Quote mining

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Quote mining is the practice of compiling quotes from large volumes of literature or spoken word.^[1] The term is used pejoratively to accuse the "quote miner" of contextomy and misquotation, where favorable positions are amplified or falsely suggested, and unfavorable positions in the same text are excluded or otherwise obscured.

The expression is also sometimes used in a slightly weaker sense, merely meaning that a quote is being used to support an idea that the original author rejects. In this second case, even a quote which is accurate can be considered a mined quote.

1 Overview
- 1.1 Darwin on the eye
2 See also
3 Notes and references
4 External links
- 4.1 Some creationist quote lists

[edit] Overview

The phrase originated in the mid-1990s.^[2] It is heavily used in the USENET newsgroup talk.origins and other forums in which creationism is discussed. As of 2007, its use is almost entirely limited to discussions of the creationism-evolution controversy.^{[citation needed]} It is commonly used by non-creationists, who complain that creationists support their arguments by reference to "quote mines" of nuanced statements which, out of context, appear to undercut evolution. It is not widely used or understood in other contexts.

Although the phrase itself is new, complaints about the practice are not. Theodosius Dobzhansky's famous 1973 essay Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution:

Their [Creationists'] favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin.

Entire books of quotes have been written by creationists, such as Henry Morris' That Their Words May Be Used Against Them and Answers in Genesis' The Revised Quote Book. In September 2006, the Discovery Institute quoted an article in Nature Reviews Microbiology even before it was printed (see author Nick Matzke's rebuttal Alert! Alack! I have been quote mined!).

[edit] Darwin on the eye

Perhaps the most famous example of creationist quote mining [2] is taken from The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in which he considers the evolution of the eye:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

– The Origin of Species, 1st Edition, Chapter 6, pp. 186-7

This quote is clearly taken out of context because Darwin continues:

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

Darwin goes on to devote three further pages to this subject. [3] Some creationists, such as Answers in Genesis have acknowledged the lack of context of the quote and urged other creationists not to use the quote without quoting the context. [4]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes and references

^ Forrest, Barbara; Paul R. Gross (2004). Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195157427. Retrieved on 2007-03-09. “In the face of the extraordinary and often highly practical twentieth-century progress of the life sciences under the unifying concepts of evolution, [creationist] "science" consists of quote-mining — minute searching of the biological literature — including outdated literature — for minor slips and inconsistencies and for polemically promising examples of internal arguments. These internal disagreements, fundamental to the working of all natural science, are then presented dramatically to lay audiences as evidence of the fraudulence and impending collapse of "Darwinism."”
^ According to the Quote Mine Project at TalkOrigins Archive, the first record of the term in talk.origins was a posting by Lenny Flank on March 30, 1997, with a February 2 1996 reference in another Usenet group, rec.arts.comics.misc[1]