Yep, there are some really nasty, intentional misquotations
in that book and in others:
The Quote:
"Fossil hunter Donald Johanson acknowledged: 'No one can be sure just what any extinct hominid looked like.'" - Creation p 89
What it really said:
"No one can be sure what any extinct hominid looked like with its skin and hair on. Sizes here are to scale, with afarensis about two feet shorter than the average human being." - Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy - the Beginnings of Humankind, New York: Warner Books, Inc, 1981, p. 286
The Quote:
"At this point a reader may begin to understand Dawkins comment in the preface to his book: 'This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction.'" - Creation p39
What it really said:
"This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliché or not, 'stranger than fiction' expresses exactly how I feel about the truth." - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, p. 9
The Quote:
"Zoologist Richard Lewontin said that organisms 'appear to have been carefully and artfully designed.' He views them as 'the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer.'" - Creation p 143
What it really said:
"The manifest fit between organisms and their environment is a major outcome of evolution.... Life forms are more than simply multiple and diverse, however. Organisms fit remarkably well into the external world in which they live. They have morphologies, physiologies and behaviors that appear to have been carefully and artfully designed to enable each organism to appropriate the world around it for its own life. It was the marvelous fit of organisms to the environment, much more than the great diversity of forms, that was the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer. Darwin realized that if a naturalistic theory of evolution was to be successful, it would have to explain the apparent perfection of organisms and not simply their variation." -Richard C. Lewontin, "Adaptation", Scientific American, vol. 239, September 1978, p. 213
The Quote:
"Carl Sagan, in his book Cosmos, candidly acknowledged 'The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a great designer.'" - Reasoning from the Scriptures, 1985, p124
What it really said:
"The fossil evidence sould be consistent with the idea of a great designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the Designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an imperfect design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitly made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a designer of a more remote and indirect temperment)." - Cosmos, p29
