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Dr. Etheridge, world-famous paleontologist of the British Museum"4 is commonly quoted by evolution deniers but turns out to have been an obscure nineteenth century figure who was an assistant at the British Museum and was never famous at all.

Quotations and Misquotations.

Dr. Colin Patterson:

I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.
That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. . .

Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two "Cites"

Stephen J. Gould:

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim. The lower jaw of reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The "hammer" and "anvil" bones of the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could such a transition be accomplished? the creationists ask. Surely a bone is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet paleontologists have discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids (the so-called mammal-like reptiles) with a double jaw joint—one composed of the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and dentary bones (as in modern mammals). For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Australopithecus afarensis, with its apelike palate, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape’s of the same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modern features—increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larder body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?
Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices.
. . .
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria 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 they are abundant between larger groups.

Evolution as Fact and Theory by S.J. Gould.

I suspect many of the rest of your quotes are equally bogus. Certainly, old Heribert is almost as out of date as "Dr. Etheridge."

First off, I view the talk.origins FAQ system as dishonest and ideologically motivated. Your continued use of their materials as arguments is dishonest on your part, in my view.

Talk.origins is a known quantity on the internet. It is not a normal forum like FR or your Yahoo discussion groups.

Talk.origins speaks with a single voice. I have recently posted three or four very well reasoned arguments against evolutino on talk.origins and the threads which have evolved around these postings amount to several hundred posts, which range from telling me I don't know what I'm talking about top calling me names.

The point is that on any normal forum, particularly on a topic like evolution on which the nation at large is at best evenly divided, half to a third of the people posting would take my side, as is the case on FR.

The reason that this does not happen on talk.origins is that anti-evolutionists are driven off of talk.origins by the pure viciousness of the evos and typically have a half-life of a few days on the forum.

Naturally the evos on talk.origins don't like seeing those lists of quotations. Their two standard responses are, one that each and every single quote is taken out of context, which is laughable and, two, that most of those quotes appear to be about fifteen or twenty years old and that, since then, all the missing intermediates have been found.

Now, aside from the fact that the claim of having found all the missing intermediates in the last fifteen years is flagrant BS, I have my own theory as to why most of the quotes actually do appear to date from around 1975 - 1985.

That is, that intelligent people and honest people who actually understand the situation, all gave up on evolutionism about that time and went on to other pursuits. For instance:

"At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt."
I.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician
Member NY Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4

See what I mean?