I’ve found it’s always a good idea to check quotes used by creationists, especially when they contain ellipses or are truncated. This one:
we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light…from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the Human form.
is no exception. It’s from Owen’s On the nature of limbs, which is available at the online Darwin archive, and the text elided is “amidst the wreck of worlds”. There’s no practical reason for leaving out just five words, so they must have been omitted because of their content, by some-one who (unlike Owen himself) apparently doesn’t want to mention Earth’s history of extinctions.
Did the author of this review elide those words themselves, or did they copy this quote, ellipsis included, from somewhere else? I can’t find anywhere else that has exactly the same quote, but there is one source which has a slightly shorter version with an identical ellipsis: Denton’s “Evolution: still a theory in crisis”. Denton is well notorious for playing fast and loose with quotes, so it is quite likely that he originated this particular ellipsis, though if Denton’s book is the real source of this quote, the reviewer must have found the extra text somewhere else.
This isn’t as unlikely a scenario as it might seem. I know of someone with a history of copying ‘quotes’ from creationist works, then looking up the original source and citing it without checking whether the ‘quote’ they have copied is actually in it. It wouldn’t surprise me if they combined two versions of this quote from Owen that they found on-line, augmenting Denton’s elided version with a longer quote.
The reference to “Archencephala” is intriguing too. Whoever wrote this review doesn’t seem to understand cladistic taxonomy, because even if humans were placed apart from other primates following Owen’s classification, we’d still be classified as mammals ‘as if we were a kind of rodent’.
The idea of Archencephala is long abandoned, and I don’t recall ever seeing it mentioned before on any of the forums I’ve frequented. A search here finds no results. But I checked a few other fora, and did get one hit - in a post at Peaceful Science[1] containing a quote from an article they’d apparently written themselves. It’s also mentioned in the preprint article, but not in any of the earlier versions
If you’ve read this far, you deserve some form of reward, so here it is: the person who mentioned Archencephala at PS is the same person who has a history for posting misquotes and concealing their actual sources. They also write about Owen a lot, are hazy about cladistics and read RTB, and were involved in writing earlier versions of this article, but perhaps not the latest version. So they are a likely candidate for having written this review.
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It’s @RTBsupporter.
But wait, I hear you cry. That would mean he posted his own review (possibly with AI assistance) of something he contributed to as if it was written by some-one else.
Is that credible?
Yes, it is. He has previously omitted his name from something he helped write, and presented a later version of the same article as something he “recently came across”, and asked about how to submit articles to journals under a different name. Posting his own work as if it was written by some-one else is his SOP.
I’m not sure if this link will work. ↩︎