Wesley R. Elsberry
93-10-03 18:50:54
Gould quoted by SciCre-ist


Some time ago, a newbie SciCre-ist posted a batch of "quotations"
from various sources as being supportive of the SciCre position, or at
least of being discomfiting to EMTs.  Included was a quote from
Stephen Jay Gould that went like this:

[Quote]

    Stephen J. Gould, Professor of Geology at Harvard University, as quoted
    in the May 1977 Natural History, Vol.  86

     "We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet
      to preserve out favored account of evolution by natural selection
      we view our data as so bad that we never see the process we profess
      to  study"... "The family trees which adorn our textbooks are
      based on inference, however, reasonable, not the evidence of
      fossils."

[End quote]

Well, it took me some little while to track down the original (but I
enjoyed skimming Gould along the way), but eventually I found it.  The
quote most nearly matches text in an essay entitled "The episodic nature
of evolutionary change", reprinted in the collection _The Panda's Thumb_.

The two sentences given in the SciCre quote stem from sentences in the
opposite order in the essay.  The first in the essay is:

"The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the
tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however
reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

Note that the SciCre quote omitted without ellipses the clause beginning
with "have data" and ending at "; the rest is", along the way substituting
a bridge that was never penned by Gould.  This distorted the entire
meaning of Gould's sentence, giving the impression that no part of the
evolutionary trees was based on actual data, which is unequivocally a lie.

For the second sentence, the mechanics of quotation are almost accurate,
but the context has been neatly excised:

"Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument.
We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet
to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection
we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess
to study."

So what was Darwin's argument referred to in the slightly restored
context?  Merely that natural selection had to progress by extremely
small differences spread over long periods of time.  While Gould avers
that this is not seen in the fossil record, it is probably more
accurate to say that the recording of Darwinian gradual change is rare
in the fossil record (Cuffey 1973).  Gould, of course, is promoting
the theory of evolutionary change which Niles Eldredge and he forwarded
in the early 1970's, that of punctuated equilibria.  Later in the essay
he makes clear that punctuated equilibria is supported by the pattern
of change that is recorded, by and large, in the fossil record.  Thus,
the characterization that our SciCre quoter wished to foster was based
upon a critical act of editing, and is definitely not supported by
reading Gould for content.

So what is the score on our SciCre quoter?  In two "quoted" sentences,
he managed to 1) lose critical context setting up a propensity of the
remainder to mislead; 2) transposed the two sentences so as to
further the propensity to mislead; 3) dropped text from the second
sentence without ellipses; and 4) added text without comment to the
second sentence in what can only be seen as a deliberate lie (at least,
I don't see any other way of looking at it).

And these are the folks claiming that "evolution" degrades morals?
It shows, by one more instance, how biologists take the moral high
road in this debate.  We do, after all, state that the arguments should
be waged over evidence.  We're still waiting for the SciCre side to
produce some, rather than continue with the literary criticism that they
seem not to be able to handle without succumbing to the temptation to
cheat.