tgamble

Thanks for finding the quote and posting it! Could this be added to talkorigins? Maybe Lord Valentine could add it to his page.

Anyway, thanks again for the help. It's a appretiated!

Valentine Pontifex

Could it be added to The Talk.Origins Archive?

Yes. Here is what you do. Take the time to write up this claim. Post it to the newsgroup
talk.origins and propose that it be made into an T.O. Archive FAQ. (If you don't have a Usenet feed or the proper software, you can use Google to post it.) It is the readers there that are the informal review committee. If you get a concensus at the newsgroup, you can then submit the FAQ. It would then be HTMLized and put into the Archive. That is the process.

If you do so, you might document the likelihood of it being a propagated error as the reason it is a misquote. I would also point out that the quote is also out-of-date even if it was quoted correctly.

tgamble

ok, I wrote it up but since writer@large did all the work, I want to get the ok from him first and give him the full credit.

Creationists here
<a href="http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/mutation.htm" target="_blank">http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/mutation.htm</a>
(and elsewhere) use this quote

"Dr. H.J. Muller, who won the Nobel prize for his work on mutations said: "It is entirely in line with the accidental nature of mutations that extensive tests have agreed in showing the vast majority of them detrimental to the organism in its job of surviving and reproducing --- GOOD ONES ARE SO RARE WE CAN CONSIDER THEM ALL BAD" (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11:331)."

Is this yet another misquote or did a Nobel Prize winner actually say this? Of course it's a misquote! Mostly fabricated. A poster on infidels.org (writer@large) found this out

&gt;"Okay ... further searching reveals this to be a cretinist favorite. The quote is all over the net. And I found a "reliable" cite in one of them: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Vol. 11, No. 9, November 1955, p.331, titled "How Radiation Changes the Genetic Constitution." Which explains whi it didn't come up in FirstSearch--the FS database doesn't go back that far. Of course, we all know that another favorite Cretinist tactic is to find horrendously old, outdated quotes from not-quite-relevant sources (I'm willing to bet dollars for donuts that the article refers to the effects of nuclear power plants and/or weapons on local environments)."

further investigation found:

I have it: "How Radiation Changes the Genetic Constitution," H.J. Muller, Professor of Genetics at Indiana University, Bulliten of the Atomic Scientists November 1955. And I was right--it *is* an article about mutation related to nuclear energy use. The selected quote comes out of a section on "Characteristics of Natural Point Mutations" and deals with the "genetic changes induced by exposure to radiation from artificial sources" (Muller 330). He's particularly concerned about the effects of radioactive compounds from power plants on humans. It's not an article about the possibilities of evolution.
It's also misquoted. (Go figure.) Here's what cretinists quote:

"It is entirely in line with the accidental nature of mutations that extensive tests have agreed in showing the vast majority of them detrimental to the organism in its job of surviving and reproducing --- GOOD ONES ARE SO RARE WE CAN CONSIDER THEM ALL BAD"

Here's the actual quote:


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is entirely in line with the accidental nature of mutations that extensive tests have agreed in showing the vast majority of them detrimental to the organism in its job of surviving and reproducing, just as changes accidentally introduced into any artificial mechanism are predominantly harmful to its useful operation. According to the conception of evolution based on the studies of modern genetics, the whole organism has its basis in its genes. Of these there are thousands of different kinds, interacting with great nicety in the production and maintinence of the complicated organization of the given type of organism. Accordingly, by the mutation of one of these genes or another, in one way or another, any component structure or function, and in many cases combinations of these components, may become diversely altered. Yet in all except very rare cases the change will be disadvantageous, involving an impairment of function (Muller 331).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note the "key" part of the cretinist quote, "GOOD ONES ARE SO RARE WE CAN CONSIDER THEM ALL BAD," doesn't appear here. The closest we can come to it is the last sentence of the paragraph,"Yet in all except very rare cases the change will be disadvantageous, involving an impairment of function." Yet Muller goes on to say in the next paragraph:


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is nevertheless to be inferred that all the superbly interadapted genes of any present-day organism arose through just this process of accidental natural mutation. This could take place only because of the Darwinian principle of natural selection, applying to the genes. That is, on the rare occasions when an accidental mutation did happen to effect an advantageous change, the resultant individual, just because it was aided by that mutation, tended to multiply more than the others (Muller 331).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hence, once again, the cretinists--who can even make Richard Dawkins sound like an evolution-hater--are selecting and misquoting to make someone say what they never intended to say.

Naturally, cretinists quote scientists out of context because they have no real evidence to support their absurd claims. Needless to say, they'd never quote muller saying the following.

"The honest scientist, like the philosopher, will tell you that nothing whatever can be or has been proved with fully 100% certainty, not even that you or I exist, nor anyone except himself, since he might be dreaming the whole thing. Th us there is no sharp line between speculation, hypothesis, theory, principle, and fact, but only a difference along a sliding scale, in the degree of probability of the idea. When we say a thing is a fact, then, we only mean that its probability is an extremely high one: so high that we are not bothered by doubt about it and are ready to act accordingly.

"Now in this use of the term fact, the only proper one, evolution is a fact. For the evidence in favour of it is as voluminous, diverse, and convincing as in the case of any other well established fact of science concerning the existence of things that cannot be directly seen, such as atoms, neutrons, or solar gravitation ....

"So enormous, ramifying, and consistent has the evidence for evolution become that if anyone could now disprove it, I should have my conception of the orderliness of the universe so shaken as to lead me to doubt even my own existence. If you like, then, I will grant you that in an absolute sense evolution is not a fact, or rather, that it is no more a fact than that you are hearing or reading these words."

H. J. Muller, "One Hundred Years Without Darwin Are Enough" School Science and Mathematics 59, 304-305. (1959)

Moral of the story: NEVER trust a creationist!

Writer@Large

Works for me . Just make sure to be clear where my work began and ended; I wasn't the one to dig up that other Muller quote (the one that begins "The honest scientist, like the philosopher ...")--Mageth did.

--W@L