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We've all encountered these types of people. You bring up an issue or ask them a question, and you get a wall of text filled with quotes, often from obscure sources, purporting to support their position. They expect you to back down and admit defeat, I suppose - my goodness, QUOTES! Now, there is nothing wrong with using a quote to support a stated, reasoned argument or opinion - this is not what I am referring to. Not at all - I am referring to wall-o-quote trolling like this, employed by people that cannot make relevant or substantive arguments on their own, but nonetheless feel compelled to argue for a position because, well I guess they really really want their position to 'win.'
Creationists are famous for doing this. Professional creationists have even put out books that are little more than quotes that they claim prove evolution wrong.
History shows that creationists arguing with quotes generally have never read the source material. History shows that creationists arguing with quotes generally do not understand the subject matter and only use quotes as a sort of appeal to authority.
That is annoying enough. It is worse when a creationist uses quotes that he apparently hand-copied from a creationist source, and uses these typo-riddled, mangled quotes as an argument.
Over here, our current quote-bomb-spammer presented this quote in response to an abstract I had presented that mentioned human-chimp % similarities:
That is verbatim. Googling the quote returned several hits - all only to places where the quote-bomber had spammed before. So I searched for the citation:
-Todd Press Human Brain evaluation PNAS 109 20121 10709-16
Nothing. Well, except for the quote-bomber's footprint. Long story short, I finally found the source:
So you can see why it was so hard to find - misspelled name... erroneous title.... garbled citation...
And even the quote was not correct- a comma where a semi-colon belonged:
"It is now clear that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are far more extensive than previously thought; their genomes are not 98% or 99% identical."
Now, that statement is unwarranted hyperbole in my opinion, especially when we consider what the author explains later in the paper:
Wow - 2-4% = extensive! Who knew?
Hmmm.... It is almost as if the creationist source of Tokien's copying hadn't read the paper (they usually don't). It is obvious that Tolkien didn't read it - or any of the quotes he copies from other creationists.
I had only checked 2 other quotes that this fellow has presented, 1 turned out to be a creationist lie and the other was a misrepresentation like this one.
TAKE HOME MESSAGE
1. Do NOT trust that quotes creationists provide are accurate in any fashion, especially those with ellipses in them.
2. Do NOT trust creationists that rely extensively on quotes to make their case to be honest in their intentions.
3. DO check quotes for accuracy and context.
4. DO call out creationists that employ out of context, irrelevant, or altered quotes as arguments.
Creationists are famous for doing this. Professional creationists have even put out books that are little more than quotes that they claim prove evolution wrong.
History shows that creationists arguing with quotes generally have never read the source material. History shows that creationists arguing with quotes generally do not understand the subject matter and only use quotes as a sort of appeal to authority.
That is annoying enough. It is worse when a creationist uses quotes that he apparently hand-copied from a creationist source, and uses these typo-riddled, mangled quotes as an argument.
Over here, our current quote-bomb-spammer presented this quote in response to an abstract I had presented that mentioned human-chimp % similarities:
“It is clear that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are far more excessive than previously thought, their genomes are not 98-99% identical”
-Todd Press Human Brain evaluation PNAS 109 20121 10709-16
-Todd Press Human Brain evaluation PNAS 109 20121 10709-16
That is verbatim. Googling the quote returned several hits - all only to places where the quote-bomber had spammed before. So I searched for the citation:
-Todd Press Human Brain evaluation PNAS 109 20121 10709-16
Nothing. Well, except for the quote-bomber's footprint. Long story short, I finally found the source:
Human brain evolution: From gene discovery to phenotype discovery
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Jun 26; 109(Suppl 1): 10709–10716.
Todd M. Preuss
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 Jun 26; 109(Suppl 1): 10709–10716.
Todd M. Preuss
So you can see why it was so hard to find - misspelled name... erroneous title.... garbled citation...
And even the quote was not correct- a comma where a semi-colon belonged:
"It is now clear that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are far more extensive than previously thought; their genomes are not 98% or 99% identical."
Now, that statement is unwarranted hyperbole in my opinion, especially when we consider what the author explains later in the paper:
Humans possess species-specific genes, as a result of the numerous tandem duplications of chromosome segments that occurred in human evolution, and also recombination events (46, 47). One consequence of the numerous duplications, insertions, and deletions, is that the total DNA sequence similarity between humans and chimpanzees is not 98% to 99%, but instead closer to 95% to 96% (41, 48, 49), although the rearrangements are so extensive as to render one-dimensional comparisons overly simplistic.
Wow - 2-4% = extensive! Who knew?
Hmmm.... It is almost as if the creationist source of Tokien's copying hadn't read the paper (they usually don't). It is obvious that Tolkien didn't read it - or any of the quotes he copies from other creationists.
I had only checked 2 other quotes that this fellow has presented, 1 turned out to be a creationist lie and the other was a misrepresentation like this one.
TAKE HOME MESSAGE
1. Do NOT trust that quotes creationists provide are accurate in any fashion, especially those with ellipses in them.
2. Do NOT trust creationists that rely extensively on quotes to make their case to be honest in their intentions.
3. DO check quotes for accuracy and context.
4. DO call out creationists that employ out of context, irrelevant, or altered quotes as arguments.
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