On Mon, 12 Feb 96 16:43:40 MST you wrote:
[...]
>JF>In addition to the claims about evolution, there was also some
>ill-feeling about whether Sunderland had committed an ethical breach in
>distributing an account of a private talk.
SJ>This doesn't hold water. Read Sunderland's book. It was quite
>clear that Patterson must have known that what he was writing was
>intended for publication. Sunderland actually followed it up later
>with a personal taped interview:
JF>It sounds like you're referring to the interviews and
correspondence
>between Sunderland and Patterson. I was referring to the talk Patterson
>gave at the AMNH in 1981. In that case, Patterson apparently had no
>idea it had been recorded, and there was, as I said, some dispute about
>the propriety of Sunderland's use of the recording. (I believe
>Sunderland was not there and did not make the recording himself. I'm
>not saying Sunderland was in the wrong, merely that there *was* some
>dispute.) Let me get Dodson and Howe out from the library again before
>going into any more detail.
OK. Sorry. I was. I agree that the surreptitious recording of
Patterson at the AMNH was unethical. It was blamed on some unknown
"creationist" but it was more likely to be an non-creationst
anti-evolutionist with an axe to grind. The AMNH was a hotbed of
Cladistics and two of the professors there, Nelson and Platnick, for
example, had, according to Dawkins, a hostility to evolution:
The fact is almost too bizarre to credit, but some of the leading
`transformed cladists' profess an actual hostility to the idea of
evolution itself, especially to the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Two of them, G. Nelson and N. Platnick from the American Museum of
Natural History in New York, have gone so far as to write that
`Darwinism...is in short a theory that has been put to the test and
found false.' " (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", 1991, Penguin,
p283)
Besides, how would a creationist get into a private lecture by
Patterson with a select group of scientists from the AMNH?
Regards.
Stephen
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