Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Jonathan Witt goes to the Quote Mine

I noticed this link to an analysis of the Discovery Institutes (DI) response to the new fossil fish Tiktaalik, which has creationists everywhere running around with chickens with their heads cut off in 'damage control', from the Dispatches from the Culture wars. The DI 'response' is so inane it doesn't deserve linkage, but you can find it at the link to Steve Reulands take-down if you really want to bother reading more DI garbage. I only suggest reading so many DI 'responses' and press releases because the general abuses of logic contained generally inflict cummulative damage if too many are read at once.

Anyway, Steve notices that Jonathan Witt quotes a paleontologist called Henry Gee in responding to the fossil finding. Somewhat unsurprisingly, like most creationist quotations of actual scientists, it seems that Jonathan Witt has hopelessly mangled the meaning of the quote. Additionally, it seems that Henry Gee is a fairly popular target of quote mining, so much so he even has made a public statement on the matter.

More analysis of the DIs farcical posts on Tiktaalik can be found on the Pandas Thumb (here and another post here) and on Ed Braytons blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Also, just so nobody can claim that I've forgot that Answers in Genesis still writes stupid things as well, Lancelet has given a suitable paddling to AiG nonsense on the fossil here and a second post here.

It's link love to takedowns of creationist nonsense tuesday!