The subject of the OP was the issue of whether adherents of YEism misquote scientists sometimes.
Bob has been kind enough to derail this thread by actually giving us some of the quotes which fit into this category. One quote which he has given us comes from Gould. Now he has been set straight on what this quote means in context for years, yet he continues to misappropriate the quote. He complained that no one had addressed this quote on this thread (I guess if you ignore the past refutations you can pretend that they do not exist) so I explained it again in my last post. Let's get the Gould quote on the record.
Gould said:
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. 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.
I informed Bob of the meaning behind this quote in my last post. I guess he didn't read it closely for he says that he is "still waiting" for it to be addressed. No problem. Bob's blunders are easy to show.
This time I will use language closer to that used by Gould himself. All life on earth, past and present, fits into a great tree. By definition, the extant life forms are the very tips of the branches. Looking into the fossil record, we do not even come close to having a specimen for every species that ever lived. The record is not complete and never will be. But we do have many of the branches and we have many of the nodes where lineages become separate branches. Though the tree is incomplete, we still have enough data to "infere" much of the rest of the tree.
Now Bob is trying to convince us that this is some great admission. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is more than sufficient information to know where most of the limbs on the tree go just from the available fossil record. And the missing details become more filled in every month as new findings are published. Bob is trying to size upon the statement that some things must still be "infered." He also wants you to think that for some reason that he can better infere about such things than the scientists who have the full set of data before them.
But Bob must also hope that you do not know about the ways that these inferences can be checked. There are a host of ways. Let's list some.
Shared pseudogenes
Molecular parahomology
Anatomical parahomology
Ontogeny
Shared retroviral inserts
Biogeography
Past biogeography
Stratiography
Molecular vestiges
Anatomical vestiges
Atavisms
Shared transposons
These are but a few of the methods available to check the inferences. But Bob hopes that you will ignore the other science behind that curtain over there. He needs to maintain this illusion that scientists make wild guesses from scraps of data instead of letting you know the rich amount of material available and the many indepenent ways to check your work.
Now since we are talking about quote mining, let's return to Gould.
It seems that Bob only want to use quotes himself. He doesn't like it when quotes are used against him. He brushed off the quote claiming that I was trying "to GO TO SOME OTHER QUOTE that [BobRyan] never gave at all." I guess only he wants to be able to quote.
But the Gould quote that I offered strikes to the heart of the issue. I only insist that quotes accurately reflect the opinion of the author. Bob cannot stand that standard, for it ruins his quotes, so he instead makes up things that he claims that are being offered as a standard. How many times have we seen Bob falsely categorize my standard like he did above. For the record, he paraphrased my stand as "'atheist evolutionists can only be quoted when they identify a blunder in evolutionism IF they ALSO become Bible Believing Genesis Accepting Christians while doing so.'"
Now nowhere will Bob ever be able to show where I have ever said such a thing. It is made up out of whole cloth. My only standard is that the quote reflects the actual opinion of the author. If you have to cut up the quote until the original meaning becomes lost, then you are misquoting.
So, let's see, again, what it is that Gould had to say about the practice of quoting him in the manner of Bob. I can see why Bob glossed over this statement.
Gould in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes said:
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-- whether through design or stupidity, I do not know--as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
Gould is "infuriat[ed]" by the practice. Gould cannot tell if they misquote him through "design" or through "stupidity." Gould is directly adressing the practices of Bob.
Gould also directly addresses the issue of the quote of GOuld from Bob that he keeps claiming has not been addressed. Gould says that transitional fossils are "abundant." Bob's selective quoting tries to make it look like they are few or non-existent in Gould's opinion. But Gould's response to this kind of quote mining shows Bob's assertions through his sliced and diced quoting to be patently false. The known transitions between the higher groups are those known "branches" and "nodes." The transitions between individual species are the ones that are generally lacking, though even there we have many fine examples of detailed change, some documented by Gould himself. (Interestingly, in the "kinds" concept where only "microevolution" is allowed, it is these species to species transitions only that should be found. If there is no "macroevolution" then there can be no transitions between higher groups. But look at what the observations show. Those transitions compatable with YEism are "generally lacking" while those disallowed by YEism are "abundant.")
Bob has also been presented with a similar quote form Patterson many times in the past expressing specifically his anger at being misquoted in the distorted quote that Bob gives.
But Bob doesn't even believe the author of the quote when being told that the quote is not accurate. Bob thinks he knows the opinion of the individual scientists better than they do themselves. I guess he is a mind reader.