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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The IDiots Confess to Deliberate Quote Mining

 
You won't believe this. Scordova has a posting on Uncommon Descent titled [quote mine] “we regard as rather regrettable the conventional concatenation of Darwin’s name with evolution”. Here's what he said,
Here is a quote mine for the day which I found in an article Bill referenced earlier (see: Start the revolution without ID). The quote is by one of the world’s leading scientists, Carl Woese:
we regard as rather regrettable the conventional concatenation of Darwin’s name with evolution
I agree. Let me suggest that if the conventional concatenation is “Darwinian evolution” a better concatenation would be “designed evolution” or even (hehe) “created evolution”.
Here's a copy of the original article with the "quote mine" underscored in red.

The IDiots have been told time and time again that there's more to evolution than just Darwinian natural selection. They've been told that use of the word "Darwinism" as a synonym for evolution is wrong. Now, they read an article where some prominent evolutionary biologists make the same point and even give one of the other mechanisms.

So, what do the IDiots do? They quote mine and then the announce to the world that they have deliberately taken a quote out of context. (That's what quote mining is.) Are they really as stupid as this suggests, or are they evil as Dawkins once feared?

7 comments :

John S. Wilkins said...

Why can't they be both? Stupidity is often a correlate of evil.

SPARC said...

It is one thing if Sal exposes his stupidity to the public. What is really bad are the 'educational' resources of the IDiots: have a look here:http://www.overwhelmingevidence.com/oe/blog/hblavatsky/of_pandas_wolves_birds_and_people

RBH said...

This isn't new for Sal. A couple of years ago he had a long-running thread on ARN, an ID site, just for mined quotes.

John Pieret said...

Wild Bill has shown considerable sensitivity to charges of quote mining in the past, presumably because he still had intentions of having a real, non-seminary academic career. Either he doesn't know what Sal has done yet, or his intentions have all become pretentions.

Thanks for wading through the swamp of UD to find this. It's most amusing.

Anonymous said...

John Wilkins has the right of it, I'm afraid.

They are stupid, and cunning and evil.

But, then they are religious believers, so why should anyone expect anything better?

Gary S. Hurd said...

Dembski's reaction to my Panda's Thumb item on his various quotemines; clearly indicated that he defends the practice of quotemining to the hilt. Sal is a little rotten apple that fell right at the base of the tree.

John Wendt said...

Psalm 14 verse 1: “There is no God”