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To: scripter
You're still playing "Twist and Shout" and it fools no one. I'm going to type slowly and give you the "For Dummies" version. We're going over it in detail.

Here I told LiteKeeper, in part, the following about Hastie's AiG article:

Hastie should know this, [that tree structures, not straight lines, are to be expected from evolution] because he closes the article with a quote from Eldredge which has been discussed on FR lately and should be instantly familiar to denizens of these threads. Although you wouldn't know from how Hastie uses it, the fact of horse evolution being a tree and not a straight line is exactly what Eldredge was talking about.
Here, you tried to tell me that I can't say that.

Starting here and continuing in that thread, it is well documented Eldredge was not talking about a tree in the link you provided or the Chase interview. Context is everything.
My statement set off some alarm bells for you, evidently. Your story seems to be that prior to about 1981 Eldredge was a bomb-throwing anti-E who believed that something other than the following--we'll call this "statement B"--was wrong with the AMNH exhibit:

But trends are indeed a tricky subject. George Gaylord Simpson spent a considerable segment of his career on horse evolution. His overall conclusion: Horse evolution was by no means the simple, linear and straightforward affair it was made out to be. Yes, those fossils on display reflect the true position of four species in geological time. But horse evolution did not proceed in one single series, from step A to step B and so forth, culminating in modern, single-toed large horses. Horse evolution, to Simpson, seemed much more bushy, with lots of species alive at any one time–species that differed quite a bit from one another, and which had variable numbers of toes, size of teeth, and so forth.

Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin, as cited by jennyp.

That's a criticism he made in 1995 and which you urgently, frantically interrupt me to say he did not mean earlier when he said ("statement A"):

I admit that an awful lot of that has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some of this stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we've got science as truth and we've got a problem.
Why is this important? Because you've gone on record elsewhere, elsewhen as calling him a liar or a turncoat for saying two things which are true. That's why you jumped in when I attacked that quote mine of Eldredge. It is your mission to save same as an arrow in the creationist quivver of lawyerly obscurantism forever and ever. It's important to your mission that he have changed his story, which can only be demonstrated if in fact the earlier statement isn't the later one writ simple. First he was an anti-E, then the E establishment put a horse's head (non-fossilized) in his bed or whatever.

But why is the horse exhibit downstairs in the first quote, the one that's so bomb-throwing-radical anti-E in character that it supposedly disallows him from ever going downstairs, pointing to the million-year-old horse, and saying "The horse is a good example?" It's downstairs because he's already a curator of the American Museum of Natural History. If he ever sold out in his professional life, he did it rather earlier than when he assumed that position. I really, really doubt that a fossil-scoffing Luddite would be elevated to that job. He's been associated with AMNH in one capacity or other since 1969.

You're calling him a liar based upon "B is not A," despite my having recognized A for what it was even before I went back and noticed B. You see, by the time Eldredge said A, everyone knew about George Gaylord Simpson's critique of the Marsh/AMNH series. He had published it in 1945, 40 years after the AMNH set up its exhibit but long before 1981. Nobody had to ask, "Gee, Dr. Eldredge, what are you talking about?" Everybody already knew and still knows. I have linked The Evolution of the Horse saying the same thing. Talk Origins says the same thing.

As new fossils were discovered, though, it became clear that the old model of horse evolution was a serious oversimplification. The ancestors of the modern horse were roughly what that series showed, and were clear evidence that evolution had occurred. But it was misleading to portray horse evolution in that smooth straight line, for two reasons:
  1. First, horse evolution didn't proceed in a straight line. We now know of many other branches of horse evolution. Our familiar Equus is merely one twig on a once-flourishing bush of equine species. We only have the illusion of straight-line evolution because Equus is the only twig that survived. (See Gould's essay "Life's Little Joke" in Bully for Brontosaurus for more on this topic.)
  2. Second, horse evolution was not smooth and gradual. Different traits evolved at different rates, didn't always evolve together, and occasionally reversed "direction". Also, horse species did not always come into being by gradual transformation ("anagenesis") of their ancestors; instead, sometimes new species "split off" from ancestors ("cladogenesis") and then co-existed with those ancestors for some time. Some species arose gradually, others suddenly.
You see, anyone whose argued on these threads for a bit and read a little about horse evolution can look at Eldredge's quote and recognize immediately what's the beef. The burden is on you to show it's anything else. So, if Eldredge didn't mean any of the above when he criticized that display downstairs as a basis for textbooks,

WHAT DID HE MEAN?

Please support your assertions. It is important to show that he actually discredited something downstairs besides the organization and framing narrative of the display, because you're using this "B is not A" to disallow him from ever again later going downstairs, pointing to fossil equids, and saying true things about what lived when and what it looked like. You're using this "B is not A" to tell me I can't say what I told LiteKeeper in 264. You're using this "B is not A" to say Eldredge is dishonest.

That last one is the biggest problem for you that I see. You've gone far out of your way to defend A as something other than standard creationist quote-mining ore. Now, raging Holy Warrior Syndrome, you have to destroy him to keep misquoting him when by any reasonable interpretation of his words everything he said was and still is true. Not very Christian of you. "False witness" and all that.

484 posted on 11/10/2002 7:54:16 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro; All
1945

The 1945 publication by Simpson seems to have been something else. The first edition of Horses by G.G. Simpson came out in 1951, for all the difference it makes. It's still solidly after 1905 and before 1981. There's a later edition, 1961, mentioned on the T.O. site. Still the same thing.

499 posted on 11/10/2002 8:58:56 AM PST by VadeRetro
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