Quote mining
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Quote mining is the practice of compiling quotes from large volumes of literature or spoken word. The term is used pejoratively to accuse the "quote miner" of cherry picking 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.
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Overview
The term is particularly used by scientists to denounce proponents of creationism, because creationists present long lists of quotes by scientists allegedly acknowledging their criticisms. To quote 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.
Darwin on the eye
Perhaps the most famous example of this 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.
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.
External links
- The Quote Mine Project - hosted by the talk.origins archive
- Quote-mining article on EvoWiki
- Index to creationist claims claim CA113 - quote mining