A proper understanding of logical fallacies will improve the quality of debate

It amounts to a claim (by association) that the authority cannot be wrong in the particular instance quoted. If the authority happened to have won the Nobel Prize for something somewhat further removed from the actual content of the quote, it becomes an even greater liability because it could be construed as an attempt by the quote-miner to mislead.If you really want to safe-guard yourself against the charge of "appeal to authority" and still use quotes, you may do any or all of the following: Others here are certainly free to modify or add to this list. Edited by DWIII, : subject matter re: a2a via quoting

Even so, there are undoubtedly many Nobel Prize (or other prestigious award) winners that are not nearly so notable; does it follow that their 15 minutes in the spotlight validates everything else that they have done? If you were doing a biography on the scientist in question, nobody would complain about a detailed listing of all of his degrees and awards and honors and such. However, this forum is largely dedicated to supporting objective claims with rational argumentation and evidence, not for doing mini-biographies on your sources. And yet I have one of his books; I certainly know who he is! I suspect most of the people who come here regularly (who don't otherwise live in a cave) also know; and even if they didn't, how does knowing this help support objective scientific claims?You may have a faint point if we were having this pleasant conversation twenty years ago; but in this day and age of the internet with near-instantaneous access to information, adjectifying him with such terms as "famous physicist" and "Nobel laureate" and "devoted family man" becomes very much superfluous. Agreed, my bad; the mere usage of quotes doesn't make for a quote-miner. I wouldn't have used that term if there were no other evidence of abuse by quotation. As has already been noted, quote-mining and appeal to authority oft go hand in hand. Even if one takes all precautions to avoid all de-contextification and ambiguity, one can still mis-use that quote to support some aspect of science by what that person says, as opposed to what the evidence indicates. Edited by DWIII, : clarification

No, he was merely citing an open reference, and maybe not necessarily the best. Any yahoo can compile a laundry list of fallacious forms; this stuff is simply common knowledge-by-experience among debaters. Strawman. The accusation is not "your conclusions are wrong"; the actual accusation is "your conclusions do not follow from your arguments". In other words: you may very well be right, but for all the wrong reasons. Why do you need authority figures to relay some "background about the science" in the first place? As far as I can tell, you are a very-well read individual, and therefore perfectly capable of expressing the relevant background in your own words, which is precisely what the writers of the popular literature had set out to do for themselves. Granted, the writers of the popular books also had the additional in-the-field scientific experience and data to draw from which you may think is not immediately available to you, but so what? This is where education comes into play: if you have a passion for the subject matter, you would recognize the need to learn about some of this stuff yourself by going into the peer-reviewed literature, or even basic textbooks. To misquote the world-famous literary supergiant William Shakespeare, "Get thee to a library.".Tell me, to what degree have you noticed the Nobel-Prize-winning scientists who write these books themselves engage in what you continue to do to the degree which you do it in spite of having been repeatedly called on it? Very little, if not none at all (unless it's one of those quote-mine bonanzas which regularly spew forth from the creationist/designist camp). An extended quote at the beginning of a chapter to introduce the subject matter, perhaps? A quote from the distant past when the scientific state-of-knowledge was in it's infancy? A humorous and yet relevant anecdote told by another scientist? These are not appeals to authority. One may be fine for that task, but a whopping shipload of them??? That's just plain overkill. And thus we are full-circle back to the out-of-context problem. Ambiguity invites distortion. And this is precisely the point where that contrary evidence should be introduced(!). Oh, wait, you didn't have any, did you? Just more quotes. Agreed; but science isn't done by politicking. Majority opinion even among the collection of all scientists carries far far less weight than actual contrary objective evidence. I cannot believe my eyes(!); kudos for a great little non-fallacious gem of a quote! (Also, can anybody else see the irony there?)

I trust you are not attempting to pull a potential false dichotomy here. Even so, I think we can safely assume (for the time being) that any currently active Nobel-Prize-in-science winner is likely to be very much up to speed on the basics of his chosen field, which necessarily includes the type of freely-available library references which I mentioned. You keep shifting the charges. You have cited oodles of quotes so far, some (not all) of which were out of context, and/or the speaker was in error, and/or you have badly misinterpreted what they were trying to say, and/or (even if none of the previous applied) you were setting them up as authoritative statements in the face of clear evidence that they were expressing what amounts to personal opinion. Has anybody here said that they should never be quoted??? The primary issue (and I haven't wavered from that) is the mis-use and/or abuse of quoted material; in particular authoritative reliance on the popular books that (even by the expert's occasional admission) were never intended to be used as primary source matter for any college course, let alone as legitimate scientific references.

"Operational science" = creationist buzzwords. I agree that your strawman-version of evolution is unfalsifiable precisely for the reasons you give. Try examining the actual claims for a change.You have a point that "all and every extant and extinct organism stemmed from the first organism through common ancestry" is a vague (and subsequently unfalsifiable) claim. Thus it is no surprise that the ToE simply does not claim that. The actual claim is, as far as we know, every currently-living organism on Earth derives from a past common ancestor (and almost certainly not the first organism, whatever that may be), and would be falsified if we find so much as one living organism on Earth that cannot fit within the established nested hierarchy (i.e, had derived from a separate abiogenetic (or even supernatural-creation) event).If something like that was ever discovered, it would be major-headlines BIG NEWS; and yet would still be no real problem for the ToE, which would be perfectly comfortable with the existence of multiple disconnected ancestral trees. As has likely been previously (and perhaps repetitively) explained to you: there is no "proof" in science, and thus there is no point in responding to the rest of your dribble."Scientific proof" is an oxymoron.