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Didn't mean to overlook your post.

More details, please...?

Your attempted examples don't coincide with my useage of "lawyering" at all. OK, not everyone deals with dishonest argument all the time.

Mark Furman used the "N" word. Therefore, he planted a bloody glove on O.J. Simpson. At least, Counselor Cochrane claimed as much and most jurors thought it made a reasonable doubt. To me, the point is borderline irrelevant and a clear case of ... lawyering.

A particular site whose articles frequently become FR threads is nothing but a collection of every unexpected result, controversy, or other sour note to be heard in all of mainstream science. All direct quotes are liberally (and rather bizarrely) sprinkled with "[Sic!]" as if a typo had been detected anywhere mainstream scientific concepts (evolution, old Earth, inflationary cosmology, etc.) are mentioned. There's lots of sneering, hissy commentary by a guy who calls Darwin "Charlie." All that is what I'm talking about in one word. Lawyering, then, is seizing on anything but anything to get to where you're going.

We see a lot of that on these threads. The kind of hiccup created by this unexpected find was guaranteed to bring the lawyers out of the woodwork.

We aren't supposed to find anything transitioning into anything else, ever, if some people were right. The thing is, we do. In this case, we found something transitoning onto the bus after we thought the bus had arrived somewhere else.

One thing that happens with more complete data is that when we get the more complete data, we have to revise the story. If you change your story, lawyers will jump on you. Can't be allowed to matter. Science follows the evidence, lawyers be damned.

If we had absolutely all the evidence, a perfectly preserved body in formaldehyde for every organism that ever lived--never mind where this repository is supposed to be stored--we would according to evolution have a record of smooth transitions which outlines a tree of common descent. The traditional problem from Darwin's day forth is that geology doesn't give us such a perfect record and, as Darwin himself noted, it never will.

But with exploration it does give us a better and better record over time. In Darwin's day the state of paleontology was so poor he could cite very little support from that quarter. Things have changed vastly since then, all in Darwin's favor. The kind of confusion raised by the find announced in this article would be cleared up with more fossil finds.

That hardly seems like too much to hope for. The last 150 years have been little but exactly such progress.