Posted by I have two more installments planned for my Dawkins series, but I think I will hold them over to next week. Instead we really must pause to consider the latest example of mind-boggling ID sleaziness.
The story begins with Tim McGrew, a philosopher at Western Michigan University. In the comments section to this blog entry, McGrew wrote the following:
Let me rephrase that: Myers has changed Wells’s wording and then has the temerity to accuse Wells of misleading the reader at the very point where Myers himself has made the change in Wells’s words.
Let me put that more bluntly: Myers is lying through his teeth. Literally. He is actually that dishonest. And not a single commentator on Panda’s Thumb for the past two months could be bothered to check Myers’s quotation against Wells’s actual words to see whether Myers was telling the truth.
This sort of thing just frosts me. John and others who frequent PT and Pharyngula should be warned that they cannot take what they see there at face value. (Emphasis in Original)
Serious charges. Before showing just how badly McGrew has stepped in it though, we should pause to mention that lying through your teeth is not something you can literally do. You can only do it figuratively.
Those are some serious charges McGrew is levelling. For some reason I’m reminded of something Richard Dawkins once said in response to critic Mary Midgley: “Indeed, we are in danger of assuming that nobody would dare to be so rude without taking the elementary precaution of being right in what she said.”
The charges relate to this essay, written by Myers and posted at The Panda’s Thumb. It was a reply to one chapter of Jonathan Wells’ book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, specifically dealing with issues related to embryology.
McGrew also wrote the following:
Because I was curious about this one, I cross-checked it against Wells’s book. The least interesting of the discrepancies is that Myers has apparently slipped in the page references to Wells: the quotation he finds objectionable appears on pp. 30-31, not on “pp. 35.” What is much more significant is that Myers has misquoted Wells — not simply selectively quoted him, but out and out misquoted him, attributing to him in direct quotation something that is critically different from what Wells actually said.
Pretty unambiguous. We have two charges to consider: (1) According to McGrew, Myers claimed a particular quote appeared on page 35 of Wells’ book, but that in reality the quote appears on pages 30-31. (2) Myers altered the quotation for the purposes of distorting Wells’ intent.
Of course, it didn’t take long for Myers to point out the obvious. The quote he attributed to Wells not only appears on page 35, but is actually placed in a graphic offset from the rest of the text. You would have thought that no one could have missed it. Yet McGrew, after boasting that he had checked it himself, assured his readers that the quote does not appear on that page.
Here is the quote as it appears on page 35 of the book:
It is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the early embryo stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults.”
Wells’ attributes this statement to biologist William Ballard. In his PT essay, Myers pointed out that this is a rank distortion of Ballard’s clearly stated intention. As presented above, the quote appears to say that vertebrate embryos are not more alike than their adults. Ballard’s point was that the very earliest stages of these embryos are different, but that these different beginnings quickly converge on a small number of developmental pathways.
So both of McGrew’s claims are utterly, laughably false. Myers had the right page, and presented the quotation accurately. But of course, these are creationists we are talking about. So the story does not end there.
Salvador Cordova, never one to let a few inconvenient facts get in his way, pounced on McGrew’s comments. He posted a blog entry at Uncommon Descent trumpeting McGrew’s findings. Under the title “More Antics from P.Z. Myers?” he writes: “You be the judge.” And then he presents McGrew’s comments.
But there is nothing to judge. McGrew made certain assertions of fact. These assertions are easily seen to be totally false. Surely that’s the end of it, right? I mean, most bloggers, upon learning that they had been duped into reprinting blatantly false charges, would withdraw the charges and apologize for having reprinted them. Having seen several of Salvador’s public presentations, I am well aware of his own predilection for presenting the work of scientists grotesquely out of context. On several occasions I have pointed this out to him. But surely in this case the facts were so plain and McGrew’s error so unambiguous that even Salvador would feel compelled to apologize.
Not so. Here is how Salvador responded when McGrew’s error was pointed out to him:
I posted it for discussion, I want the readers to decide and argue amonst themselves and provide data and links or whatever.
What is at issue is not what Ballard said, but Myers quotaion of Wells.
That, my friends, is the textbook definition of sleaze. As we have seen, there is nothing to decide and argue here. When you reprint someone else’s offensive acusations, and then have it pointed out to you that those accusations are totally false, you do not absolve yourself by saying you were just offering the charges for discussion.
Since apologizing for reprinting blatant falsehoods apparently goes against Salvador’s grain, he instead tried to change the subject, in a later comment:
What is at issue is page 30-31, not page 35. Myers is omitting the fact he ignored what Wells actually wrote on page 31 as McGrew pointed out.
The issue is whether Myers misrepresented the clear intent of what Wells was writing by omitting what Wells wrote on page 31.
Of course, down here on planet Earth the issue was the potentially libelous charges levelled by McGrew towards Myers. We have already seen that those charges were false.
So what’s this about pages 30-31? Well, it seems that Wells used Ballard’s quote twice. Once in the graphic, as already cited. And once in the main body of the text. The new claim is that this second use of Ballard’s quote absolves him from the charge of distorting Ballard’s intention. Let’s take a look. Here’s the full context, from pages 30-31 of Wells’ book.:
Like Haeckel’s fakery, the dissimilarity of early vertebrate embryos was well known in the nineteenth century. Embryologist Adam Sedgwick pointed out in 1894 that the doctrine of early similarity and later difference is “not in accordance with the facts of development.” Comparing a dogfish with a chicken, Sedgwick wrote: “There is no stage of development in which the unaided eye would fail to distinguish between them with ease.” It is “not necessary to emphasize further these embryonic differences,” Sedgwick continued, because “every embryologist knows they exist and could bring forward innumerable instances of them. I need only say with regard to them that a species is distinct and distinguishable from its allies from the very earliest stages all through the development.”
Modern embryologists confirm this. Dartmouth College biologist William Ballard wrote in 1976 that it is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the cleavage and gastrulation stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults.”
The gambit is that since Wells here mentions the gastrulation and cleavage stages of the vertebrates, that is, the very earliest stages of development, it is acceptable that this caveat was left out of the graphic on page 35.
Sadly, this gambit fails. As is clear from the quote above, Wells is using Ballard as evidence that modern embryologists endorse Sedgwick’s nineteenth century conclusion that embryos differ at every stage of their development. In reality, modern embryologists do not support Sedgwick’s conclusion. The modern view, supported by Ballard, is that embryos differ greatly at their very earliest stages, before converging on very similar pathways through a slightly later stage.
So let’s review:
- McGrew said that the quote used by Myers does not appear on page 35. In reality it appears prominently in a graphic on that page.
- McGrew said that Myers doctored the quote, thereby altering Wells’ meaning. In reality, Myers did not do this. The quote on page 35 was presented accurately and meant exactly what Myers said it meant.
- Salvador Cordova shamelessly repeated these false charges at William Dembski’s blog, and did not apolgize even after the error was pointed out to him.
- Instead he tried to change the subject (as did McGrew) to a different page of Wells’ book, where the same quotation is used with slightly more context. But this second usage is also unambigously erroneous. Wells made it seem that Ballard supported Sedgwick’s nineteenth century conclusion, when in reality Ballard unambiguously contradicted it.
As a coda, we might ask how McGrew reacted when his boldface accusations of lying and doctoring quotes were shown to be false:
First up: PZ Myers did not fabricate the quotation, as I originally thought he had. He took it out of a call-out box on p. 35 of Wells — the page that he said it was on. My apologies to PZ for assuming that he was trying to quote the text rather than the call-out box: he is absolved of the crime of actually fabricating the quotation.
Well, that’s something. But then McGrew plays the page 30-31 gambit:
For PZ Myers: Did you notice that Wells actually refers to gastrulation in the original text at the bottom of p. 30? Did you look for the text from which the call-out was taken? If you did, why did you choose to quote from the call-out instead and to focus on the wording there, which differs from the wording in the text precisely by replacing the more precise reference to “cleavage and gastrulation stages” with the briefer reference to “early embryo stages” – and then to claim that Wells is being deceptive? Isn’t that dishonest?
If you didn’t, doesn’t this pretty much torch your central criticism of Wells — that he dishonestly represented Ballard as referring to the pharyngula stage? And if that’s the case, don’t you owe Wells an apology?
Of course, the “call-outs”, as McGrew called them, are intended to be simple, take-away points from the text. They are arguably more important than the main text itself. And what was presented in this particular box was totally false. I hardly see how P.Z. can be faulted for pointing this out. We have also seen that the use of Ballard’s quote in the main text was also unambiguously out of context, so this hardly helps McGrew’s case.
There is one last line of defense. That is the claim that the blatantly inaccurate call-out was probably inserted by an editor, and not by Wells himself. It’s a pretty feeble defense. As we have seen, Ballard’s quote is misused in the main body of the text as well. Second, I am not aware that Wells has protested the editor’s decision in creating this call-box.
We have seen this sort of jaw-droppingly brazen dishonesty previously from the creationists and ID folks. In this essay I documented William Dembski’s refusal to correct his blatant misuse of a statement from paleontologist Peter Ward. In this one I showed how Dembski’s co-blogger-in-chief, Denyse O’Leary, was duped into repeating blatantly false charges about the views of Stephen Jay Gould. Even after the error was pointed out, she refused to offer any correction.
Shame on them, of course. And shame on any respectable scholar who persists in believing that ID should be treated with respect.
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