[...]
WE>Laurie gets messages explaining how his quotes are misquotes of one
>form or the other. Laurie claims that anyone who challenges the quote
>either is challenging the quoted authority or is too stupid to
>understand what they are doing.
SJ>It is interesting that the standard response of evolutionists on CVSE
SJ>to Laurie's quotes was that they were "misquotes", "out-of-context",
SJ>"selective", etc, etc. It was like a mantra! It seemed to me to
SJ>stretch credulity a bit to think that *all* Laurie's quotes were
SJ>"misquotes". So I checked up on most of them in the original books
SJ>and articles and found they were mostly in context and accurate. So
SJ>I challenged evolutionists to make good their claim, but to my
SJ>recollection, they didn't even try. No wonder Laurie keeps at it!
SJ>If evolutionists actually took his quotes seriously and answered them
SJ>thoroughly, patiently and courteously, he would have less and less to
SJ>debate about. I know this for a fact, because Laurie tried posting
SJ>quotes for a young-Earth and global Flood to me, and I answered him
SJ>properly. If he repeated the same quote I said something like "refer
SJ>to my post of...". He eventually gave up.
[...]
Let me illustrate two quotes in one paragraph of Laurie's that
did not withstand scrutiny.
[Quote]
LA> He even appeals to Richard Goldschmidt and Immanuel
LA> Velikovsky here and there and then immediately distances
LA> himself from them. For example he is quoted by Dr. Gary
LA> Parker as saying;
LA> "The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offer no
LA> support for gradual change . . . ." Then he goes on to
LA> propose that "Macroevolution proceeds by the rare success
LA> of these hopeful monsters, not by continuous small changes
LA> within populations."
Let's expand the ellipses in your first sentence: "gradual
change, and the principle of natural selection does not
require it -- selection can operate rapidly." Besides which,
Gould has credited a particular transitional sequence reviewed
in G&E 1977 as not only showing gradualism, but even phyletic
gradualism. His absolute statement above is rhetorical
hyperbole, as shown by his work in the primary literature.
The second sentence should not refer to "he", but
rather should say "Goldschmidt went on to propose". Gould was
*relating* Goldschmidt's work, not adopting it as his own
stance. Thank you for yet more examples of SciCre
misquotation.
[End quote - WR Elsberry, Evolution Echo, 24 Aug 95]
I quite often pointed out problems with the quotes that Laurie
employed, either in the actual quote, the omission of context,
or even the inapplicability of the quote in question to the
topic under discussion. As an example of the last, Laurie is
fond of quoting Colin Patterson saying that "just-so" stories
aren't evidence whenever the topic of transitional fossils
comes up. This happens whether one is discussing transitional
sequences in the abstract, in which case Patterson's quote has
some arguable place in the discussion, or where one is discussing
*particular* sequences and the evidence concerning them, in which
case it is simply irrelevant.
Wesley