Quote mining

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Quote mining is the practice of purposely compiling frequently misleading quotes from large volumes of literature or speech.^[1]

The term is pejorative. "Quote miners" are often accused of contextomy and misquotation, in an attempt to represent the views of the person being quoted inaccurately. For example, if a person being quoted disagrees with some position, a quote miner will present quotes that suggest that instead, this person is supportive of this position. Material that ostensibly bolsters this position is often taken out of context. Exposition that is at odds with the argument being made in the same text is 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

[edit] Overview

The phrase originated in the mid-1990s.^[2] It is commonly used by members of the scientific community to describe a method frequently employed by creationists^[1] to support their arguments. Creationists often present "mined quotes" which, when taken out of context, appear to undercut evolution, or quotes which have been altered so that it appears as though the source of the quotation opposes evolution when this is not true. Although the phrase originated relatively recently, complaints about the practice are not new. Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in his famous 1973 essay "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" that

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 created by creationists, such as That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, by creation scientist Henry Morris,^[3] and The Revised Quote Book by Andrew Snelling.^[4]

This term might not be widely used or understood in other circumstances and situations.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Darwin on the eye

A typical example of quote mining ^[5] 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.

In this case, the originally quoted sentence is a rhetorical device: Darwin is first admitting to the 'seeming' strength of a criticism in order to better refute it. Darwin, in fact, goes on to devote three further pages to this subject, all of arguing as to why he believes the original objection to be unwarranted. Thus, presenting the original sentence alone gives the reader a false impression of what Darwin thinks about the subject: that he thinks a problem is unsolvable, when in fact in context he was merely admitting that it might seem unsolvable, at first.^[6] The creationist organization "Answers in Genesis" has noted the unfairness of quoting Darwin in this way, and urged others not to use the quote without including the following explanatory material.^[7]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes and references

^ ^a ^b 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]
^ That Their Words May Be Used Against Them, Henry Morris, Master Books, December 1997 ISBN 0890512280.
^ The Revised Quote Book, Andrew Snelling, Creation Science Foundation, Brisbane Queensland, 1990.
^ http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php?title=Darwin_on_evolution_of_the_eye
^ Cretinism or Evilution?: An Old, Out of Context Quotation
^ Arguments we think creationists should NOT use