17th February 2003 at 06:50 PM JohnR7 said this in Post #7
"I feel that the effect of hypotheses of common ancestry in systematics has not been merely boring, not just a lack of knowledge; I think it has been positively anti-knowledge . . Well, what about evolution? It certainly has the function of knowledge, but does it convey any? Well, we are back to the question I have been putting to people, `Is there one thing you can tell me about?' The absence of answers seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge."*Colin Patterson, Director AMNH, Address at the American Museum of Natural History (November 5, 1981).
Another tactic of false witness is to quote out of context. Patterson's talk at AMNH is a prime example. Here is how Patterson describes it:
"The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in <I>Science</I> just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.
I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html
Trying to take quotes out-of-context is no way to get around the data for evolution and falsifying creationism. Can you give us the
entire paragraph, John, plus the paragraph before and the one after?
Shame on you, John, for bearing false witness. Why didn't you use the quote from Patterson's book, John?
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/quote_patterson.html
"Patterson's Response
On November 5, 1981, Patterson did give a talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to the monthly Systematics Discussion Group meeting. A creationist in the audience secretly taped the talk, and later circulated a heavily flawed transcript. Patterson was asked about this, and responded by saying that the talk was <I>only</I> about details within his narrow specialty, cladistics. He had spoken loosely, and thrown out rhetorical questions, since he thought that everyone in his audience was an expert. He had just read a scathing attack on cladistics, and was pretty heated up. He was not talking from notes, and did not try to create a correct transcript. When asked for a summary, he said that he was talking about the two schools of thought among cladistics experts. One school took evolution as a given. Therefore when they drew a diagram showing the relatedness of various species, they were explicitly drawing a family tree that showed descent. The other school - Patterson's - tried to construct diagrams showing only the logical relatedness of species, strictly based on similarities and differences. That is, his diagrams did not use evolution as an assumption. He was arguing that this is important, because it is
a fallacy to use one of your assumptions as one of your conclusions. Since his school did not use evolution as an assumption, they were free to use it as a conclusion. Patterson said he was <B>not</B> expressing doubt that evolution had happened, and he felt that his "cladograms" were evidence <B>for</B> evolution. For example, here is a quote from the end of the last book he wrote before he died:
<BLOCKQUOTE>[The] "misprints" shared between species ... are (to me) incontrovertible evidence of common descent. <I>Evolution</I>, 2nd Edition (1998), Page 122 "
