Richardthughes
Posts: 11178
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Roy destroys KirosFocus. And rightly too:
| Quote | Kairosfocus (post #97):
If you want to accuse me sight unseen of misquoting or quoting out of context, I think on fair comment the ball is in your court to show that my citation is inaccurate.
I have still not been able to locate my copy of Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb, but I have found some-one else who owns one. I’ve also checked several reliable on-line sources, including one with a copy of the full text of the essay concerned.
In Return of the Hopeful Monster, Gould wrote this:
All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.
But in post #53, you quoted Gould – italics yours, bolding mine – thus:
All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between the major groups are characteristically abrupt.
You misquoted Gould.
It may only be a minor misquote, but it is unquestionably a misquote.
Does that additional “the” matter? You lost any chance you ever had of arguing that it doesn’t matter in post #75 when you wrote this:
Where — notice Roy, when a world class paleontologist speaks of a scarcity of transitional forms among “THE major groups” [all caps emphasis added], the direct, normal import of his meaning is quite plain and obvious…
Well, it might have been obvious if Gould had actually written that, but he didn’t.
Putting emphasis on a word that isn’t even in the text is a novel way of preserving the meaning. Still, it’s just possible that by “major groups” Gould did indeed mean, as you wrote in post #53, “the top level classifications at levels where major body plan features and functions are manifest, including phyla, subphyla, class and order.” Luckily Gould included a couple of examples of the transitions, and hence major groups, that he was referring to:
On the isolated island of Mauritius, former home of the dodo, two genera of boid snakes (a large group that includes pythons and boa constrictors) share a feature present in no other terrestrial vertebrate: the maxillary bone of the upperjaw is split into front and rear halves, connected by a movable joint.
Many rodents have check pouches for storing food. These internal pouches connect to the pharynx and may have evolved gradually under selective pressure for holding more and more food in the mouth. But the Geomyidae (pocket gophers) and Heteromyidae (kangaroo rats and pocket mice) have invaginated their cheeks to form external fur-lined pouches with no connection to the mouth or pharynx.
It takes just a couple of minutes to discover that the two snake genera – Casarea and Bolyeria – are in one of about a dozen families in the infraorder Alethinophidia, and the two families of rodents lie within the suborder Castorimorpha along with the family Castoridae (beavers). Thus the types of direct, fossil-less transition that Gould was referring to are those that lead to animals being classified as belonging to new families – not to new phyla, subphyla, classes or orders. By claiming Gould was referring to the latter, when the examples Gould provided suggest otherwise, you have taken Gould’s words out of context.
And since Gould wasn’t referring to phyla, subphyla etc, by emphasising that non-existent “the” and claiming that Gould was referring to “THE major groups“, rather than any old major groups, you have distorted Gould’s meaning.
You provided a handy checklist of what quote-mining typically means at post #90:
misquoting or out of context, distorting quoting
Misquoting: check.
Out of context: check.
Distorting: check.
WJM also provided a definition:
Quote mining is using quotes in order to make it appear the person being quoted meant something other than what they actually meant.
Yous used a (mis)quote to make it appear that Gould meant the higher taxonomic orders, including phyla and subphyla, when both the examples in Gould’s essay and Gould’s own later clarification show that he actually meant lower taxonomic orders. By both WJM’s definition and your own, you are a quote-miner.
You could try claim to be a victim of some-one’s error here – after all, it probably wasn’t you that inserted that additional “the”. But nobody forced you to copy the misquote from whatever dubious site you obtained it from. Nobody forced you to cite Gould directly rather than via a secondary source. Nobody forced you to continue to conceal your actual source, despite hints in posts #91 and #93 and being directly asked in posts #86 and #95. Then, after I say that “I am being as careful as I can to make sure that everything I say is justifiable“, you can’t even be bothered to wonder why I’m asking or how I knew you didn’t get that quote from a legitimate source, but instead accuse me of making unjustified and groundless accusations and false insinuations. You aren’t a victim, you’re culpably negligent.
Nor are you innocent of the distortion. Your comments about quote-mining in post #53 indicate that you knew when you posted the quote from “Return of the Hopeful Monster” that it had been described as being out-of-context. Yet despite that knowledge, you made no attempt to confirm the context before posting. Culpable negligence again.
That is the basis for my criticism. It is possible that Gould produced multiple versions of his essay, and that your misquote is actually genuine, but I really, really doubt it. It’s far more likely that you misquoted Gould out-of-context, distorted his intended meaning, and became a quote-miner.
Despite the facts provided here and your exhortation for me to “acknowledge wrongdoing,accept correction and turn from what has been done” I suffer no illusion that you will do anything of the sort. Instead I expect you to either to twist and turn in false indignation and slander me, or to ignore this post completely. But if you do reply, remember that unless your response starts with either an acknowledgment that you misquoted Gould (or very strong evidence that he did produce two versions of his text) it will not be worth reading.
Roy |
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