Quote Mining - or How to Lie About Your Opponents by Quoting Them

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/qote-mining-or-how-to-lie.html

I was shown this creationist "meme", claiming that "scientific literature says that naturalistic evolution is false". They even used lots of unnecessary capital letters!

Well, the top line is a simple lie, but the "support" for this lie is another form of lying - quote-mining. This is the selective quoting of someone else's writing in order to give the impression that they are saying something which they are not, usually by omitting important contextual information.

Here is the mined quote. From Frontiers Research Topics, Microbial Genomics Challenge Darwin. The piece is entitled "Microbial genomics challenge Darwin". The writers are  Didier Raoult and Eugene V. Koonin.

"Evolutionary biologists have accepted as indisputable truths that the mutations were entirely random. They believe that:

1. it was only selection that brought determinism and directionality into the process of evolution
2. all evolutionarily consequential heritable changes were extremely small in scale (the principle of gradualism that was staunchly defended by Darwin himself)
3. natural selection was the only important factor that shaped the evolving phenotypes and genotypes, driving in particular the emergence of biological complexity
4. the history of all life forms, at least in principle, could be adequately described by a single Tree of Life (following the famous sole illustration in the Origin) (Dobzhansky, 1937; Huxley, 1942).

At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, genomics ... shattered each of these key tenets of (neo)Darwinism."

The ellipsis indicates that some text has been removed. But it's not just the text within the sentence. The entire thrust of the piece has been omitted - lying by omission is the most common form of quote-mining deception. Always find the original source and compare it with what is being claimed. The full paragraph is as follows.

"At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, genomics, especially comparative genomics of microbes, shattered each of these key tenets of (neo)Darwinism. We are now fully aware that many of the most important genomic changes are by no account miniscule; that the mutational process is far from being completely random; that evolution of complexity via routes distinct from natural selection is possible; and that pervasive horizontal gene transfer makes the original concept of the Tree of Life largely obsolete. Perhaps even more remarkably, the study of genome evolution, in particular in microbes, has brought to fore completely novel aspects of the evolutionary process of which Darwin and the architects of the Modern Synthesis were utterly unaware. Conceivably, the foremost of these phenomena is the unending arms race between cellular life forms and genomic parasites such as viruses and mobile elements that shapes the genomes of both the hosts and the parasites (Raoult, 2010a; Koonin, 2011).""

Is this scientific literature saying that evolution is false? Not at all. It is pointing out that much progress has been made in the field of evolution since the "beliefs" listed were held.

The writers' headline is clearly attention-bait, and they create a dubious strawman version of what evolutionary science was before the new discoveries were made, but we need not go into those issues here. They clearly are of the opinion that "Naturalistic Evolution" is NOT false.