Valentine Pontifex

John McCoy, an amateur creationists liar of liars, plaigarized a list of "evolutionist" quotations and claimed that it was his and that he had photocopies of the quotes. He has repeated ignored many provided examples of misquotes in the list and says that no one has provided evidence that they are out of context. After a couple dozen attempts to provide links to those posts that debunked the quotes he refused the follow them on baseless ground that the Google links would have a virus.

The debunkings include flagrant examples of quotes being out-of-context (like missing ellipsis), examples of citations to books that do not exist, examples of incorrect citations (that just so happen to match incorrect citations of various creationist quote mines), quotes by people who are really creationists, quotes by non-scientists, etc. Most of the quotes are VERY old as well.

In any event, a poster known as catshark compiled the various debunkings which can be read in this post.

I suspect that it is a shoe-in for Post of the Month so it is likely to get into the T.O. Archive via that route.

RufusAtticus

Thanx

Albion

Considering how easy it is to check some of these quotes, it's depressing how creationists just swallow them whole without even trying to see if scientists really do have such a dim view of their own subject.

Nickle

That quote by Wald is great!

Deadbeat

Kudos to catshark for that one. What an impressive amount of work.

Valentine Pontifex

There is now a thread dedicated to looking up more of "McCoy's" quotes. Maybe you can give a hand...

Join the t.o. Quote-Mine Project!

Celsus

Valentine Pontifex,

AiG is up to their usual antics, this time misquoting Ruse. Strangely enough I found the full text of his article on a creationist page. The best part is, they highlight the bits that support their interpretation, so it was simply a matter of looking at the unhighlighted portions to get the right context. I used it as a rebuttal to a creationist who cited it. I don't know if this is relevant, but I thought it might help.

Joel

Valentine Pontifex

tgamble (if memory serves) posted the text of it on talk.origins at the time as well. You can find it via groups.google.com. I am aware of the creationists misquoting it. This is actually a nice example that misquoting does not always mean cutting out the sentence before or after. This is a case of one need to read the article as a whole. I have considered doing something with it though that would probably require gaining explicate permission to reprint the article since quoting all of it really is pushing "fair use." Then come the difficulty in writing. One does not want to merely preach to the converted. Getting fundamentalists out of their habit of reading isolated statements even when they are dished out the context is not an easy assignment.