Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Quote mining: Quoting someone saying something that proves inconvenient to a would-be authority

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In the face of charges from a frantic Darwinist, Paul Nelson points out that he is not “quote mining” when he quotes Lewis “Six Impossible Things” Wolpert making the same argument as himself:

What is not okay, however, and requires an immediate reply, is Myers’ accusation that I quote-mined the evolutionary developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. Quote-mining is the practice of citing scholarly sources out of context, for a polemical purpose. It’s a serious charge to make, and needs to be backed up with evidence.Myers provides no such evidence, but that’s not the real problem. If you accuse someone of quote-mining, you actually have to read the source that supposedly was mined, to understand the context. If Myers had done so, he would have seen immediately that Wolpert makes exactly the same argument that I presented in the OD series: natural selection, at least as the process is conventionally modeled, cannot explain the origin of differentiation.

Myers has refused to say whether he read Wolpert 1994 before accusing me of quote mining the publication.

It heats up.

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