Niles Eldredge, in _The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at
Creationism_ (1982, Washington Square Press, pp. 130-131) writes
regarding the ICR's Gary Parker and Luther Sunderland:
The ICR's Gary Parker has been among the more blatant offenders
[in distorting the words of scientists]. On page 95 of his
_Creation: The Facts of Life_, we read: "Famous paleontologists
at Harvard, the American Museum, and even the British Museum say
we have _not a single_ example of evolutionary transition at all."
This is untrue. A prominent creationist [Sunderland] interviewed
a number of paleontologists at those institutions and elsewhere
(actually, he never did get to Harvard). I was one of them. Some
of us candidly admitted that there are some procedural difficulties
in recognizing ancestors and that, yes, the fossil record is
rather full of gaps. Nothing new there. This creationist then
wrote letters to various newspapers, and even testified at
hearings that the paleontologists he interviewed admitted that
there are no intermediates in the fossil record. Thus, the lie has
been perpetuated by Parker. All of the paleontologists interviewed
have told me that they did cite examples of intermediates to the
interviewer. The statement is an outright distortion of the
willing admission by paleontologists concerned with accuracy, that,
to be sure, there are gaps in the fossil record. Such is creationist
"scholarship."
David Raup, in a letter to Thomas J. Wheeler dated December 9, 1987 (quoted
in Wheeler's "A Response to D. James Kennedy's Presentations on Creationism
and Evolution on 'The John Ankerberg Show'," available from Wheeler at
426 Deerfield Lane, Louisville, KY 40207) wrote regarding a quote about
the horse series being "phony" (used by Kennedy) that:
I suspect that much of the quote from the radio [actually television]
came from the Sunderland interviews. Although I might easily have
made the statement about the horse series, I do not remember doing
so. In my interview with Sunderland I said: "Well, as more is
learned about the evolution of the horse, more separate lineages
have been recognized and it's far more complicated than early work
indicated." I suspect that the quoted statements were actually made
either by Eldredge or Gould. I have heard Gould repeatedly
criticize the traditional museum treatment of horse evolution. And
Eldredge said in his Sunderland interview that the AMNH [American
Museum of Natural History] exhibit on the subject is "lamentable."
Wheeler notes that when he asked Kennedy for the source of the Raup
quote, he was sent a photocopy of a page from _The Quote Book_ which
did not at all match what Kennedy said on the air (Wheeler reprinted
it in full on p. 26 of his response) and does not state that there
are no transitions in the horse series.
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