Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: incindiary;nunya bidness
Well of course you're going to say something like that... your theory is under attack. Although I don't know how you can sit here and deny that the fossil evidence for transitional forms is incredibly weak. Even Darwin admitted that.

Did you actually READ that web page that she directed you to? It's very important that you see why we hate quote-miners so much. For example, did you actually look up each of those quotes yourself, and verify that the author meant to say what you think he said? If you haven't, did you know that you are guilty of intellectual fraud?

Lets look at a few of the quotes you posted, to show what I mean...

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

-Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University

This is an example of an innacurate quote to a T. For example, I have no way of checking to see if he really DID say what you quote, because you don't leave any sort of reference. However, we can note he has also said:

"since we proposed punctuated equilibrium to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists - whether through design or stupidity, I do not know - as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but are abundant between larger groups."Gould, S.J. (1983) p 260, Hens teeth and Horses toes. Norton & Co., New York

And

"Archaeopteryx, the first bird, is as pretty an intermediate as paleontology could ever hope to find."(Gould, S.J. (1991) Bully for Brontosaurus. Penguin, London. 540 pp, p 144-145.

Feel free to look those up in a library, they are in context, and mean exactly what the author meant for them to mean.

In reference to the Patterson quotes:

"I was too naive and foolish to guess what might happen: the talk was taped by a creationist who passed the tape to Luther Sunderland... Since, in my view, the tape was obtained unethically, I asked Sunderland to stop circulating the transcipt, but of course to no effect. There is not much point in my going through the article point by point. I was putting a case for discussion, as I thought off the record, and was speaking only about systematics, a specialized field. I do not support the creationist movement in any way, and in particular I am opposed to their efforts to modify school curricula. In short the article does not fairly represent my views. But even if it did, so what? The issue should be resolved by rational discussion, and not by quoting 'authorities,' which seems to be the creationists' principal mode of argument." (Letter from Colin Patterson to Stephen Binkley, June 17, 1982).

and

"Chelvam asserts that 'we are drowning' in evidence against darwinism. He cites nothing beyond the remarks attributed to me. It seems possible that he confuses two theories under the name of darwinism, the general theory of common ancestry or descent with modification, and Darwin's special theory of mechanism, natural selection. If he knows of evidence inconsistent with the general theory of common descent, he should tell us what it is. I know of none." (Colin Patterson in a letter to the editor, _Nature_ 332:580, 1988).

Letter from Patterson to T.O. regular

I don't have the time to hit on all of the quotes there, though most of them are improperly quoted so as to make them extremely difficult to track down and interpret the context. Nearly all of them are more than 15 years old (excepting the Denton quote), and more than quite a few are more than 30 years old, with some older than Darwin(funny how someone born before Darwin has an opinion on his theory, eh?)! Science moves on whether you like it or not. We know a lot more now than we did 15 years ago about evolution. Yet creation science has stood stock still for the past 50. I suggest you read jennyp's link. If you want to efficiently argue with a scientist, be scientific, check and recheck your attributions. It is one of the major failings of most creationist webpages that I can think of, and it more than illustrates the state of creation science today, the fact that they have no evidence to support their cause, so they are reduced to putting words in other peoples mouths. How truthful is that?

271 posted on 02/06/2002 5:25:15 AM PST by ThinkPlease
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 259 | View Replies ]


To: ThinkPlease
I never said that those scientists were creationists, and I never said that all of them were opposed to evolution. I just posted the quotes, which IMO, show that your theory is full of holes. And most of them were referenced, down to the page they were printed on. Yes, I did look at jennyp's link. Did I ever say that quotes were the end-all proof against evolution? No. Sounds like you all protest a bit too much.
308 posted on 02/06/2002 11:11:31 AM PST by incindiary
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 271 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson