Valentine Pontifex

Bernard Wood's name is mispelled. But that is a minor nitpick. I am a bad typist myself. ;-)

Also the word in the title should be labyrinthine, but then again I have no right to rant to loudly with my 10 typos a minute typing.
The word, BTW, refers to the bone in the inner ear called the labryinth.

What will rant about, loudly is that "the Australopithecines are quadropedal [sic]" is simply not found in the paper. It gets worse. There is simply no claim in that paper that the australopithecines are quadrupeds and indeed the authors clearly support the claim that the australopithecines walked in a bipedal fashion.

In short, Bait has lied to us either by inventing a quote and misleading us about Spoor et al.'s conclusions or by claiming the reply was "My reply:" and thus committed plagiarism on another creationist source.

Lets look at what the authors of the paper really said. The first sentence after the abstract read (ommiting endnotes):
Notice the the dispute then, as it is now, is not whether the australopithecines are bipeds, but rather if they like us ALWAYS moved around on two legs or if they combined walking on two legs with true tree climbing behavior. Owen Lovejoy has been the chief advocate over the last quarter century of the view that the australopithecines are obligate bipeds. His position has been loosing support for the view they instead the australopithecines had an intermediate bipedalism combined with arboreal climbing.

Lets skip the near the end of the paper:
A search for information on one of the fossil in question revealed that The T.O. Archive addresses the issue (and saves me some writing):
<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_canals.html" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_canals.html</a>

Oolon Colluphid

The only thing I'd add to this is to note that Ron (Bait) seems like a decent bloke, freely admitting errors where they've been shown. The problem is that he is relying on creationist sources. And these, as we know, are misleading to put it mildly, mendacious at best, and downright bloody liars as a matter of course. What's really sad is that people like Ron get so utterly misled by them.

Ron: you really can't trust creationist sites. It's up to you to decide whether you can trust 'evolutionist' ones (maybe Mulder's dictum of 'trust nobody' is appropriate ), but here's a clear demonstration that creationists are either liars themselves or misled by liars.

Oolon

Kosh

"We are nothing if not persistent!"
- Paclids, Star Trek:TNG

Valentine Pontifex

He is going to have to learn that if he says something is true because x person said something in journal a, volume b, page c with no indication that he is copying the citation from another source that he is fully responsible for the accuracy of the citation and will be judged by that standard.

If he is cribbing from creationist sources and not reading the scientific literature directly, he must give tell us what that source is. Failure to do so is plagiarism.

Ron, be adviced that if you fail to provide a secondary citation (i.e. "[some source] cited by [some other source]") then when you give a citation you are outright claiming that you personally checked that source. This is what a citation is: the source that the author actually used. If an author did not actually use that source he should not cite it unless he indicates a secondary citation (i.e. I used this source and its citation was...).