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To: Dataman
Somebody forgot to tell the late SJ Gould and the rest of the evos who keep inventing creative ways to explain the lack of transitionals.

CREATIONIST MISREPRESENTATION ALERT

Gould said no such thing, as I'm sure you well know.

This is the old creationist "quote Gould grossly out of context" misrepresentation. Let's hear what Gould himself had to say about that, shall we?

Kirtley Mather, who died last year at age ninety, was a pillar of both science and Christian religion in America and one of my dearest friends. The difference of a half-century in our ages evaporated before our common interests. The most curious thing we shared was a battle we each fought at the same age. For Kirtley had gone to Tennessee with Clarence Darrow to testify for evolution at the Scopes trial of 1925. When I think that we are enmeshed again in the same struggle for one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[...]

Scientists regard debates on fundamental issues of theory as a sign of intellectual health and a source of excitement. Science is—and how else can I say it?—most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines their implications, and recognizes that old information might be explained in surprisingly new ways. Evolutionary theory is now enjoying this uncommon vigor. Yet amidst all this turmoil no biologist has been lead to doubt the fact that evolution occurred; we are debating how it happened. We are all trying to explain the same thing: the tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy. Creationists pervert and caricature this debate by conveniently neglecting the common conviction that underlies it, and by falsely suggesting that evolutionists now doubt the very phenomenon we are struggling to understand.

[...]

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. [...] 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.

[...]

A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane. 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. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge…are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."

-- Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," May 1981

Note that this was written in 1981. Since then, countless more transitional fossils, both between species and between larger groups, have been found.

Come back when you've got something to "support" your side which isn't just a dishonest twisting of someone's actual position.

One way to judge the validity of the creationists is by how often they lie about things. Misquoting people for deceitful "support" is so common among creationists that there are now countless webpages devoted to correcting their lies. For example:

Online resources documenting antievolutionist misquotations

The Fossil Hominid FAQ of The Talk.Origins Archive has several pages on creationist misquotations on human evolution: Here are some other pages of The Talk.Origins Archive that are about creationist misquotes: The following articles from The Talk.Origins Archive that that, in part, address creationist misquotations: Here are some pages on the web that address creationist misquotations: A searchable archive on creationist quotes can be found at Antievolution Quotes and Misquotes: The Archive.

135 posted on 03/06/2003 5:07:04 PM PST by Ichneumon
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To: Ichneumon; Remedy; Dataman
Ooh! Look what you linked! George Gaylord Simpson's 1953 quote.

It isn't just out of date, it's dishonest! Now, guess which Luddite posted it on this thread in number 90 and guess who slapped high-fives with the poster for doing so?

139 posted on 03/06/2003 5:30:11 PM PST by VadeRetro (It was one of the few quotes in the salad with any real meat on it, too!)
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To: Ichneumon; VadeRetro
There is also the t.o quote-mine project, started when a Man Who Shall Not Be Named (no, not the one who used to be here, but another one) quote spewed onto t.o. So the people there started a project to find all of the references to the quotes he supplied from a webpage. It's still in the opening stages:

The Talk.Origins Quote-Mine project

Check it out!

164 posted on 03/07/2003 6:58:16 AM PST by ThinkPlease (Fortune Favors the Bold!)
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