JABbering Stooge

A: If there’s an ellipsis in the quote, it’s probably mined.

Case in point, Dave Scott “My IQ is Two Standard Deviants Deviations Above the Mean” Springer. (Oh, sweet Zombie Jesus, he lives here in Austin!) As is typical for the IDiot movement, he decides to quote mine the late Stephen Jay Gould in order to celebrate the creationist nutjobs sneaking their drek into Texas science education standards:

Stephen J. Gould, perhaps the most famous paleontologist of the 20th century, wrote:

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 … in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed.

Amusingly, Mr. Springer seems a tad defensive about being accused of quote mining (Gee, I wonder why that might be?) and challenges us to prove it:

Lest I be accused of quote mining you can find Gould discussing it in more detail in Gould’s book The Richness of Life, pages 263 and 264, found in its entirety on Google Books.

Okay, Mr. Springer, consider your challenge accepted and answered. Here’s the full quote, with text that contradicts DaveScot’s “point” in bold:

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; [Elided part begins here] the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:

• The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record will rightly reject my whole theory.

Darwin’s argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution directly. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never “seen” in the rocks.

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 almost never see the very process we profess to study.

For several years, Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History and I have been advocating a resolution of this uncomfortable paradox. We believe that [Thomas Henry] Huxley was right in his warning. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. In fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

2. Sudden appearance. [Elided part ends here] In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed.

In other words, Gould wasn’t arguing that evolution didn’t happen and could never happen, as DaveScot would have you believe. He was arguing that evolution doesn’t operate the exact way Darwin and many who came after him argued that it does.

So, there you go, Mr. Springer. Proof that you quote-mined Dr. Gould. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!

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