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The Quote Mine Project

Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines

Assorted Quotes, Part 2

by the talk.origins newsgroup
Copyright © 2006
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Quote #4.21

[Too little evidence in the fossil record to support human evolution]

Palaeoanthropologists seem to make up for a lack of fossils with an excess of fury, and this must now be the only science in which it is still possible to become famous just by having an opinion. As one cynic says, in human palaeontology the consensus depends on who shouts loudest. - J.S. Jones

Representative quote miners:
Institute for Creation Research: The Second Man;
Living Word Bible Church of Australia: A Lack of proof in the fossil record and missing links? ; and
Harun Yahya (The Qur'an Leads The Way To Science): Fossil Impasse.

The full citation is: J. S. Jones, "A thousand and one Eves" review of "The Search for Eve" by Michael H. Brown. Harper & Row: 1990., Nature 345, 395-396 (31 May 1990). For those with subscriptions, the original review can be found at Nature's website.

Creationists generally use this quote to indicate that acceptance of human evolution is a matter of faith among researchers without objective scientific support.

However as the quote in fuller context makes clear Jones appears to be making an unrelated point about journalists who are less impressed by the science than by the irrelevant personalities of the researchers:

It [The Search for Eve] is a racy tale about the human race and about the quarrels of those who study it. As usual, the science is more interesting than the scientists. Does it really matter that one proponent has "piercing gelid eyes" while another is a "demure earth mother"? Admittedly, though, there are few fields which can boast papers written from prison where the author is serving time for poisoning the judge who gave him a drugs sentence. Palaeoanthropologists seem to make up for a lack of fossils with an excess of fury, and this must now be the only science in which it is still possible to become famous just by having an opinion. As one cynic says, in human palaeontology the consensus depends on who shouts loudest.

However, Jones was also aware that palaeontologists often bitterly disagree on details, since it is difficult or impossible to know how close any particular homonid fossil "is on the direct line of descent to modern humans." On the other hand, in the same review he says:

Fossils are, above all, evidence for the fact of evolution rather than for how it happened.
&
New fossil discoveries mean that man has been getting younger every year, and there are now no major disagreements about the date of the separation of the human and the ape family trees.

These and other statements by Jones, flatly contradict the meaning suggested by creationist quote miners.

- Keith Elias

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