Valentine Pontifex

Since this board (and in particular tgamble) got the ball rolling on the Muller quote on mutations, I am sure that the people here will especially enjoy the latest addition to the T.O. Archive:

Muller and Mutations

Albion

Excellent!

tgamble

"Tim Gamble cleaned it up and brought to matter to talk.origins. "

Shouldn't that be "the matter"?

S2Focus

If you do a google search on the string "Good ones are so rare that we can consider them all bad" (include the quotation marks), you will see how far this bogus quote has propagated amongst creationist web-sites.

A document on the UCSD-based "IDEA Club" web-site came up in the google search. When I checked it out, I found that, to the IDEA Club's credit, they had added this disclaimer:
Important note on this quote: Some have in the past stated that this article by Muller also contains the phrase, "good ones [mutations] are so rare that we can consider them all bad." THAT STATEMENT DOES NOT EXIST IN THIS ARTICLE. IDEA Staff have checked the original article and found that is is not there...

I then checked to see when the web-page was last updated (ctrl-I with the Mozilla browser), and found that the page had been modified on 02/27/03.

I made a quick visit to the "Wayback Machine" (see www.archive.org) and found that earlier versions of the IDEA Club web-site carried the original incorrect Muller quote.

Although the IDEA club folks deserve credit for making the necessary correction, they really ought to credit Tim Gamble and some of the other talk.origins participants, rather then just their own staff, for finding this error.

RufusAtticus

It's funny how they didn't correct it until someone brought it up on T.O., which was much longer after it had been debunked on this board. S2Focus, I think you should send them an email mentioning that they should give proper credit.

Valentine Pontifex

Actually you did not have to google it. The document links to the IDEA quote list and notes that they corrected the quote after it was brough up to them.

S2Focus

Yep -- I missed that, even though it was "staring me in the face"... oh, well...

That being said, the IDEA club staff ought to have the courtesy to acknowledge the folks who actually brought the error to their attention.

Jimmy Higgins

Actually, I think the most credit should go to the ignoramus who tried to use that on me, so that I brought it up here, where it had already been dealt with, so that Talk Origins could finally deal with it, so that.... (and the toe bone is connected foot bone, and the foot bone is connect to the... )