The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Quotemines and The Dead Guy Gambit

Some of the topics that I write about will be controversial to some. My hope is that people will respond to such writings with well-reasoned discussion. Part of well-reasoned discussion involves supporting your position, and that's what this post will discuss.  I'm mainly going to set this post against the background of evolution, but it applies generally to a lot of topics - global warming, the purported link between childhood vaccines and autism, and the war on terror, just to name a few.

Citations

If you read any significant amount of non-fiction, chances are you've run across a situation where the author uses information from another source to make his or her point. Generally speaking, this is a citation.  It's important to use them, particularly if you're making a point that is likely to be challenged. 

Good citations are crucial: they establish connections between sources, provide support (or counterpoint) for an authors assertions, and generally give the reader a much broader view of the topic at hand.

Poor citations are another matter. In the best situation, a poor citation is a nuisance: annoying, but not particularly harmful. At the other end of the spectrum, a poor citation can mislead, distract, and confuse a reader.

This essay will give some examples of both and discuss some of the problems that can crop up in poorly constructed citations.

The Basics

Citations can appear in a number of forms, but generally speaking they contain two parts.¹

• Whatever it is the other source said - this can be a direct quote from the other source or a paraphrased summary.
• The information necessary for an interested reader to find the cited information in its original source. At a minimum, this would include the source author's name, the title of the publication, and the year of publication.²

A good citation would look something like this³ :

"Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!"
(Seuss, D. (1960). Green Eggs and Ham. Random House Books for Young Readers.)

There's really not much to it. At this point, if you wanted to find out more about the sordid Green Eggs and Ham affair, you'd have no problem other than maybe finding the time to go to the library.

Context

Let's look at another example with a little more heft.

The late Stephen Jay Gould rightly pointed out that a dominant icon of evolution is a shambling file of simian ancestors, rising progressively in the wake of the erect, striding, majestic figure of Homo sapiens sapiens: man as evolution's last word, drawing evolution from the past towards his eminence. (Dawkins, R. (2005). The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (p. 2). Mariner Books.)

This looks pretty much like what we saw above, right? It's Dawkins citing Gould claiming that evolution is all about the march towards humanity. It's even got a citation with a page number. If you wanted to go look this up, you could. But you wouldn't find this quote, because I've ripped it out of context and made a few edits that I didn't indicate. Here's the real quote, with my deletions bolded⁴:

The late Stephen Jay Gould rightly pointed out that a dominant icon of evolution in popular mythology, a caricature almost as ubiquitous as lemmings jumping over cliffs (and that myth is false too), is a shambling file of simian ancestors, rising progressively in the wake of the erect, striding, majestic figure of Homo sapiens sapiens: man as evolution's last word (and in this context it is always man rather than woman); man as what the whole enterprise is pointing towards; man as a magnet, drawing evolution from the past towards his eminence. (Dawkins, R. (2005). The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (p. 2). Mariner Books.)

Much, much different. What we really have is Dawkins citing Gould refuting the notion (as a myth) that evolution is all about getting to humanity. The quote, in context, is part of a discussion on how hindsight can be a dangerous thing, since we tend to retroject our own biases into what happened in the past.

The point here is that the context of a quotation is extremely important in establishing the meaning of the quotation. It's trivially easy (and disturbingly common) for writers to pull exactly the same sort of stunt I just did in order to make their case seem stronger than it is. Some authors will defend this practice, but in point of fact it isn't defensible⁵. It's called quotemining, and it's lying, pure and simple⁶.

Quotemining is also insulting, in my opinion.  Writers who quotemine are making several assumptions about their readership:

• The readers are too lazy to bother to check the references
• The readers are uncritical and inclined to believe whatever someone tells them, particularly if it reinforces opinions they already have
• The readers are ignorant enough of the subject at hand that they lack a frame of reference for the material

These assumptions aren't particularly flattering.  With the array of resources that the internet provides, such as Google searches and Amazon, in addition to the research tools offered (often on-line) through many public libraries, there are vanishingly few good reasons for a reader to not check at least a few references to see if the author is accurately citing them.  If you run across an author that's not accurately citing his sources, this should be a signal to you that something is wrong. 

Dead Guys

There is one more sneaky citation trick that rears its head from time to time.  I'll call it The Dead Guy Gambit.

Let's say you're trying to come up with some quotations to support your position, but everyone currently working in the field you're interested in disagrees with you? What options do you have? Well, you can do what we did above, and perform a contextectomy on a quotation of a modern expert, but some uppity reader might call you on it, either by pointing out that you misquoted the original material, or by bringing the quoted indvidual into the discussion. Quite embarrassing. Fortunately, there's another option: dead guys. There are a lot of dead guys in just about any field of study you could imagine, and there are a lot of advantages to quoting them: they offer a wide body of quotable material, much of which is in the public domain, much of their material may be way out of date, so there are less likely to be modern experts who are directly challenging it, and (best of all), they don't show up unexpectedly telling you that you misquoted them.

Charles Darwin is a favorite (and ironic) choice for this sort of treatment. An excellent example may be found here.  (It's worth pointing out that Darwin isn't the last word on evolution, either.  When he was writing, he had no knowledge of genetics.  The modern understanding of genetics has led to tremendous increases in knowledge of evolutionary mechanisms that Darwin couldn't have dreamed of.  Nevertheless, the underlying premises of universal common descent with modification and the importance of selective pressures remain central to the so-called modern synthesis.  Quoting Darwin to refute modern evolution is rather like quoting Newton to refute general relativity.) 

The Dead Guy Gambit gets used a lot in anti-evolution writings. Often, there will be a list of "famous scientists who didn't believe in evolution", with names like Carolus Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Georges Cuvier thrown up as dissenters. The problem here is that the people on such lists were typically either dead before Darwin published in 1859, or else died before the scientific community had a chance to parse through Darwin's work and incorporate it. What you won't find on lists like that are the names of any modern biologists practicing in their fields.

The Dead Guy Gambit has a more subtle purpose, too - it's a subtle argument from authority.  We know the names of a lot of dead guys by virtue of encountering them in school.  If I say "Linnaeus", many people are going to have at least heard of him, and may know that he developed the system of binomial nomenclature that we use to name organisms.  If I say "Douglas Futuyma", most people will have no idea who I'm talking about.  We tend to attach a lot of significance to name recognition, so a list of comments by people we recognize will tend to carry more weight in our minds than will a list of comments by people we don't, regardless of whether the ones we recognize have any real credibility.

This isn't to say that every quote by a dead guy is useless or irrelevant.  It does mean, though, that if you see a quote by somebody that's been dead for 150 years, you should stop and reflect on whether or not what was said in the middle of the 19^th century accurately reflects the early 21^st century understanding of the subject matter.

Summary

To wrap up, I hope I've managed to point out some of the problems that can crop up with regard to improper citation of sources.  What I hope this leads to is well-supported comments and discussion with a high signal-to-noise ratio.  That benefits everyone a lot more than time spent chasing down questionable references.

CB

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¹ In works of fiction (and occasionally non-fiction), authors may make implicit reference to other works, expecting that the savvy reader will pick up on them. Such references are often cultural - for example, an American author in 2008 might make a reference to towers falling, or the destruction wrought by a hurricane - and the author may assume that the readers pick up the significance. The problem here comes when someone a hundred, or five hundred, or two thousand years from now reads the work without knowledge of the social and historical context. This future reader, lacking that context, might be tempted to retroject his own context on the old work, and in doing so may reach a different understanding than the author intended. We must be very cautious when reading old texts for this reason, among others.

² Internet publications can be a little more complicated, since todays website can be tomorrows Page Not Found Error. We're not going to discuss internet sources here, other than to say that the citation needs to include a link to the page and the date the page was accessed.

³ I'm not going to spend a lot of time on specific stylistic conventions here. There are several out there - the American Psychological Association (APA) style is common and fairly straightforward, and is the one that I'll use in my examples.

⁴ It's also fairly common to see a short citation, something like "Dawkins, R. , 2005", Usually citations like that come after a more elaborate one and are just used as a shorthand. Sometimes, though, authors will completely leave out the publication title, which can make it exceedingly difficult to track down the original source of the quotation.

⁵ I need to make a distinction here.  Not every misquote is deliberate, of course.  The honest mistakes tend to get acknowledged and corrected.  The intentional misquotes tend to get perpetuated over and over, even when they're pointed out.  

⁶ I've got a specific author in mind here. I'll be posting about him soon.