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I'm thinking about rerunning this one at WP:TFA on its anniversary on November 24. Thoughts? Has the article held up well over the years? - Dank ( push to talk) 19:36, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
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In a long series of edits, Stan introduced a superfluous paragraph of original research, repeating context of the "time to publish" which is already covered above with secondary sources, and returned to editing the meaning of "races", pushing a pov by attributing widely held scholarly opinion to individuals, and deleting some sources. I've gone back to where he started, and I've copyedited it, adding additional sources and modifying the wording accordingly. I've also put back in a quote from Sober which Stan added, with more context from Sober's article to avoid a misleading impression of Sober's focus. . . dave souza, talk 12:17, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
OTOOS,
pp.422-424
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Thus, on the view which I hold, the natural system is genealogical in its arrangement, like a pedigree; … It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. … The origin of the existence of groups subordinate to groups, is the same with varieties as with species, namely, closeness of descent with various degrees of modification. Nearly the same rules are followed in classifying varieties, as with species. Authors have insisted on the necessity of classing varieties on a natural instead of an artificial system; we are cautioned, for instance, not to class two varieties of the pine-apple together, merely because their fruit, though the most important part, happens to be nearly identical; … In classing varieties, I apprehend if we had a real pedigree, a genealogical classification would be universally preferred; … If it could be proved that the Hottentot had descended from the Negro, I think he would be classed under the Negro group, however much he might differ in colour and other important characters from negroes.
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@ Charlesdrakew: Hi Charles, you reverted my latest edit. Your edit summary does not provide any justification for such a reversion, nor is it even true. Will you explain, please, on what points you think we agree and on which points we disagree? Editors are expected to work together to reach a consensus. Thanks. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 14:00, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
If you've other issues, please set them out individually with reference to reliable published mainstream sources, and don't just revert wording”: This is exactly what I did in this edit, where I set out the point made by Joseph Carroll (scholar) that when commentators say that Darwin’s Sentence Light-will-be-thrown is his only reference to human evolution, they “overlook” other such references in OTOOS. I did everything you asked, and what is your response? In this , you removed Carroll’s main point that saying there is only one reference overlooks other references: you reverted his wording, exactly what you told me not to do. As bad as unilaterally removing relevant and properly sourced material is, that is nothing compared with what you replaced it with: a fake news quote from Janet Browne’s vortex of bullshit on p.60 of Power of Place. The quote you added has three individual claims, two of which are totally false. You also mischaracterized what Browne said in the quote – she most certainly never said there was a single reference to human origins – which I’ll explain in a new section: #Janet Browne on human origins in OTOOS. Furthermore, in the above-mentioned edit and this one, you turned two moderate-length paragraphs into two rambling pages of comments and quotes, adding background details in a section meant to describe the book itself (there is a separate background section). The burning irony here is that your 17:36 18 Sept post informed me that keeping background material “concise” was so imperative that you told me to edit elsewhere, and now you added a lot of background material yourself.
I've removed "the social construct of" which you objected to, in my view it's arguable…”: As you know, I objected to the claim because it was not sourced. As you know, WP:Verifiability is core content policy, yet you brazenly say that your post is nevertheless “arguable”. I want to thank you for so explicitly spelling out your contempt for Wikipedia policy. History has shown that you consider everything to be “arguable”, whether it is true or not, whether it is verified or not, no problem at all, let’s get the spin machine going with a bunch of “arguments”, ie. WP:SYNTHESIS, to defend the post. That’s not how to build an encyclopedia grounded in reality. Claims need to be verified by reliable sources, as you well know.
Please … act collaboratively instead of trying to push your pov in contradiction of published academic sources”: You are once again accusing me of what you have done many times, including when you pushed your bullshit POV that “Darwin did not share the then common view that other races are inferior”. As I mentioned in para.2 of my 05:56 1 Sept post below ( # Re: “superfluous paragraph…) Yopienso provided a ton of sources that contradicted your claim, but because you see everything as “arguable” you kept edit warring to push this POV until you finally decided to stick with what the source actually said (the POV hadn’t been verified). I thought we were in the clear on this one, but you had a history of, when squeezed in one area, of doubling down in another, and when I called out Janet Browne’s vortex of bullshit as fake news, you were not happy, and indeed, a couple of days later, you upped the ante, posting (in this series of edits): “Darwin [believed] that black people were fully equal”. Your post was based entirely on your own synthesis, indeed you knew very well that Desmond and Moore (the authors you cited) had been very explicit on their views about Darwin, writing but a few chapters earlier: “He thought blacks inferior”. After your fellow editors pointed out that your claims weren’t true you finally conceded that the gig was up this time, but in the meantime, you were not only “trying to push your pov in contradiction of published academic sources”, as you accused me of, but on top of that, your lying bullshit POV contradicted the very source you cited. So, yeah, any time you decide to stop your ridiculous smear campaign against my editing just because I kick a few of your sacred cows (ie. call out fake news), that would be a very good thing indeed.
In a
series of talk page edits starting at
03:07, 3 October 2017, Stan returned with the sort of behaviour discussed at
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive943#Origin of Species dispute, and likely to get the same response. Doubtful if there are any valid points hidden in the morass. He's returned to demanding inline attribution of points only he disputes, so I've
undone his edit to the article
One of the talk page edits included adding a section heading
This conversation desperately needs more input from intellectually honest editors – that's clearly unacceptable as a heading, so I've trimmed it.
He concludes with
Page is getting long. Setting up automatic archive, similar to Talk:Charles Darwin. Hope it works. Don't know if it will, so would appreciate if someone can check that out. . .
dave souza,
talk 12:47, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Doubtful if there are any valid points hidden…”: When editors are quick to accuse others of original research, tendentious editing, and “trying to push [their] pov in contradiction of published academic sources,” and when they are even quicker to cut & run from that conversation when the evidence is shown to point the other way, then the point is very far from “hidden” indeed: people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 22:36, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.”: I certainly don’t disagree with your comment that this Thomas Huxley quote should be a motto here. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the Browne citation was removed by consensus last summer, but has made a zombie-like return. History has shown that Dave, when squeezed in one area, has a tendency of doubling down on another topic. On 18th Sept, between 7:03 and 7:17, in this edit I returned the in-text attribution required by WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV and posted a number of comments on the talk page which Dave seemed to not like. And only a few hours later, at 12:18 Dave posted the quote from Browne’s p.60 vortex of false and contradictory claims. So, now the previously slain had returned, and both the timing and the history make this look like cause and effect. Another case of the zombie-like return of a previously “slain” POV is on Darwin’s view of racial hierarchy, which I’ll discuss next.
Please engage with the current discussion”: I would love to address your concerns, John, but I have absolutely no idea why you think that it is “incompatible with Wikipedia” for editors to ask for intellectual honesty, for separating fact from fiction, and to broaden talk page discussions about content beyond just two editors. I thought broad community involvement was a good thing, so until you can explain to me exactly why it isn’t, I’ll continue to encourage more input from multiple editors on the talk page discussions about article content, especially given the number of hit & run reverters who then refuse to engage in any discussion about their reversion. Specifically, you reverted my edit, removing attribution that would be required if there are sources pushing biased POVs, so you now have a moral obligation to discuss the clear evidence of POV-pushing.
…posting a wall of text”: My post might be longer than you might like, John, but when you come here on a hit & run smear campaign of unspecified insinuations with the express intent of getting me blocked, I think I have the right and responsibility of reply. You have a massive double standard in going after me for things that Dave does in much greater abundance where you tacitly endorse the very thing you attack me for. There are many times I would present evidence that article claims (invariably posted by Dave) contradicted Darwin’s own writings where Dave would accuse me of original research and you would support him by telling me that even if it wasn’t true, I would need secondary sources to remove the false claim, but when Dave posted claims citing nothing more than Darwin’s writings, then you didn’t have any problems with using primary sources.
rv: per talk the original is supported by consensus; the links [[Race (biology)|races]] and [[Variety (botany)|varieties]] are helpful” ( edit summary for your reversion): I’m not sure what consensus you are referring to here, because we actually haven’t discussed linking those terms in our talk page discussions. Perhaps you are referring to Dave and I reaching a consensus on the point that Darwin used the terms races and varieties in a similar manner. [8] [9] On the point about the links, it’s not such a big deal to me; one thing is that in Darwin’s day, the term varieties did not have the focus on botany as it does today, so that’s a difference to consider, but if this is the sticking point for you, then by all means, we’ll keep the links, add the required attribution, and we can call it a consensus if you want. Cheers -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 22:28, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
1. @Yopienso, Thanks for your comments below. As you said, Darwin put the “Preservation of Favoured Races” in his subtitle, so it makes sense to say a few words about this in the article. Your suggestion of trimming that quote was good and I’m glad it worked out. I actually think that the whole Publication section is too long. It was substantially expanded in January (I think excessively) and could use some re-writing and further trimming, but I’m a little bit autistic and sometimes have a laser like focus on one thing to the exclusion of others. I want to respond directly to the comments above, so I’ll insert my comments here with a subheading to separate this from the conversation below.
2. @Dave, RE: “not contested except by one editor's opinion of primary sources
”: No, I have the utmost respect for what Darwin wrote; it is the secondary sources you are pushing that are the problem here. Your defence here doesn’t hold water, just like your earlier defence, where you
claimed that our dispute was over “
WP:DUE weight”, when in fact you had earlier
acknowledged that we didn’t disagree on the weight to give each source and viewpoint, which are the same between the two different versions.
3. RE: “Multiple sources have been discussed in talk covering the same point
” and “there is [no doubt or disagreement] in reliable secondary sources
”: If your so-called reliable sources were accurate and all making the same point, then we could use Wikipedia voice, but they definitely don’t. They are saying all kinds of different things, pushing biased POVs, with many claiming straight-up falsehoods, hence the need for attribution. In response to me challenging your claim that Darwin hadn’t referred to human races in OTOOS, you dug up and posted citations to Geoffrey Hodgson and Mark Isaak, which, amazingly enough, actually did “verify” your false post. These citations have been for being
fake news. You also posted Desmond & Moore’s claim that Darwin only thought about race in relation to slavery and, but for his opposition to slavery, he wouldn’t even have discovered evolution by natural selection, a claim to bizarre even for the Twilight Zone. You proposed citing Richard Dawkins’ claim that Darwin based his racial classifications on common characteristics (along with pushing his anti-group-selection POV), even though Darwin explicitly discussed “a genealogical arrangement of the races of man” on
p.422 of OTOOS. Thus we can see a broad range of fictitious claims, a far cry from the unified support of multiple secondary sources required for using Wikipedia voice.
4. RE: “ WP:ASSERT”: Yes, the capitol of France is Paris. This is a known objective fact that gets reported in Wikipedia voice. In contrast, Darwin’s inner feelings about what some particular term meant in some broad generic setting is inherently unknowable to 100% certainty, therefore “a matter subject to serious dispute”, as evidenced by your sources shooting in all different directions on the matter, and consequently requires in-text attribution. In contrast again, we can (and do) WP:SUBSTANTIATE specific uses of the term in the book itself. I have found a sentence very similar to, although longer than, the subtitle, which I’ll include (I presume this is where the idea for the subtitle came from).
5. RE: “Other point[s] repeated in your comment have already been covered, and appropriate modifications previously incorporated
”: In general, Dave, yes, we have removed numerous false claims so that is a huge improvement and something I am thankful for. But as I mentioned in para.6 (18 October), when I
removed your left-wing propaganda that race is a social construct, you reacted five hours later by
adding a quote from Janet Browne’s vortex of false and contradictory claims on p.60 of POP. The quote has three claims, two of which are
false with the second claim (the single accurate claim) contradicted by the third one. (Is it possible to be more
fake news than this?) So more work does need to be done, but one step at a time.
6. @Johnuniq, RE: “rv: all I see on talk are impenetrable walls of text moaning about other editors and the Twilight Zone
” (
edit summary of your latest reversion): I find it absolutely adorable (ie. very very depressing) that you pretend like you have no idea what the problem is. You are the one is moaning about everything I do (without actually saying what you think is wrong). You have reverted me many times, never commenting on the content dispute, but your edit summary is always moaning about something vague that I allegedly did or didn’t do. You have set out to obstruct me from the very beginning. In
response to my 13th edit (a post at Talk:CD), and in a
follow-up, you clearly informed me that you didn’t care if an article post was false, you didn’t care how clearly it contradicted Darwin’s own writings, you promised to oppose me if I didn’t find a secondary source meeting your approval to verify that two plus two doesn’t equal five.
7. You have certainly lived up to promise of obstruction. Prior to the present dispute on whether or not to attribute the sources on Darwin’s meaning of the term races, Dave was pushing the citation to Geoffrey Hodgson’s bullshit claim, “the Origin of Species does not refer explicitly to human races at all” as ‘context’ to Darwin’s meaning of the term. You supported him by reverting me, restoring the fake news citation, moaning and puking about everything I said and did, but avoiding any discussion about content [10] [11]. You then had the nerve to attack me on my talk page ( permalink), telling me again and again that I needed to focus on content. You told me that if I had any questions, I should ask, but when I did exactly that, you flatly refused to answer, saying again and again that you were not “motivated” to converse with me ( eg. “I am not motivated to debate article content”) and rudely asking me: “you would like me to spend time engaging in a discussion on a user talk page about article content?” (yes that is why I asked the question!) and going so far as to say: “I will not engage in further discussion here as evidence shows that is unproductive.” Yeah, no shit, if you refuse to answer even the most basic question on your own editing, the conversation is guaranteed to be “unproductive” which is, of course, exactly what you wanted, because you knew the sources you restored were total fake news, and having a productive discussion would mean acknowledging this. Your conduct here is perfectly described by WP:NINJA.
8. You have also reverted me, restoring the false claim that Darwin only referred to human origins one single time in OTOOS, even though Darwin actually referred to human origins more than once, because Janet Browne had written, “he was completely silent on the subject of human origins” [12] [13]. This is the equivalent of posting to the article 2+2 = 3 because a so-called source claims that 2+2 = 5. If you can explain how two wrongs make a right then I’m all ears, but until then, I’ll call it Twilight Zone Logic.
9. In your previous reversion, you claimed there was a consensus on Dave’s version ( edit summary: “per talk the original is supported by consensus”). Here is the diff of your follow-up reply, constituting the talk page at that time. Where is this agreement on any particular version that you speak of? It’s not there. There is only a two-party discussion between me and Dave, not agreeing on attribution. You have interjected to moan and groan about my editing, but say absolutely nothing about content. Or did InternetArchiveBot somehow form the mystery consensus on the attribution dispute??
10. All I’m asking for, John, is that you follow the important collaborative principles laid out in WP:BRD and engaging in content discussions on articles that you edit. Please specify which points you agree with, which ones you don’t, and why you don’t. Is this really too much to ask? And if you aren’t willing or capable of engaging in good-faith content discussions, then you shouldn’t be reverting edits, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be claiming a non-existent consensus in doing so. That would be awesome. Thanks. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 23:25, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
…dismissing scholarly sources because they don't say exactly what you want them to say. They provide variations…”: The issue at hand is not about adding or removing sources and citations, but rather about what is the proper attribution. As you mention here, there is tremendous variation in what the different sources are saying. This means that in-text attribution is required, because Wikipedia policy is very clear that to post something in Wikipedia’s voice, reliable sources need to be unified on the point.
Darwin avoided any discussion of human origins or human races”: While it’s true that your so-called scholarly sources have said that Darwin “was completely silent on the subject of human origins,” and that “the Origin of Species does not refer explicitly to human races at all,” the claim that Darwin never talked at all about human origins or human races in OTOOS is total fiction. Fake news will get properly dismissed.
you're still complaining about other editors”: This is a bit rich coming from an editor who started the section #Recent edits: time to publish, and meanings of 'race' to falsely accuse another editor of original research, following that up with various other complaints, but when the evidence showed that the arrow of guilt actually pointed in the opposite direction, quitting that conversation to start this one with the express purpose of complaining about that editor, and going to another’s talk page to WP:CANVASS support for your complaint. And indeed, that editor came here to complain about my demands for intellectual honesty and separating fact from fiction, saying I should be blocked for such a scandalous request, so my response is simply my right and duty of reply.
You'd do better to provide any reliable sources that differ, and discuss them on this talk page concisely, focussing on specific suggestions for article improvement”: You make this request sound reasonable, Dave, but your history is clear that when sources differ from the POV you want to push, you simply ignore them and respond with filibustering and stonewalling. One very prominent example of this is when you were defending your false claim that Darwin saw all races as fully equal, YoPienso did provide you with a ton of sources showing your post to be incorrect. But rather than concede something as basic as 2+2 ≠5, you responded with incredible filibustering, the likes of which I have never seen before. I’ve touched on this in other posts, but haven’t spelt out in detail the manner of your filibustering, and if you are claiming to respect sources that contradict the POV you want to push, then I need to expand on this point, but in a collapsed box.
Filibustering and stonewalling reliable sources that were provided
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the sources are consistent in agreeing the main point, that races [does not refer to] the modern tendency to use the word on its own to signify human races”: NONE of your sources say this, Dave, you’re just making it up (ie. WP:OR), just like you just made up the claim that Darwin didn’t view any races as inferior, given that Janet Browne said nothing of the sort.
but we also don't use inline attribution in a way that suggests significant disagreement without secondary sources for such disagreement. You're still not providing new sources”: There is no such requirement, you’re just filibustering here. The simple fact is to build an encyclopedia, editors are allowed to have, and need to have, editorial discretion. There isn’t going to exist a published source that says that another source needs to be attributed in Wikipedia (of course that’s the point of filibustering), but even if I found a secondary source that said as much, we all know your history with secondary sources contradicting your POV-pushing. You ignore them and filibuster, as I explained in para.6 above. When you were provided sources (including Desmond & Moore) that contradicted your claim that Darwin saw all races as fully equal you responded with filibustering the likes I have never seen, rambling on and on and on about cabbage races and the nature/nurture distinction and how Jemmy’s mind was very different from an educated one and how this all flew in Lyell’s face because Lyell thought humans were both diverse and not diverse. This was the most egregious display of WP:OR and WP:SYN one could imagine (more commentary and links are provided in the collapsed box above). And if that wasn’t enough, some weeks after you had finally backed down, you reposted your bullshit POV, claiming that Darwin thought “black people were fully equal”, citing Desmond and Moore, the very source you were provided with that said “He thought blacks inferior”. So when you are given a source you disagree with, you take it and post the exact opposite, proof that your current request for secondary sources is not in good faith, but rather an effort to filibuster, because you know very well that the sources you have provided on the meaning of race are all over the map. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 16:12, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
[continuation of discussion from #Section break: inline attribution as of 10:37, 19 October 2017 (UTC), now subdivided with new subsection heading "Discussion to trim quote" ... dave souza, talk 06:21, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
Thsnks YoPienso, good to have an outside view on this. Now we've got a section on "Human evolution", Darwin's offered assurance "That I do not discuss origin of man" is more relevant there, so I've added that line to the section. More tentatively, I've tried to focus "Murray as publisher; choice of title" on-topic by moving the full quote into the inline citation, leaving only the avoidance of unorthodoxy, and have reworked the last paragraph along the lines of your suggestion. Think that works better? . . dave souza, talk 04:28, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
The lead is correct, OtOOS introduced the theory and evidence to the world at large, but as noted in the relevant section outlines of the concept by CD and ARW were published jointly in the preceding year. Maybe worth clarifying. . . dave souza, talk 04:19, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
1. Hi. Dave, I truly don’t understand your obsession with Janet Browne and her vortex of bullshit on p.60 of Power of Place. In this edit, you added a fake news quote from this vortex, which consisted of three individual claims, two which are completely false. Furthermore, your characterization of what Browne said is also false. You claimed that in the quote you provided, she said there was a single reference to human origins in OTOOS, when she explicitly said exactly the opposite: “In this book, he was completely silent on the subject of human origins”. I’ll parse the quote out in para.7, but first some history on Wikipedia’s treatment of human origins in OTOOS.
2. When I started editing here nearly two years ago, you had long ago posted that Darwin alluded to human origins one and only one time in OTOOS: “His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history".” (I’ll refer to this statement as “Claim XYZ”). I used to naively accept Claim XYZ as gospel fact, if Wikipedia said that Darwin had only alluded to human evolution one time, who was I to question it? Wikipedia has strict rules requiring posts be verified by reliable sources, right? But my BS detectors went off when I was reading TDOM, because in the introduction Darwin refers back to OTOOS and mentions two instances where he discussed human origins: Sentence Light-will-be-thrown on p.488 and Comment sexual-selection-applies-to-humans on p.199.
3. So, Darwin’s own writing contradicted Claim XYZ, common sense contradicted Claim XYZ, it should have been easy to change “His only allusion to human evolution was…” to “He alluded to human evolution with…”. But alas, this was not to be. You trotted out Janet Browne’s vortex of bullshit to justify your post. Not only did Browne say Darwin was “completely silent on the subject of human origins” in the quote you provided, in the preceding sentences, she went on in grand theatrical style about how Darwin had long ago drained his manuscripts of any reference to human origins, and that he hadn’t reintroduced them, and that he had avoided talking about the origins of human beings “with profound deliberation”. This just didn’t make any sense to me, because Darwin had alluded to human origins on at least two occasions, so why the over-the-top claims that he hadn’t? Whenever I brought this up on the talk page, you insisted that I was just too stupid to comprehend Browne’s brilliance. You said it should be parsed out as “he was silent... except” even though that would have led to the opposite conclusion you were claiming. It was so confusing for me, I didn’t understand what was happening, until…
4. I still remember that feeling, riding in my cousin’s car, reading OTOOS, when I came to the passage on page 479 where Darwin wrote that bone patterns in our hands being homologous to other mammals “at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.” This set the gears whirling in my mind. OTOOS says that our morphology is explained by Darwin’s theory of descent with modification??! How can you have a more explicit reference to human evolution than that?!!! My blood ran cold as the light finally dawned on me. Browne knew. She knew very well there plenty of references to human evolution in OTOOS. She had deliberately set out to fuck over the truth. She wanted to provide cover for the left-wing thought police to “aggressively push their biased perspective on the rest of the world” and she knew the best place to hide a lie was in plain sight, mixed in with other lies, in one grand vortex of bullshit. And she knew she had to put in enough accurate and ambiguous statements for the thought police to defend the fake news passage. I looked in the mirror and knew I had two choices: throw in the towel or confront this poison head on.
5. Having realized that Browne knew very well of plenty of references to human evolution in OTOOS, I called out many of her false and self-contradictory fake news claims in her pp.60-61 vortex of bullshit, not just about references to human origins in OTOOS, but also about references to the Creator and origins of life as well. Despite this, you kept insisting that everything Browne wrote was perfectly clear and reliable, although other editors disagreed, and finally a consensus was reached to remove her citation because it was found to be too ambiguous. You then put in the place of the removed Browne citation, you replaced it with a citation to James Costa, which unbeknownst to you described Darwin’s p.199 comment on sexual selection as a “reference to human origins”. This is exactly what I had been saying, the very point you had been giving me hell for, and now the source you added contradicted everything you had been claiming about OTOOS only having one allusion to human origins. But even after I pointed this out to you, you still kept banging on that both Browne and Costa were in perfect accordance. It felt like being in the Twilight Zone where up is down and black is white. I guess that’s why they call it fake news.
6. Joseph Carroll (scholar) is a modern academic scholar on Darwin and writes that commentators who say that Sentence Light-will-be-thrown is the only reference to human evolution “overlook” other such references. But, what do you do in response to me posting this point to the article? As mentioned in para.1, the first thing you did was to remove it and replace it with a quote from Browne’s vortex of bullshit as a footnote reference – currently #185 – and to falsely claim that the quote you added said there was a single reference to human origins in OTOOS. And with that edit, along with this one, you expanded two paragraphs into two pages, with much background material in a section meant to describe the book itself, as there is another section for background material to go.
7. So, let’s parse out the quote you added, which contains three separate claims. I’ve reproduced the relevant parts here with the individual claims numbered for reference:
Let’s rephrase Browne’s three claims and put them in a list. The quote you added says that in OTOOS, there are:
Claims 2 and 3 are in direct contradiction with each other: either there is only one reference to human beings or there is more than one. Claim 2 is the correct one here of course: there is obviously more than one reference to human beings in OTOOS. Claim 3 is simply false: Darwin certainly “allowed himself” more than the 12 listed words to “refer to human beings”. Claim 1 is also false: the book was obviously not “completely silent on the subject of human origins”. So Browne is hitting one for three, a 33% accuracy rate, hardly good enough to qualify as a reliable source for this great encyclopedia we are trying to build. To add insult to injury, your claim that the quote says that there is one and only one reference to human origins in OTOOS is also false (last time I checked, zero references ≠ one reference, and human beings ≠ human origins). If we include this inaccurate claim in the calculation here, we get a paltry accuracy rate of 25%. Definitely not in compliance with WP:RS.
8. Carroll would hardly have been referring to fake news in saying that scholars overlook references to human evolution, but rather to authors such as Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, who in The Cambridge Guide to the “Origin of Species” (2009), page xvii, write in the introduction: “The Origin in not directly about humans. The only explicit reference is an almost throwaway passage at the end of the book. ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’” Given the obvious reality that there are other references to humans in OTOOS, Carroll is absolutely correct to say that Ruse and Richards have overlooked them.
9. It might be cute when kids believe that the gifts they find under the tree were delivered by a fat guy riding a flying sleigh and sliding down the chimney, and it might be cute when adults pretend to believe in Santa, but it is truly sad if adults don’t grasp the difference between fact and fantasy. Similarly, we are adults here, and it is time for us to act like grown-ups. It is time for us to recognize that just like Santa Claus isn’t real, neither are many of the statements made on pp.60-61 of Power of Place. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 03:34, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
ground we've discussed already”: Let’s look a bit closer at the ground we’ve covered so far. You kept pushing the line that Darwin had alluded to human evolution one and only one time (on p.488) [25] [26] when I pointed out that Darwin himself had said that he had alluded to human origins on p.199. You insisted that this couldn’t be because Janet Browne had, in your words, said there was only one allusion to human origins. Yet, you had also claimed (correctly this time) that Browne had said that Darwin had deliberately avoided all discussion of human origins (either way though, Browne clearly said that there was not more than one allusion to human origins in OTOOS).
Nope, still looks like a mix of original research and speculation about what sources might have said if they'd been published later. It won't do, and you're verging on slow edit warring. As above, please start afresh with a new section, discuss the present text rather than your past battles, and be concise and to the point. . . dave souza, talk 19:34, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
Administrator note: I have no opinion on the merits of the arguments above; my role as an administrator is to prevent disruption to the Wikipedia project. To that end, I have two tools at my disposal: article protection, which in this case would lock the article for all editors including those uninvolved with the dispute, or identifying and blocking the source of the disruption. I chose the latter and blocked Stan Giesbrecht, as having the least impact on the project for the most benefit. I regret doing this because he has been engaging on the talk page, but the WP:BURDEN rests on the person who wants to add content, and that burden is not satisfied by revert-warring (or, for that matter, writing walls of text that other editors are disinclined to read). ~ Anachronist ( talk) 05:46, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
See here re this page of Origin of Species. Thx, Humanengr ( talk) 17:57, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 |
I'm thinking about rerunning this one at WP:TFA on its anniversary on November 24. Thoughts? Has the article held up well over the years? - Dank ( push to talk) 19:36, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
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In a long series of edits, Stan introduced a superfluous paragraph of original research, repeating context of the "time to publish" which is already covered above with secondary sources, and returned to editing the meaning of "races", pushing a pov by attributing widely held scholarly opinion to individuals, and deleting some sources. I've gone back to where he started, and I've copyedited it, adding additional sources and modifying the wording accordingly. I've also put back in a quote from Sober which Stan added, with more context from Sober's article to avoid a misleading impression of Sober's focus. . . dave souza, talk 12:17, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
OTOOS,
pp.422-424
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Thus, on the view which I hold, the natural system is genealogical in its arrangement, like a pedigree; … It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. … The origin of the existence of groups subordinate to groups, is the same with varieties as with species, namely, closeness of descent with various degrees of modification. Nearly the same rules are followed in classifying varieties, as with species. Authors have insisted on the necessity of classing varieties on a natural instead of an artificial system; we are cautioned, for instance, not to class two varieties of the pine-apple together, merely because their fruit, though the most important part, happens to be nearly identical; … In classing varieties, I apprehend if we had a real pedigree, a genealogical classification would be universally preferred; … If it could be proved that the Hottentot had descended from the Negro, I think he would be classed under the Negro group, however much he might differ in colour and other important characters from negroes.
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@ Charlesdrakew: Hi Charles, you reverted my latest edit. Your edit summary does not provide any justification for such a reversion, nor is it even true. Will you explain, please, on what points you think we agree and on which points we disagree? Editors are expected to work together to reach a consensus. Thanks. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 14:00, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
If you've other issues, please set them out individually with reference to reliable published mainstream sources, and don't just revert wording”: This is exactly what I did in this edit, where I set out the point made by Joseph Carroll (scholar) that when commentators say that Darwin’s Sentence Light-will-be-thrown is his only reference to human evolution, they “overlook” other such references in OTOOS. I did everything you asked, and what is your response? In this , you removed Carroll’s main point that saying there is only one reference overlooks other references: you reverted his wording, exactly what you told me not to do. As bad as unilaterally removing relevant and properly sourced material is, that is nothing compared with what you replaced it with: a fake news quote from Janet Browne’s vortex of bullshit on p.60 of Power of Place. The quote you added has three individual claims, two of which are totally false. You also mischaracterized what Browne said in the quote – she most certainly never said there was a single reference to human origins – which I’ll explain in a new section: #Janet Browne on human origins in OTOOS. Furthermore, in the above-mentioned edit and this one, you turned two moderate-length paragraphs into two rambling pages of comments and quotes, adding background details in a section meant to describe the book itself (there is a separate background section). The burning irony here is that your 17:36 18 Sept post informed me that keeping background material “concise” was so imperative that you told me to edit elsewhere, and now you added a lot of background material yourself.
I've removed "the social construct of" which you objected to, in my view it's arguable…”: As you know, I objected to the claim because it was not sourced. As you know, WP:Verifiability is core content policy, yet you brazenly say that your post is nevertheless “arguable”. I want to thank you for so explicitly spelling out your contempt for Wikipedia policy. History has shown that you consider everything to be “arguable”, whether it is true or not, whether it is verified or not, no problem at all, let’s get the spin machine going with a bunch of “arguments”, ie. WP:SYNTHESIS, to defend the post. That’s not how to build an encyclopedia grounded in reality. Claims need to be verified by reliable sources, as you well know.
Please … act collaboratively instead of trying to push your pov in contradiction of published academic sources”: You are once again accusing me of what you have done many times, including when you pushed your bullshit POV that “Darwin did not share the then common view that other races are inferior”. As I mentioned in para.2 of my 05:56 1 Sept post below ( # Re: “superfluous paragraph…) Yopienso provided a ton of sources that contradicted your claim, but because you see everything as “arguable” you kept edit warring to push this POV until you finally decided to stick with what the source actually said (the POV hadn’t been verified). I thought we were in the clear on this one, but you had a history of, when squeezed in one area, of doubling down in another, and when I called out Janet Browne’s vortex of bullshit as fake news, you were not happy, and indeed, a couple of days later, you upped the ante, posting (in this series of edits): “Darwin [believed] that black people were fully equal”. Your post was based entirely on your own synthesis, indeed you knew very well that Desmond and Moore (the authors you cited) had been very explicit on their views about Darwin, writing but a few chapters earlier: “He thought blacks inferior”. After your fellow editors pointed out that your claims weren’t true you finally conceded that the gig was up this time, but in the meantime, you were not only “trying to push your pov in contradiction of published academic sources”, as you accused me of, but on top of that, your lying bullshit POV contradicted the very source you cited. So, yeah, any time you decide to stop your ridiculous smear campaign against my editing just because I kick a few of your sacred cows (ie. call out fake news), that would be a very good thing indeed.
In a
series of talk page edits starting at
03:07, 3 October 2017, Stan returned with the sort of behaviour discussed at
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive943#Origin of Species dispute, and likely to get the same response. Doubtful if there are any valid points hidden in the morass. He's returned to demanding inline attribution of points only he disputes, so I've
undone his edit to the article
One of the talk page edits included adding a section heading
This conversation desperately needs more input from intellectually honest editors – that's clearly unacceptable as a heading, so I've trimmed it.
He concludes with
Page is getting long. Setting up automatic archive, similar to Talk:Charles Darwin. Hope it works. Don't know if it will, so would appreciate if someone can check that out. . .
dave souza,
talk 12:47, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Doubtful if there are any valid points hidden…”: When editors are quick to accuse others of original research, tendentious editing, and “trying to push [their] pov in contradiction of published academic sources,” and when they are even quicker to cut & run from that conversation when the evidence is shown to point the other way, then the point is very far from “hidden” indeed: people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 22:36, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.”: I certainly don’t disagree with your comment that this Thomas Huxley quote should be a motto here. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the Browne citation was removed by consensus last summer, but has made a zombie-like return. History has shown that Dave, when squeezed in one area, has a tendency of doubling down on another topic. On 18th Sept, between 7:03 and 7:17, in this edit I returned the in-text attribution required by WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV and posted a number of comments on the talk page which Dave seemed to not like. And only a few hours later, at 12:18 Dave posted the quote from Browne’s p.60 vortex of false and contradictory claims. So, now the previously slain had returned, and both the timing and the history make this look like cause and effect. Another case of the zombie-like return of a previously “slain” POV is on Darwin’s view of racial hierarchy, which I’ll discuss next.
Please engage with the current discussion”: I would love to address your concerns, John, but I have absolutely no idea why you think that it is “incompatible with Wikipedia” for editors to ask for intellectual honesty, for separating fact from fiction, and to broaden talk page discussions about content beyond just two editors. I thought broad community involvement was a good thing, so until you can explain to me exactly why it isn’t, I’ll continue to encourage more input from multiple editors on the talk page discussions about article content, especially given the number of hit & run reverters who then refuse to engage in any discussion about their reversion. Specifically, you reverted my edit, removing attribution that would be required if there are sources pushing biased POVs, so you now have a moral obligation to discuss the clear evidence of POV-pushing.
…posting a wall of text”: My post might be longer than you might like, John, but when you come here on a hit & run smear campaign of unspecified insinuations with the express intent of getting me blocked, I think I have the right and responsibility of reply. You have a massive double standard in going after me for things that Dave does in much greater abundance where you tacitly endorse the very thing you attack me for. There are many times I would present evidence that article claims (invariably posted by Dave) contradicted Darwin’s own writings where Dave would accuse me of original research and you would support him by telling me that even if it wasn’t true, I would need secondary sources to remove the false claim, but when Dave posted claims citing nothing more than Darwin’s writings, then you didn’t have any problems with using primary sources.
rv: per talk the original is supported by consensus; the links [[Race (biology)|races]] and [[Variety (botany)|varieties]] are helpful” ( edit summary for your reversion): I’m not sure what consensus you are referring to here, because we actually haven’t discussed linking those terms in our talk page discussions. Perhaps you are referring to Dave and I reaching a consensus on the point that Darwin used the terms races and varieties in a similar manner. [8] [9] On the point about the links, it’s not such a big deal to me; one thing is that in Darwin’s day, the term varieties did not have the focus on botany as it does today, so that’s a difference to consider, but if this is the sticking point for you, then by all means, we’ll keep the links, add the required attribution, and we can call it a consensus if you want. Cheers -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 22:28, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
1. @Yopienso, Thanks for your comments below. As you said, Darwin put the “Preservation of Favoured Races” in his subtitle, so it makes sense to say a few words about this in the article. Your suggestion of trimming that quote was good and I’m glad it worked out. I actually think that the whole Publication section is too long. It was substantially expanded in January (I think excessively) and could use some re-writing and further trimming, but I’m a little bit autistic and sometimes have a laser like focus on one thing to the exclusion of others. I want to respond directly to the comments above, so I’ll insert my comments here with a subheading to separate this from the conversation below.
2. @Dave, RE: “not contested except by one editor's opinion of primary sources
”: No, I have the utmost respect for what Darwin wrote; it is the secondary sources you are pushing that are the problem here. Your defence here doesn’t hold water, just like your earlier defence, where you
claimed that our dispute was over “
WP:DUE weight”, when in fact you had earlier
acknowledged that we didn’t disagree on the weight to give each source and viewpoint, which are the same between the two different versions.
3. RE: “Multiple sources have been discussed in talk covering the same point
” and “there is [no doubt or disagreement] in reliable secondary sources
”: If your so-called reliable sources were accurate and all making the same point, then we could use Wikipedia voice, but they definitely don’t. They are saying all kinds of different things, pushing biased POVs, with many claiming straight-up falsehoods, hence the need for attribution. In response to me challenging your claim that Darwin hadn’t referred to human races in OTOOS, you dug up and posted citations to Geoffrey Hodgson and Mark Isaak, which, amazingly enough, actually did “verify” your false post. These citations have been for being
fake news. You also posted Desmond & Moore’s claim that Darwin only thought about race in relation to slavery and, but for his opposition to slavery, he wouldn’t even have discovered evolution by natural selection, a claim to bizarre even for the Twilight Zone. You proposed citing Richard Dawkins’ claim that Darwin based his racial classifications on common characteristics (along with pushing his anti-group-selection POV), even though Darwin explicitly discussed “a genealogical arrangement of the races of man” on
p.422 of OTOOS. Thus we can see a broad range of fictitious claims, a far cry from the unified support of multiple secondary sources required for using Wikipedia voice.
4. RE: “ WP:ASSERT”: Yes, the capitol of France is Paris. This is a known objective fact that gets reported in Wikipedia voice. In contrast, Darwin’s inner feelings about what some particular term meant in some broad generic setting is inherently unknowable to 100% certainty, therefore “a matter subject to serious dispute”, as evidenced by your sources shooting in all different directions on the matter, and consequently requires in-text attribution. In contrast again, we can (and do) WP:SUBSTANTIATE specific uses of the term in the book itself. I have found a sentence very similar to, although longer than, the subtitle, which I’ll include (I presume this is where the idea for the subtitle came from).
5. RE: “Other point[s] repeated in your comment have already been covered, and appropriate modifications previously incorporated
”: In general, Dave, yes, we have removed numerous false claims so that is a huge improvement and something I am thankful for. But as I mentioned in para.6 (18 October), when I
removed your left-wing propaganda that race is a social construct, you reacted five hours later by
adding a quote from Janet Browne’s vortex of false and contradictory claims on p.60 of POP. The quote has three claims, two of which are
false with the second claim (the single accurate claim) contradicted by the third one. (Is it possible to be more
fake news than this?) So more work does need to be done, but one step at a time.
6. @Johnuniq, RE: “rv: all I see on talk are impenetrable walls of text moaning about other editors and the Twilight Zone
” (
edit summary of your latest reversion): I find it absolutely adorable (ie. very very depressing) that you pretend like you have no idea what the problem is. You are the one is moaning about everything I do (without actually saying what you think is wrong). You have reverted me many times, never commenting on the content dispute, but your edit summary is always moaning about something vague that I allegedly did or didn’t do. You have set out to obstruct me from the very beginning. In
response to my 13th edit (a post at Talk:CD), and in a
follow-up, you clearly informed me that you didn’t care if an article post was false, you didn’t care how clearly it contradicted Darwin’s own writings, you promised to oppose me if I didn’t find a secondary source meeting your approval to verify that two plus two doesn’t equal five.
7. You have certainly lived up to promise of obstruction. Prior to the present dispute on whether or not to attribute the sources on Darwin’s meaning of the term races, Dave was pushing the citation to Geoffrey Hodgson’s bullshit claim, “the Origin of Species does not refer explicitly to human races at all” as ‘context’ to Darwin’s meaning of the term. You supported him by reverting me, restoring the fake news citation, moaning and puking about everything I said and did, but avoiding any discussion about content [10] [11]. You then had the nerve to attack me on my talk page ( permalink), telling me again and again that I needed to focus on content. You told me that if I had any questions, I should ask, but when I did exactly that, you flatly refused to answer, saying again and again that you were not “motivated” to converse with me ( eg. “I am not motivated to debate article content”) and rudely asking me: “you would like me to spend time engaging in a discussion on a user talk page about article content?” (yes that is why I asked the question!) and going so far as to say: “I will not engage in further discussion here as evidence shows that is unproductive.” Yeah, no shit, if you refuse to answer even the most basic question on your own editing, the conversation is guaranteed to be “unproductive” which is, of course, exactly what you wanted, because you knew the sources you restored were total fake news, and having a productive discussion would mean acknowledging this. Your conduct here is perfectly described by WP:NINJA.
8. You have also reverted me, restoring the false claim that Darwin only referred to human origins one single time in OTOOS, even though Darwin actually referred to human origins more than once, because Janet Browne had written, “he was completely silent on the subject of human origins” [12] [13]. This is the equivalent of posting to the article 2+2 = 3 because a so-called source claims that 2+2 = 5. If you can explain how two wrongs make a right then I’m all ears, but until then, I’ll call it Twilight Zone Logic.
9. In your previous reversion, you claimed there was a consensus on Dave’s version ( edit summary: “per talk the original is supported by consensus”). Here is the diff of your follow-up reply, constituting the talk page at that time. Where is this agreement on any particular version that you speak of? It’s not there. There is only a two-party discussion between me and Dave, not agreeing on attribution. You have interjected to moan and groan about my editing, but say absolutely nothing about content. Or did InternetArchiveBot somehow form the mystery consensus on the attribution dispute??
10. All I’m asking for, John, is that you follow the important collaborative principles laid out in WP:BRD and engaging in content discussions on articles that you edit. Please specify which points you agree with, which ones you don’t, and why you don’t. Is this really too much to ask? And if you aren’t willing or capable of engaging in good-faith content discussions, then you shouldn’t be reverting edits, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be claiming a non-existent consensus in doing so. That would be awesome. Thanks. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 23:25, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
…dismissing scholarly sources because they don't say exactly what you want them to say. They provide variations…”: The issue at hand is not about adding or removing sources and citations, but rather about what is the proper attribution. As you mention here, there is tremendous variation in what the different sources are saying. This means that in-text attribution is required, because Wikipedia policy is very clear that to post something in Wikipedia’s voice, reliable sources need to be unified on the point.
Darwin avoided any discussion of human origins or human races”: While it’s true that your so-called scholarly sources have said that Darwin “was completely silent on the subject of human origins,” and that “the Origin of Species does not refer explicitly to human races at all,” the claim that Darwin never talked at all about human origins or human races in OTOOS is total fiction. Fake news will get properly dismissed.
you're still complaining about other editors”: This is a bit rich coming from an editor who started the section #Recent edits: time to publish, and meanings of 'race' to falsely accuse another editor of original research, following that up with various other complaints, but when the evidence showed that the arrow of guilt actually pointed in the opposite direction, quitting that conversation to start this one with the express purpose of complaining about that editor, and going to another’s talk page to WP:CANVASS support for your complaint. And indeed, that editor came here to complain about my demands for intellectual honesty and separating fact from fiction, saying I should be blocked for such a scandalous request, so my response is simply my right and duty of reply.
You'd do better to provide any reliable sources that differ, and discuss them on this talk page concisely, focussing on specific suggestions for article improvement”: You make this request sound reasonable, Dave, but your history is clear that when sources differ from the POV you want to push, you simply ignore them and respond with filibustering and stonewalling. One very prominent example of this is when you were defending your false claim that Darwin saw all races as fully equal, YoPienso did provide you with a ton of sources showing your post to be incorrect. But rather than concede something as basic as 2+2 ≠5, you responded with incredible filibustering, the likes of which I have never seen before. I’ve touched on this in other posts, but haven’t spelt out in detail the manner of your filibustering, and if you are claiming to respect sources that contradict the POV you want to push, then I need to expand on this point, but in a collapsed box.
Filibustering and stonewalling reliable sources that were provided
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the sources are consistent in agreeing the main point, that races [does not refer to] the modern tendency to use the word on its own to signify human races”: NONE of your sources say this, Dave, you’re just making it up (ie. WP:OR), just like you just made up the claim that Darwin didn’t view any races as inferior, given that Janet Browne said nothing of the sort.
but we also don't use inline attribution in a way that suggests significant disagreement without secondary sources for such disagreement. You're still not providing new sources”: There is no such requirement, you’re just filibustering here. The simple fact is to build an encyclopedia, editors are allowed to have, and need to have, editorial discretion. There isn’t going to exist a published source that says that another source needs to be attributed in Wikipedia (of course that’s the point of filibustering), but even if I found a secondary source that said as much, we all know your history with secondary sources contradicting your POV-pushing. You ignore them and filibuster, as I explained in para.6 above. When you were provided sources (including Desmond & Moore) that contradicted your claim that Darwin saw all races as fully equal you responded with filibustering the likes I have never seen, rambling on and on and on about cabbage races and the nature/nurture distinction and how Jemmy’s mind was very different from an educated one and how this all flew in Lyell’s face because Lyell thought humans were both diverse and not diverse. This was the most egregious display of WP:OR and WP:SYN one could imagine (more commentary and links are provided in the collapsed box above). And if that wasn’t enough, some weeks after you had finally backed down, you reposted your bullshit POV, claiming that Darwin thought “black people were fully equal”, citing Desmond and Moore, the very source you were provided with that said “He thought blacks inferior”. So when you are given a source you disagree with, you take it and post the exact opposite, proof that your current request for secondary sources is not in good faith, but rather an effort to filibuster, because you know very well that the sources you have provided on the meaning of race are all over the map. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 16:12, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
[continuation of discussion from #Section break: inline attribution as of 10:37, 19 October 2017 (UTC), now subdivided with new subsection heading "Discussion to trim quote" ... dave souza, talk 06:21, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
Thsnks YoPienso, good to have an outside view on this. Now we've got a section on "Human evolution", Darwin's offered assurance "That I do not discuss origin of man" is more relevant there, so I've added that line to the section. More tentatively, I've tried to focus "Murray as publisher; choice of title" on-topic by moving the full quote into the inline citation, leaving only the avoidance of unorthodoxy, and have reworked the last paragraph along the lines of your suggestion. Think that works better? . . dave souza, talk 04:28, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
The lead is correct, OtOOS introduced the theory and evidence to the world at large, but as noted in the relevant section outlines of the concept by CD and ARW were published jointly in the preceding year. Maybe worth clarifying. . . dave souza, talk 04:19, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
1. Hi. Dave, I truly don’t understand your obsession with Janet Browne and her vortex of bullshit on p.60 of Power of Place. In this edit, you added a fake news quote from this vortex, which consisted of three individual claims, two which are completely false. Furthermore, your characterization of what Browne said is also false. You claimed that in the quote you provided, she said there was a single reference to human origins in OTOOS, when she explicitly said exactly the opposite: “In this book, he was completely silent on the subject of human origins”. I’ll parse the quote out in para.7, but first some history on Wikipedia’s treatment of human origins in OTOOS.
2. When I started editing here nearly two years ago, you had long ago posted that Darwin alluded to human origins one and only one time in OTOOS: “His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history".” (I’ll refer to this statement as “Claim XYZ”). I used to naively accept Claim XYZ as gospel fact, if Wikipedia said that Darwin had only alluded to human evolution one time, who was I to question it? Wikipedia has strict rules requiring posts be verified by reliable sources, right? But my BS detectors went off when I was reading TDOM, because in the introduction Darwin refers back to OTOOS and mentions two instances where he discussed human origins: Sentence Light-will-be-thrown on p.488 and Comment sexual-selection-applies-to-humans on p.199.
3. So, Darwin’s own writing contradicted Claim XYZ, common sense contradicted Claim XYZ, it should have been easy to change “His only allusion to human evolution was…” to “He alluded to human evolution with…”. But alas, this was not to be. You trotted out Janet Browne’s vortex of bullshit to justify your post. Not only did Browne say Darwin was “completely silent on the subject of human origins” in the quote you provided, in the preceding sentences, she went on in grand theatrical style about how Darwin had long ago drained his manuscripts of any reference to human origins, and that he hadn’t reintroduced them, and that he had avoided talking about the origins of human beings “with profound deliberation”. This just didn’t make any sense to me, because Darwin had alluded to human origins on at least two occasions, so why the over-the-top claims that he hadn’t? Whenever I brought this up on the talk page, you insisted that I was just too stupid to comprehend Browne’s brilliance. You said it should be parsed out as “he was silent... except” even though that would have led to the opposite conclusion you were claiming. It was so confusing for me, I didn’t understand what was happening, until…
4. I still remember that feeling, riding in my cousin’s car, reading OTOOS, when I came to the passage on page 479 where Darwin wrote that bone patterns in our hands being homologous to other mammals “at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.” This set the gears whirling in my mind. OTOOS says that our morphology is explained by Darwin’s theory of descent with modification??! How can you have a more explicit reference to human evolution than that?!!! My blood ran cold as the light finally dawned on me. Browne knew. She knew very well there plenty of references to human evolution in OTOOS. She had deliberately set out to fuck over the truth. She wanted to provide cover for the left-wing thought police to “aggressively push their biased perspective on the rest of the world” and she knew the best place to hide a lie was in plain sight, mixed in with other lies, in one grand vortex of bullshit. And she knew she had to put in enough accurate and ambiguous statements for the thought police to defend the fake news passage. I looked in the mirror and knew I had two choices: throw in the towel or confront this poison head on.
5. Having realized that Browne knew very well of plenty of references to human evolution in OTOOS, I called out many of her false and self-contradictory fake news claims in her pp.60-61 vortex of bullshit, not just about references to human origins in OTOOS, but also about references to the Creator and origins of life as well. Despite this, you kept insisting that everything Browne wrote was perfectly clear and reliable, although other editors disagreed, and finally a consensus was reached to remove her citation because it was found to be too ambiguous. You then put in the place of the removed Browne citation, you replaced it with a citation to James Costa, which unbeknownst to you described Darwin’s p.199 comment on sexual selection as a “reference to human origins”. This is exactly what I had been saying, the very point you had been giving me hell for, and now the source you added contradicted everything you had been claiming about OTOOS only having one allusion to human origins. But even after I pointed this out to you, you still kept banging on that both Browne and Costa were in perfect accordance. It felt like being in the Twilight Zone where up is down and black is white. I guess that’s why they call it fake news.
6. Joseph Carroll (scholar) is a modern academic scholar on Darwin and writes that commentators who say that Sentence Light-will-be-thrown is the only reference to human evolution “overlook” other such references. But, what do you do in response to me posting this point to the article? As mentioned in para.1, the first thing you did was to remove it and replace it with a quote from Browne’s vortex of bullshit as a footnote reference – currently #185 – and to falsely claim that the quote you added said there was a single reference to human origins in OTOOS. And with that edit, along with this one, you expanded two paragraphs into two pages, with much background material in a section meant to describe the book itself, as there is another section for background material to go.
7. So, let’s parse out the quote you added, which contains three separate claims. I’ve reproduced the relevant parts here with the individual claims numbered for reference:
Let’s rephrase Browne’s three claims and put them in a list. The quote you added says that in OTOOS, there are:
Claims 2 and 3 are in direct contradiction with each other: either there is only one reference to human beings or there is more than one. Claim 2 is the correct one here of course: there is obviously more than one reference to human beings in OTOOS. Claim 3 is simply false: Darwin certainly “allowed himself” more than the 12 listed words to “refer to human beings”. Claim 1 is also false: the book was obviously not “completely silent on the subject of human origins”. So Browne is hitting one for three, a 33% accuracy rate, hardly good enough to qualify as a reliable source for this great encyclopedia we are trying to build. To add insult to injury, your claim that the quote says that there is one and only one reference to human origins in OTOOS is also false (last time I checked, zero references ≠ one reference, and human beings ≠ human origins). If we include this inaccurate claim in the calculation here, we get a paltry accuracy rate of 25%. Definitely not in compliance with WP:RS.
8. Carroll would hardly have been referring to fake news in saying that scholars overlook references to human evolution, but rather to authors such as Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, who in The Cambridge Guide to the “Origin of Species” (2009), page xvii, write in the introduction: “The Origin in not directly about humans. The only explicit reference is an almost throwaway passage at the end of the book. ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’” Given the obvious reality that there are other references to humans in OTOOS, Carroll is absolutely correct to say that Ruse and Richards have overlooked them.
9. It might be cute when kids believe that the gifts they find under the tree were delivered by a fat guy riding a flying sleigh and sliding down the chimney, and it might be cute when adults pretend to believe in Santa, but it is truly sad if adults don’t grasp the difference between fact and fantasy. Similarly, we are adults here, and it is time for us to act like grown-ups. It is time for us to recognize that just like Santa Claus isn’t real, neither are many of the statements made on pp.60-61 of Power of Place. -- Stan Giesbrecht ( talk) 03:34, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
ground we've discussed already”: Let’s look a bit closer at the ground we’ve covered so far. You kept pushing the line that Darwin had alluded to human evolution one and only one time (on p.488) [25] [26] when I pointed out that Darwin himself had said that he had alluded to human origins on p.199. You insisted that this couldn’t be because Janet Browne had, in your words, said there was only one allusion to human origins. Yet, you had also claimed (correctly this time) that Browne had said that Darwin had deliberately avoided all discussion of human origins (either way though, Browne clearly said that there was not more than one allusion to human origins in OTOOS).
Nope, still looks like a mix of original research and speculation about what sources might have said if they'd been published later. It won't do, and you're verging on slow edit warring. As above, please start afresh with a new section, discuss the present text rather than your past battles, and be concise and to the point. . . dave souza, talk 19:34, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
Administrator note: I have no opinion on the merits of the arguments above; my role as an administrator is to prevent disruption to the Wikipedia project. To that end, I have two tools at my disposal: article protection, which in this case would lock the article for all editors including those uninvolved with the dispute, or identifying and blocking the source of the disruption. I chose the latter and blocked Stan Giesbrecht, as having the least impact on the project for the most benefit. I regret doing this because he has been engaging on the talk page, but the WP:BURDEN rests on the person who wants to add content, and that burden is not satisfied by revert-warring (or, for that matter, writing walls of text that other editors are disinclined to read). ~ Anachronist ( talk) 05:46, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
See here re this page of Origin of Species. Thx, Humanengr ( talk) 17:57, 26 December 2018 (UTC)