Omni, by no one, in context he clearly refers to evolutionists as he mentions he and others had checked those facts and shown them to be wanting.
Three possibilities: one, he means literally no one, in which case he is demonstrably wrong; two, he means no one but creationists, in which case he is demonstrably wrong; three, he means no scientists who accept the ToE, in which case he is demonstrably wrong.
The man is just flat wrong. My intuitive take is that he got carried away with his rhetoric--but he didn't go back and clarify it, did he?
I don't think evolutionary scientists need to explicitly repudiate every error made in prior centuries before getting on with their work, any more than Christians need to repudiate Ptolemy, and the persecution of Galileo, before discussing and critiquing modern science.
Do you?
I guess the alternative is we could think they all deliberately lied, but that seems to be going too far, don't you think?
Yes, I think so, but it would seem that many creationists, et al. disagree.
Let me put it this way, rand: the creationists' smears of evolutionary scientists who had little interest or knowledge of Haeckel's work, and their distortions and misrepresentations about Haeckel's work, its significance and reception, dwarf Haeckel's own sins, and they occur for the same reason that his did--Haeckel thought the essential truth of his observations justified manipulating the images to make them more persuasive. That is a continuing problem of human behavior in everything from faked stem cell research to staged miracles.
A good close-to-home example is your use of the Collector's Curve here at EvC to claim that 90% of all fossils that will ever be found have been found. Even though it was pointed out that you were representing an empty, data-free paradigm illustration as slam-dunk evidence, you never renounced your claim--you just left it uncorrected in the historical record, thus perpetuating an erroneous claim--sorta like bad drawings.
Where are the creationists/IDers/critics of evolution who ought to be soundly rejecting your error in order to preserve their own integrity and credibility?
Sound familiar?
Creationists adore Richardson's 1997 paper and his rejection of a highly conserved phylotypic stage, but never address Richardson's subsequent publications, including his 1998 letter to
Science repudiating the use of his work to attack evolutionary biology, and a later paper which addresses the continuing importance of Haeckel's ideas.
Still, I am happy to learn that you reject the claims of critics who accuse evolutionists of deliberately misleading readers about Haeckel's drawings. That's progress.
This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 01-30-2006 08:20 PM
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