The Quote Mine A Must Read

[Baggins]

Biologist Francis Hitching, in his book The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, states:
If we find fossils, and if Darwin's theory was right, we can predict what the rock should contain; finely graduated fossils leading from one group of creatures to another group of creatures at a higher level of complexity. The 'minor improvements' in successive generations should be as readily preserved as the species themselves. But this is hardly ever the case. In fact, the opposite holds true, as Darwin himself complained; "innumerable transitional forms must have existed, but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" Darwin felt though that the "extreme imperfection" of the fossil record was simply a matter of digging up more fossils. But as more and more fossils were dug up, it was found that almost all of them, without exception, were very close to current living animals.

This man is not a scientist he is a paranormal investigator so what ever he thinks about evolution is about as meaningful as what Britney Spears thinks about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Francis_Hitching

I'll give you that one. Not a quote mine just irrelevant.

The biography mentioned above also states "John Francis Hitching is a member of the Royal Archaeological Institute, the Prehistoric Society, the Society for Psychical Research, the British Society of Dowsers and the American Society of Dowsers". However, the Royal Archaeological Institute has apparently denied his claim of membership

he seems as honest as you

 

[Baggins]

The fossil record reveals that species emerged suddenly, and with totally different structures, and remained exactly the same over the longest geological periods. Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard University paleontologist and well-known evolutionist, admitted this fact first in the late 70s:
The history of most fossil species include two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1) Stasis - most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless; 2) Sudden appearance - in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'.

This is another discussion about punctuated equilibrium versus gradualism and has nothing to do with Gould's acceptance of evolution.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/author.html

Go to Gould on that list

The first sentence in the quote is also not a true discription of punctuated equilibrium. But why would it be coming from a cut and paste from a creationist web site?

 

[Baggins]

Another evolutionary paleontologist, K. S. Thomson, tells us that new groups of organisms appear very abruptly in the fossil record:
When a major group of organisms arises and first appears in the record, it seems to come fully equipped with a suite of new characters not seen in related, putatively ancestral groups. These radical changes in morphology and function appear to arise very quickly

I've bolded the important bit of that

 

[consol]

Quotes from a famous creationists.

Ken Ham, 'One day I will write a book, and have it published when I'm dead'.
Ken Ham, 'Thousands will attend my funeral, how many people can say that?'.
Ken Ham, 'Yes creationists should pay their taxes, but I'm a leader not a follower'.
Ken Ham, 'I bring people hope, and If I can get away with it why shouldn't I?'
Ken Ham, 'Why should I worry if creationism is true or not, as long as it makes me money'.
Ken Ham, 'God gave us idiots for a reason, and idiots have their uses'.
Ken Ham, 'In the end what difference does it make'.

And there are lots and lots more.

 

[Baggins]

This thread also demonstrates the dishonesty of the creationist debate tactics.

Notice how Huggy Bear has just cut and pasted an enormous list of stuff he has neither read nor understood.

He then claims victory if we can't refute each mined quote in detail.

It took him about 30secs to cut and paste his OP, It has taken me 1/2 hour already to work through a few of the quote mines and show them to be dishonest.

 

[Baggins]

A professor of paleontology from Glasgow University, T. Neville George, admitted this fact years ago:
There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration… The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.

I'd challenge you to find a single palaeontologist who ever believed anything different, this is inevitable due to the processes of fossilisation and punctuated equilibrium.

That you believe that this quote damages paleontology of biology just shows your deep ignorance of both.

 

[Baggins]

And Niles Eldredge, the well-known paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, expresses as follows the invalidity of Darwin's claim that the insufficiency of the fossil record is the reason why no transitional forms have been found:
The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record.

Where do you start with a quote mine that is wrong on so many levels?

Eldredge doesn't believe that no transitionals have been found

What he is doing in this quote is supporting punctuated equilibrium as the main method of speciation.

For Eldredge quote mines go here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/author.html

and go to E

 

[Baggins]

Another American scholar, Robert Wesson, states in his 1991 book Beyond Natural Selection, that "the gaps in the fossil record are real and meaningful." He elaborates this claim in this way:
The gaps in the record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-2.html#quote21

Who is Robert Wesson? According to information gleaned from two web pages, From Bradford Books: Beyond Natural Selection and Robert G. Wesson, Political Science: Santa Barbara, he was a political scientist who died in 1991, the year this book was published. [Fuller quote follows:]

He may be a scholar but he isn't a biologist, so what he has to say about evolution is irrelevant.

The original quote is accurate, forms a complete paragraph, and seems to be discussing Punctuated Equilibria, but at the end a reference is also given, to page 307 of "The eukaryote genome in development and evolution" (John, B., & Miklos, G. L. G. 1988. London: Allen & Unwin).

In this latter book the section referred to discusses the Cambrian explosion and the Burgess Shale!

Wesson seems to be confused about what he is talking about in the paragraph quoted, and I'm not sure why I should take the musings of a political scientist as representative of current palaeontological thought.

So a second quote that turns out not to be a quote mine, but as before completely irrelevant

 

[Grizzly]

Anyone else find a 33 year old man who calls himself "Huggy Bear" proudly admitting he quotemines raging hilarious?

Huggy Bear lays it out, so we can play it out

 

[Baggins]

N. Eldredge and I. Tattersall also make an important comment:
That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, ...prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search ...One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.
The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.

Famous quote mine:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-2.html#quote37

In the passages quoted, Eldredge and Tattersall are discussing the merits of gradualism, something the quote miner has left out, as we can see:

The main impetus for expanding the view that species are discrete at any one point in time, to embrace their entire history, comes from the fossil record. Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. Instead, collections of nearly identical specimens, separated in some cases by 5 million years, suggested that the overwhelming majority of animal and plant species were tremendously conservative throughout their histories.

That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, troubled by the stubbornness of the fossil record in refusing to yield abundant examples of gradual change, devoted two chapters to the fossil record. To preserve his argument he was forced to assert that the fossil record was too incomplete, to full of gaps, to produce the expected patterns of change. He prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search and then his major thesis - that evolutionary change is gradual and progressive - would be vindicated. One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.

The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted pattern, simply looked the other way. Rather than challenge well-entrenched evolutionary theory, paleontologists tacitly agreed with their zoological colleagues that the fossil record was too poor to do much beyond supporting, in a general sort of way, the basic thesis that life had evolved.

Note the claim that the fossil record supports evolution.

 

[Baggins]

Likewise, the American paleontologist Steven M. Stanley describes how the Darwinist dogma, which dominates the world of science, has ignored this reality demonstrated by the fossil record:
The known fossil record is not, and never has been, in accord with gradualism. What is remarkable is that, through a variety of historical circumstances, even the history of opposition has been obscured. ... 'The majority of paleontologists felt their evidence simply contradicted Darwin's stress on minute, slow, and cumulative changes leading to species transformation.' ... their story has been suppressed.

Another quote that has got nothing to do with the acceptance of evolution and is all about the relative importance of gradualism and punctuated equilibrium

In a blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition of Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (1998. Johns Hopkins University Press; Reprint edition), Douglas J. Futuyama notes that Stanley's book "addresses from a paleobiologist's perspective, the question of whether punctuated equilibria or gradualism offers the best account of the history of life."

 

[Baggins]

Richard Dawkins, one of the foremost advocates of evolutionist thought in the world, comments on this reality that undermines the very foundation of all the arguments he has been defending:
For example the Cambrian strata of rocks… are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.

I have to agree that it is, until you study the 100 million years between the end of the Last Pre-Cambrian Ice age and the peak of the Cambrian biota.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4424

papers 1-9 deal with this.

The quote above is another case of a rhetorical device being quoted without its answering paragraph, how childish to think you could get away with that.

Dawkins answers this quote mine here:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/01/dawkins-why-int.html

I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: "It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history." Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader's appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context

Dawkins

 

[Baggins]

Not a quote mine:

Phillip Johnson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is also one of the world's foremost critics of Darwinism, describes the contradiction between this paleontological truth and Darwinism:
Darwinian theory predicts a "cone of increasing diversity," as the first living organism, or first animal species, gradually and continually diversified to create the higher levels of taxonomic order. The animal fossil record more resembles such a cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start and thereafter decreasing.

But he is a professor of law.

As far as I am concerned this is as useful as finding out what Richard Dawkins thinks about an aspect of the American legal system.

Pointless

 

[Baggins]

An article published in the journal Science in 2001 says: "The beginning of the Cambrian period, some 545 million years ago, saw the sudden appearance in the fossil record of almost all the main types of animals (phyla) that still dominate the biota today."The same article notes that for such complex and distinct living groups to be explained according to the theory of evolution, very rich fossil beds showing a gradual developmental process should have been found, but this has not yet proved possible:

Science is a popular magazine not peer reviewed science.

I would respectfully disagree with them about what we would expect to see fossilwise, gradualism does not appear to happen under the conditions found in the late Pre-Cambrian/Cambrian adaptive radiation.

I can explain why I think this, in fact I have on many threads, you can do a search on them.

 

[Baggins]

The picture presented by the Cambrian fossils clearly refutes the assumptions of the theory of evolution, and provides strong evidence for the involvement of a "supernatural" being in their creation. Douglas Futuyma, a prominent evolutionary biologist, admits this fact:
Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence.

that isn't a fact it is an opinion and Futuyama is welcome to it. Many scientists are religious and will believe something along these lines, it is completely unevidenced.

Rereading it appears he is saying organisms did not appear fully developed, and I agree with him on that

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-2.html#quote18

Ironically, Futuyma immediately follows this with the observation of an early example, by Gish, of quote mining. A little later he says:

"The transitional forms that evolve so quickly, and in such a small area, are very unlikely to be picked up in the fossil record. Only when the newly evolved species extends its range will it suddenly appear in the fossil record. Eldredge and Gould have suggested, therefore, that the fossil record should show stasis, or equilibrium, of established species, punctuated occasionally by the appearance of new forms. Hence, the fossil record would be most inadequate exactly where we need it most -- at the origin of major new groups of organisms." p. 83

 

[Baggins]

The fossil record clearly indicates that living things did not evolve from primitive to advanced forms, but instead emerged all of a sudden in a fully formed state. This provides evidence for saying that life did not come into existence through random natural processes, but through an act of intelligent creation. In an article called "the Big Bang of Animal Evolution" in the leading journal Scientific American, the evolutionary paleontologist Jeffrey S. Levinton accepts this reality, albeit unwillingly, saying "Therefore, something special and very mysterious - some highly creative "force" - existed then

This is more dishonest than usual as the first part of teh paragraph has nothing to do with the second part. The first part is written by a creationist and is conflated with the second part to make it all look as one piece.

I don't care what Levinton thinks, he may well be a Christian biologist who believes god guided evolution in some way or developed the mechanism. They are not uncommon.

It doesn't change the fact that the supernatural is unscientific.

 

[Baggins]

The record from the Cambrian Age demolishes Darwinism, both with the complex bodies of trilobites, and with the emergence of very different living bodies at the same time. Darwin wrote "If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection."-that is, the theory at the heart of in his book. But as we saw earlier, some 60 different animal phyla started into life in the Cambrian Age, all together and at the same time, let alone small categories such as species. This proves that the picture which Darwin had described as "fatal to the theory" is in fact the case. This is why the Swiss evolutionary paleoanthropologist Stefan Bengtson, who confesses the lack of transitional links while describing the Cambrian Age, makes the following comment: "Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us."

If you want to discuss why you are wrong about this I would be happy to debate you. I wrote my degree thesis about the post ice age adaptive radiation in the late Pre-Cambrian early Cambrian.

There has been a lot of work in the last decade that has really illuminated this period of the earth's palaeontological history.

This symposium from 2000:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4424

shows how far we are coming and in the time since even more discoveries have been found illuminating this period.

We are now starting to find many ancestral organisms to those that are found in the Cambrian.

We have always known the Cambrian "explosion" was more about preservation than reality, with enhanced techniques for recovering soft bodied faunas we are now starting to be able to show that there are complex soft bodied precursors to the shelled faunas of the Cambrian.

Spriggina springs to mind immediately:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spriggina

I imagine you will dodge actually discussing the reality of Cambrian palaeontology because you know nothing about and you have no desire to learn anything about it as your world view would inevitably collapse if you had to confront reality.

 

[Naraoia]

I agree.

Haha, good one!

 

[Naraoia]

is that all you have got? i mean cant you even intelligently defend these claims? i dont even need to bother refuting all your senseless comments as the decent intelligent people who come by this thread will see through your vain unsuccessful refute of these findings, the quotes speak for themselves

Apparently, huggy thinks only others' quotes speak for themselves.

Where do you get those irony meters again?

 

[FishFace]

HuggyBear. According to the implication of your topic, many people think that evolution is false. If this is the case, presumably they have published lots of papers, articles and books about this.
Please could you link me to those published works, I prefer the meat to these dinky little quotes.

Since so many people so obviously think evolution is wrong, I'm sure this will be no problem for you.

Thanks!