do this again. It is a complete waste of time. As to bart's demand that I publish a "retraction" for my accusation of quote mining, I hope that the above essay will stand instead.

Congratulations Quetzal on a masterful expose on creationist quote mining. Bart stands condemned of careless and reckless disregard for the truth or, at the very least, credulous reliance on unreliable and/or dishonest creationist sources.I found the Dawkins misrepresentation particularly offensive because even the most cloistered, ignorant creationist would realise that it is completely inconsistent with the creationists' characterisation of Dawkins as an arch atheist.Alas your magnificant efforts will undoubtedly be in vain. Bart will fail to acknowledge his errors. He will probably even repeat the same misrepresentations in the future in other places. The sources which he is parroting will not retract or remove their misrepresentations. But I would be happy to be proven wrong.However I will keep a copy of your material in case I find the same misrepresentations appearing in any forum I am in so that they can be debunked with some facts which creationists seem to fear.

Excellent post, Quetzal.One more to add: said by Prof George Greenstein (Symbiotic Universe 1988 p27), quoted universally by Creationist sites as an example of a reknowned astronomer claiming that there is unmistakeable evidence in nature for the existence of a Supreme Being.What is rarely quoted is how this passage continues (all emphases mine): which reveals the Professor to be more of an agnostic theist and refusing to accept God as an explanation for anything.PE

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I found the Dawkins misrepresentation particularly offensive because even the most cloistered, ignorant creationist would realise that it is completely inconsistent with the creationists' characterisation of Dawkins as an arch atheist.

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Sorry, wj. I guess I wasn't clear enough. That was my very own quote mine. I just wanted to show how easy it was...

Noted.

You deserve an applause, that was and is a most excellent post and a rather thorough dissection, Quetzal. ------------------[This message has been edited by TrueCreation, 02-04-2003]

"Bart will fail to acknowledge his errors. "Indeed. I was also accused of attempting to "browbeat" and the like.Of course, Bart has failed to respond substantively in any post. Lists of quotes and assertions of 'brow beating' are about all he seems to be able to muster.