Wow. You've found the "Mother Lode" of quote-mining exposes!
That is an excellent final nail in the coffin of Sparky's little disingenuous performance over the previous 500+ replies.
Much appreciated.
This quote demonstrates a creationist committing many of the bad uses of authority that I detailed above. Notice the author is citing Feduccia's conclusion, and not his evidence. There is no mention that that his opinion is a minority opinion. In short the creationist is saying that Feduccia is an authority and that he says that birds are not descended from dinosaurs, therefore birds are not descended from dinosaurs. It is a classic "argument from authority." . . .Been there with Sparky on this thread, for sure!
. . . It is also very inconsistent. Feduccia also says that evolution occurs so if this argument is to be followed to its logical conclusion, this creationist must accept the evolution of birds from non-birds! One could also cite many more authorities that say birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs. This is why one should not pick and choose authorities.Yep!
What makes this problem worse in creationist literature is that many creationist writers do not actually read what they are quoting in the original but copy it from another writer, usually (but not necessarily) another creationist who himself might have copied it from yet another creationist. This is often revealed by multiple creationists having the same error in the quote or citation. . . . If a quoter has not read the original work he should not cite the original as if he did but rather indicate in his citation that the quote was taken from a secondary source.You can hardly have a thread without having to wade through a bunch of these creationist quote salads. How many of the posters have actually read the material they appear to quote? Zero.
Finally, a creationist may indeed not be quoting honestly.Sad to say, but very very very very very true. The link has A Good Link on it, concerning the deliberate misquotes of one of Sparky's favorite creationist sources, Henry Morris.
Here Morris quotes a prominent paleontologist:
One of the outstanding problems in large-scale evolution has been the origin of major taxa, such as the tetrapods, birds, and whales, that had appeared to arise suddenly, without any obvious ancestors, over a comparatively short period of time.He omits what followed immediately after:
Increased knowledge of the fossil record has greatly increased our understanding of these and other transitions, and show that they do not necessarily require processes that differ from those known to occur at much lower taxonomic levels . . .In short, Morris has transformed the guy 180 degrees. It's not the only example on that page, either.
Morris concludes his article saying "most everything they [evolutionists] say…seems potentially something that can be used against them." (Morris 1999:c). Well, if one is willing to rip the words of scientists completely out of context and twist them to imply the exact opposite of their original intent, then I suppose Morris might be correct.Creation Science is Quote Science!
Finally, (another link from your link), we have Sparky's other favorite Duane Gish on transitional hominid skull 1470 analyzed here. Cafeteria science at its worst. Just the stuff that helps my side, Ma'am!
What makes this problem worse in creationist literature is that many creationist writers do not actually read what they are quoting in the original but copy it from another writer, usually (but not necessarily) another creationist who himself might have copied it from yet another creationist.A Yahoo! on the search string "TOO HUMAN TOO OLD: Russel H Tuttle, ":
You can do this with almost any old snippet of text from a creationist quote. This one just happened to be about the first time I ever experienced the phenomenon. (Someone posted the silly article as an FR thread.)
Will you please stop posting these awesome resources? I've got work to do!Here's a fun link that helps explain why creationist quote -mining is full of BS...check it out: