What the paleontologists actually said

Every quotation below was checked against the source named, opened in this session.  Where a source could not be opened, that is stated in the entry and the quote does not run.  Section C lists the quotes that failed and says exactly how they failed.

What this page covers, and what it does not.  This is an audit of the quotations that were already sitting in this project's research notes when the series began — which is where the quote-mine risk lives, because a quotation in a note file has usually travelled through somebody else's website to get there.  Quotations that entered the articles from sources opened fresh during research are verified in the relevant dossier's own quotes ledger, with a verdict on each, and those ledgers are published beside their articles; Section F says where they are.

The fossil record is the most quote-mined subject in all of apologetics.  TalkOrigins maintains a Quote Mine Project about this literature specifically, and it is largely right.  This project's own 221 KB note file on the fossil record is roughly 60% block quotes, and a substantial fraction of them arrived by way of creation.com, evolutionnews.org, bibliotecapleyades.net, an i.imgur.com page scan, a dead webcache.googleusercontent.com URL, or — in one case — the TalkOrigins quote-mine page itself, cited as though it were the source.

Four rules were applied.  No quotation enters on the authority of an apologetics site or of a critic's site.  A Google Books search link is a query, not a citation.  Where the sentence immediately before or after a quotation changes its meaning, that sentence is printed here.  And where a scientist said something in the same document that cuts against the argument this series wants to make, it is printed too — Section B is not a courtesy, it is the reason Section A can be trusted.

Verdict counts — for the note-file audit only

These counts describe the audit of this project's note file.  They are not a count of every quotation the series uses.  Each row is a passage that was in our notes, or one read in the same source while checking a passage that was.  Quotations the articles later took from sources opened fresh during research are counted in their own dossiers' ledgers, listed in Section F, and are deliberately not repeated here — one passage, one ledger, so that no verdict has two homes.

The counting rule, so a reader can check the arithmetic.  One row per distinct passage that somebody sat down and checked against a named source.  Where a passage has more than one defect — and several have three — it is counted once, under the most serious one, in this order:  UNSOURCEABLE, then CONTEXT-STRIPPED, then MISCITED, then VERIFIED-WITH-ERRORS, then VERIFIED.  So Benton 2009 appears in the CONTEXT-STRIPPED row even though its citation is also wrong by an issue and fifty pages, and Erwin 2011 appears there even though our transcription of it also has three errors and the journal name is wrong.  The counts therefore understate the defect rate rather than inflating it.

The 236 passages come from eleven separate audits:  the ten research dossiers listed at the end of this page, plus the sections above, which were checked first and are counted here.  A passage checked twice by two different people is counted once, credited to whoever got there first.

The series has grown since this consolidation was made, and the 236 has deliberately not grown with it.  Eight further dossiers have written quotes ledgers that did not exist when this page was assembled, and the whale ledger — listed at zero in Section E4 — has since been written too.  Those ledgers cover sources opened during research rather than passages inherited from our notes, so they are a different job from this one and their totals stay with them.  Section F lists all of them.

What this audit changed

Most of what follows is repair work — a wrong journal, a dropped word, a missing page.  Six findings are not repair work.  They change what the articles in this series are allowed to claim, and three of them take a favourite argument away from our own side.

1.  A sentence our notes attribute to Gould appears in no Gould text anybody has been able to open — and the real continuation is worse for us than the invented one.  Our note file carried Gould's 1981 complaint about being quoted by creationists, and followed it with a second sentence about punctuations occurring at the species level while directional trends run "on the staircase model" at the level of transitions within major groups.  Those words are not in "Evolution as Fact and Theory."  A search-inside query for the phrase "staircase model" against the whole of Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes returns nothing, and a HathiTrust full-text search of the entire corpus for the opening clause of that sentence returns zero hits, while the sentence Gould actually wrote returns sixteen.  What Gould actually wrote next is that intermediates are generally missing between species and plentiful between larger groups.  Thomas R. Holtz Jr.'s University of Maryland course page attributes the "staircase" wording to The Panda's Thumb (1980), and that could not be checked:  all eight Internet Archive scans are print-disabled and Google Books previews none of the four Norton ISBNs.  The finding is not "our notes invented it."  The finding is that the sentence we were relying on cannot be produced from any source anyone has opened, and that the sentence which can be produced is a harder one for us.  The difference is precise and it is worth stating exactly.  Our notes' version speaks of directional trends at the higher level — which a creationist reader can absorb, since a trend is a pattern of change and says nothing about whether the intermediate animals are in the ground.  Gould's actual sentence is an existence claim:  the transitional forms are there, between larger groups.  Use the wording that was read.  Do not use the "staircase" wording until somebody opens The Panda's Thumb.

2.  Gould and Simpson pull in opposite directions about where in the taxonomic hierarchy the gaps sit, and both are flagship sources for the same section.  This one needs stating carefully, because the obvious version of it is too strong.

Here is exactly what each man claims, and at what rank.  Simpson, in Why and How (1980), is specific about rank in both directions:  gaps among species are "sporadic and often small," gaps among orders, classes and phyla are "systematic and almost always large," and the effect intensifies as the hierarchy is climbed.  Gould, in 1981, says intermediates are generally lacking at the species level but abundant between larger groups — and he does not say which larger groups.  "Larger groups" is not a rank.

So the two statements are not straightforwardly contradictory, and this page should not say they are.  Three things narrow the gap between them.  Gould is talking about whether named intermediate fossils exist; Simpson is talking about morphological distance, which is a different quantity.  Young-earth creationism generally grants relatedness at genus and family level anyway, so Gould's claim is uncontroversial for us at the ranks where it is least specific.  And nobody on either side claims abundant documented transitions between phyla, which is the top of Simpson's range.

But they do collide, and here is where.  Gould's worked example in that same essay, over the following page, is the reptile jaw becoming the mammalian ear — the several jawbones reduced step by step until they become the hammer and anvil.  That is a class-level transition.  So Gould does mean high rank, at least there, and at least in that case he asserts the transition is documented.  Simpson's claim explicitly covers classes and says the gaps there are large and systematic.  At class level the two of them are asserting different things about the same evidence.

Verdict for the article:  an unresolved tension whose size depends entirely on rank, not a flat contradiction.  The article has to say which ranks it is making a claim about, and it cannot quote both men as if they were witnesses to one proposition.  Resolving it is the article's job.  This page's job is to make sure nobody quotes either of them without knowing the other is there.

3.  Half of a widely used "Gould 2002" stasis quotation is not Gould.  Our notes ran two sentences together as one quotation from The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, citing pp. 749 and 753.  The first sentence is Gould's, on p. 749, with one word wrong in our copy — our notes have species anatomy fluctuating "over time" where Gould wrote "through time."  The second is on p. 753, and there Gould is quoting H. J. MacGillavry (1968, p. 70), a Dutch oil-industry paleontologist, and says so on the page.  The sentence about most species showing no appreciable evolutionary change is MacGillavry's, reporting what he saw in commercial sections.  Our notes also drop a word from it.  Corrected, it is better evidence, not worse — Gould is presenting it as testimony from a working stratigrapher with no theoretical stake, which is exactly the kind of witness this series wants.  But it has to be attributed to the man who said it.

4.  The "95% shallow marine / 0.25% vertebrates / 1% more than a single bone" chain ends at a talk nobody can hear.  Traced through creation.com to Andrew Snelling's 1991 Creation article, whose own footnotes source the 95% figure and the 1% figure to an informal, unpublished, unrecorded lecture given by Kurt Wise at the Institute for Creation Research on 17 August 1988.  The 0.25% is not a measurement at all; it is 5% of 5%, arithmetic done on the first figure.  Full working in Section A above.  This does not run on this site in any article, and the right fix is to compute the composition of the fossil record from the Paleobiology Database ourselves.

5.  Bechly's 80%-completeness figure is attributed on camera to a paper that cannot contain it.  Bechly names Foote and Sepkoski 1999 in Nature as the source of "80% of vertebrate families" being recorded.  That paper analyses fifteen marine groups; the only vertebrates in it are cartilaginous and bony fishes, and not one tetrapod family appears in the study.  The paper prints no such percentage anywhere — its per-class values exist only as unlabelled points in a scatter plot — and its Methods state that the sample was built by excluding groups with fewer than 100 resolvable fossil genera, so it favours the better-preserved groups by construction.  The nearest published match is Denton 1985's table of terrestrial vertebrate families, which could not be verified because every Internet Archive scan is print-disabled.  Worse for the argument:  Bechly's own refereed 2016 paper on odonate fossil calibrations reports six living dragonfly families with no crown-group fossil record at all — in the group he knows better than almost anyone alive.

6.  Kurt Wise, in 1995, conceded three of Darwin's four fossil expectations, and named the whale sequence as the biggest problem for his own model.  This was already known; what the audit added is that the concession is more specific than the version that circulates.  Two pages past the famous paragraph, Wise writes that the mammal-like reptiles are a good higher-taxon intermediate, and that the three jaw bones change monotonically up-section from three roughly equal bones toward the single bone of the mammal jaw.  He cites a mainstream synapsid paleontologist, J. A. Hopson, for it.  A hostile reader who opens that PDF will also find, on the facing page, Wise suggesting that Loch Ness sightings might be living Basilosaurus — a claim Creation Ministries International has since retired.  Cite Wise on whales and on jaws, and get to the Nessie paragraph first.

A. Verified, with the citation corrected

Stasis and the shape of the record

David Raup, 1979 — "even fewer examples of evolutionary transition"

VERIFIED, with two transcription errors and one damaging ellipsis.  Source opened:  the full scanned text of Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin vol. 50 at archive.org/download/fieldmuseumofnat50chic/fieldmuseumofnat50chic_djvu.txt (an unrestricted item, no loan needed).

Correct citation:  David M. Raup, "Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50, no. 1 (January 1979): 22–29, at p. 25.

What Raup actually wrote, in full, with the part our notes cut restored in bold:

"Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded.  We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much.  The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.  By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information — what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic."

Errors in our notes:  "and knowledge" for "and the knowledge"; "a nice, simple progression" for "a nice simple progression"; "Darwinian" for Raup's lowercase "darwinian."  The four-dot ellipsis deleted the quarter-million-fossil-species figure, which is a fact in this argument's favour and should never have been cut.

Context that must run with it.  Raup's alternative to gradual Darwinian change is neutral, random-walk evolution, not design.  Two pages on he writes:  "I think it is safe to say that we know for sure that natural selection, as a process, does work.  There is a mountain of experimental and observational evidence, much of it predating genetics, which shows that natural selection as a biological process works."  And:  "This record of change pretty clearly demonstrates that evolution has occurred if we define evolution simply as change; but it does not tell us how this change took place, and that's really the question."  His closing move is to argue that the dinosaurs may have been "simply unlucky" — extinction by chance rather than by inferiority — and that "we are thus talking about the survival of the lucky as well as the survival of the fittest."  Any use of the 120-years passage that does not report that Raup's proposed replacement is neutral evolution is a quote-mine.

Boyce Rensberger, 1980 — Eldredge's "the pattern that we were told to find … does not exist"

VERIFIED as text.  MISCITED in every version this project holds, and CONTEXT-STRIPPED in a way that is fatal.

Our notes attribute this three separate times, variously to "New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting," to "Niles Eldredge in the NY Times, 1980" via evolutionnews.org, and to "New York Times, 1980" via a PDF on a UTEP faculty page.  All three are the same article.

Source opened:  the scan at http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/nytimes.pdf — a photograph of the physical clipping, rendered and read page-image by page-image.  The clipping's own masthead reads:

• Byline: "BY BOYCE RENSBERGER / © 1980, New York Times News Service"
• Publication of this printing: Houston Chronicle, Wednesday, November 5, 1980, Section 4, Page 15
• Headline as printed: "Ideas on evolution going through a revolution among scientists"

So the correct citation is Boyce Rensberger, New York Times News Service, syndicated 4–5 November 1980, as printed in the Houston Chronicle, 5 November 1980, sec. 4, p. 15.  It is not an unsigned wire report, and the copy this project has is not the New York Times's own printing.  The occasion was the Field Museum "Macroevolution" conference of October 1980, the same meeting Roger Lewin covered in Science 210 (21 November 1980): 883–887.

The quoted passage, transcribed from the clipping (the paper misspells Eldredge as "Eldridge" throughout, which is itself a tell for how this quote has travelled):

"Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms.  The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

'The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,' declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments.  Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear.  There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another."

The sentences that kill the quote-mine are three paragraphs earlier in the same column, and they are about people using this quote:

"No clear resolution of the controversies was in sight.  This fact has often been exploited by religious fundamentalists who misunderstood it to suggest weakness in the fact of evolution rather than the perceived mechanism.  Actually, it reflects significant progress toward a much deeper understanding of the history of life on Earth."

And the article opens:

"Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin's epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor.  Genetic analysis, for example, has shown that every organism is governed by the same genetic code controlling the same biochemical processes."

Verdict for use:  the Eldredge sentence may be quoted only alongside Rensberger's warning paragraph.  Quoting it without that paragraph is doing the exact thing the article named, in the article's own words.  Printed together, it is stronger evidence, not weaker — because the reporter concedes the pattern while insisting on the inference.

Douglas Erwin, 2011 — "clumpy at virtually all scales"

VERIFIED.  Our journal attribution was wrong; the ScienceDirect id was right.

Our notes say Science, 2011.  It is Douglas H. Erwin, "Evolutionary uniformitarianism," Developmental Biology 357, no. 1 (2011): 27–34, doi:10.1016/j.ydbio.2011.01.020.  Confirmed against Crossref and against the full PDF, obtained free from the Smithsonian's institutional repository (repository.si.edu, bitstream 23d8f698-ea30-4964-af84-b6eef230be5d; the request needs a full Chrome header set or it 403s).  S0012160611000443 is a Developmental Biology PII, so the id was never in conflict with anything but the journal name our notes typed next to it.

Verbatim, opening of the Introduction (p. 27):

"The ubiquity of morphological discontinuities between clades of organisms has troubled evolutionary biologists since Cuvier and Darwin and remains one of most important questions in evolutionary biology.  Why is it that the distribution of morphologies is clumpy at virtually all scales?  Although both Darwin and the proponents of the Modern Synthesis expected an 'insensible' gradation of form from one species to the next, this is only sometimes found among extant species (for example, among cryptic species) and is rare in the fossil record.  Gradations in form are even less common at higher levels of the Linnean taxonomic hierarchy."

Errors in our notes:  "one of the most important questions" (Erwin's own text drops the "the" — it is his typo, and it must be reproduced or marked [sic]); "expected insensible gradiation" for "expected an 'insensible' gradation" — Erwin puts insensible in scare quotes because he is quoting Darwin; "Modern Synthesesis" for "Modern Synthesis."

The second half of our note's quotation is separated from the first by seven journal pages, not by the "…" our notes print.  It is from the closing Discussion (pp. 33–34):

"The pattern of origination of metazoan phyla and classes is highly non-uniform through the Phanerozoic, with an overwhelming bias towards the Cambrian and Ordovician.  In the past non-paleontologists have attempted to rescue uniformitarian explanations by 'explaining away' this empirical pattern as a result of various biases.  Both taxic and quantitative morphometric approaches have established that the pattern is accurate reflection of the appearance of morphological novelties."

That bolded sentence is the strongest single sentence in the whole corpus for the "the gaps are real, not sampling" argument, and our notes did not have it.  It should be quoted in preference to almost anything else on that point, because Erwin is the Smithsonian's senior Cambrian paleontologist and he is saying the pattern survives quantitative test.

Context that must run with it.  Erwin's explanation is thoroughly naturalistic and is the actual point of the paper:  gene regulatory network "kernels" formed early in metazoan history, became effectively unchangeable, and thereby closed off the kinds of variation that could be generated later.  His conclusion:  "the growth of developmental networks has progressively structured the nature of accessible developmental innovations over time."  He is arguing that the evolutionary process itself has changed through time, not that it did not happen.  Our note's own annotation — "TODO read whole context and talk about what he actually proposes in the paper" — was the right instinct.  Do that, in the article.

Kurt Wise, 1995 — the young-earth concession

VERIFIED against the publisher's own PDF.  Our note held only a Wayback capture of a bryancore.org scan with no OCR.  The publisher copy is live:  https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j09_2/j09_2_216-222.pdf.

Correct citation:  Kurt P. Wise, "Towards a Creationist Understanding of 'Transitional Forms'," CEN Technical Journal 9, no. 2 (1995): 216–222, at pp. 218–219.

"Evidences for Darwin's second expectation — of stratomorphic intermediate species — include such species as Baragwanathia (between rhyniophytes and lycopods), Pikaia (between echinoderms and chordates), Purgatorius (between the tree shrews and the primates), and Proconsul (between the non-hominoid primates and the hominoids).  Darwin's third expectation — of higher-taxon stratomorphic intermediates — has been confirmed by such examples as the mammal-like reptile groups between the reptiles and the mammals, and the phenacodontids between the horses and their presumed ancestors.  Darwin's fourth expectation — of stratomorphic series — has been confirmed by such examples as the early bird series, the tetrapod series, the whale series, the various mammal series of the Cenozoic (for example, the horse series, the camel series, the elephant series, the pig series, the titanothere series, etc.), the Cantius and Plesiadapus primate series, and the hominid series.  Evidence for not just one but for all three of the species level and above types of stratomorphic intermediates expected by macroevolutionary theory is surely strong evidence for macroevolutionary theory.  Creationists therefore need to accept this fact.  It certainly CANNOT be said that traditional creation theory expected (predicted) any of these fossil finds."

Errors in our notes:  "phenacdontids" for "phenacodontids"; "It certainly CANNOT said" for "It certainly CANNOT be said."  Wise's italics on genus names were lost.

The sentence immediately before it, which our note flagged and which the article must print, because it is the half that helps us:

"Of Darwinism's four stratomorphic intermediate expectations, that of the commonness of inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates has been the most disappointing for classical Darwinists.  The current lack of any certain inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates has, of course, led to the development and increased acceptance of punctuated equilibrium theory."

So Wise's accounting is:  of Darwin's four expectations, the one about intermediates between species is unmet, and the other three — intermediate species, intermediate higher taxa, and stratomorphic series — are met.  Quoting only the concession overstates it; quoting only the "most disappointing" line understates it.  Both run, in that order.

His abstract also names the hardest case for his own side by name:  "Even at this early stage of development and with such significant challenges as the early whale series, the creation model appears to have potential…"  That belongs in whale-evolution.

(Wise's paper has been audited in far more depth by the creationist-audit dossier beside this one — research/creationist-id-paleontology-audit.md, §4A.  It holds the library copy at sources/papers/wise-1995_towards-creationist-understanding-transitional-forms.pdf, the reference superscripts, Wise's instruction that creationists stop using the phrase "transitional form" at all, and the Loch Ness paragraph on the facing page that anyone quoting this article needs to know is there.)

Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, 1982 — "the fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong"

MISCITED, and the primary could not be opened.  Two incompatible renderings of one sentence are in circulation and this project holds the one that traces to a quote-mine list.

This is the worst-provenance item in the whole note file.  Our notes carry the passage three times, and the citation attached to it is, verbatim, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-2.html — the TalkOrigins Quote Mine Project page, cited as though it were the source.  Bolted to it is a Google Books link, books.google.com/books?id=frwaAgAAQBAJ.  That volume id was resolved this session:  it is Phillip Engle, The Ten Facts of Evolution, Lulu.com, 2007 — a print-on-demand book that quotes Eldredge and Tattersall.  So our "primary citation" is a self-published secondary quoting the book, and our text is a quote-mine list's transcription of it.

How the primary was pursued, and why it failed.  Internet Archive holds two scans, mythsofhumanevol0000eldr and mythsofhumanevol00eldr.  Both return is_lendable: false, is_printdisabled: true from archive.org/services/loans/loan/?action=availability; action=browse_book returns "This book is not available to borrow at this time," and /fulltext/inside.php returns "Item not available."  Google Books has no preview for either ISBN of the Columbia University Press edition (0231047606 and 0231047614 both return "preview":"noview"; OpenLibrary lists only one further ISBN, 0231051441).  HathiTrust does not hold the book:  a full-text search for "Nor is the problem a miserably poor record" returns seven hits and every one of them is a creationist secondary — three Wendell R. Bird, one more Bird, one Walter ReMine's The Biotic Message, one Catholic periodical.  A search for "The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong" returns exactly one hit, ReMine 1993.  That is the signature of a laundered quote:  a sentence that exists in the searchable literature only inside works that are quoting it.

The conflict.  Two renderings of one sentence:

Both give the same page range for the original, pp. 45–46, and one web source gives p. 48.  This cannot be settled without the book.  Until it is, the sentence does not run.

What TalkOrigins actually restores, which our notes cut.  The Quote Mine Project prints the surrounding text, and it is worth having, because most of it helps the argument rather than hurting it.  The immediately preceding sentences:

"The main impetus for expanding the view that species are discrete at any one point in time, to embrace their entire history, comes from the fossil record.  Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record.  Instead, collections of nearly identical specimens, separated in some cases by 5 million years, suggested that the overwhelming majority of animal and plant species were tremendously conservative throughout their histories."

And the sentence immediately after, which is the one the quote-miners cut and which is the reason TalkOrigins lists the passage at all:

"Rather than challenge well-entrenched evolutionary theory, paleontologists tacitly agreed with their zoological colleagues that the fossil record was too poor to do much beyond supporting, in a general sort of way, the basic thesis that life had evolved."

TalkOrigins' own comment on that sentence is one line:  "Note the claim that the fossil record supports evolution."  That is a fair hit and the article should concede it in those terms.  Eldredge and Tattersall are attacking gradualism, not descent; the whole book is an argument for punctuated equilibrium.

The Engle 2007 page image also carries a further paragraph, marked off by ellipses, that neither our notes nor TalkOrigins has:

"Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted.  The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism.  Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record."

That paragraph is stronger for this series than the sentence everybody quotes, and it is unverified for exactly the same reason.  Get the book.  It is a 197-page 1982 Columbia University Press hardback, widely held used; a physical copy or an interlibrary loan settles four separate entries in this ledger at once (this one, the extinction/rebound passage, the p. 59 passage, and the p. 163 Teggart passage).

Eldredge and Tattersall — the extinction-and-rebound passage

UNSOURCEABLE.  Our note carries it with the author's own annotation, "(can't find source on amazon or google books)".  That annotation is correct and this session did not improve on it.  The passage — "One striking aspect of these extinction/rebound episodes … the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history — not the artifact of a poor fossil record" — is not reachable by any of the routes listed above, for the same reason:  the book is not digitised anywhere that serves text.  Does not run.  It is also the single most useful passage in the corpus for the "gaps are real" section, so it is worth the interlibrary loan by itself.

Eldredge and Tattersall, p. 59 and p. 163

UNSOURCEABLE, same reason.  Our note gives a bare citation with no quoted text for p. 59, and for p. 163 gives "We have already argued that that the fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change.  So too, says Teggart, does the historical sequence of human events."  The doubled "that that" is in our note; whether it is in the book is unknown.  Note that p. 163 is in the book's historiography chapter — Eldredge and Tattersall are drawing an analogy to Frederick J. Teggart's philosophy of history, not making a paleontological claim.  Quoting it as a statement about fossils would misrepresent it even if the words check out.

Stephen Jay Gould, 1981 — "infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists"

VERIFIED against the book, and it does not say what our notes say it says.  This is the most important entry on the page, and it must be printed prominently in the article.

Our note file carried this passage with no attribution at all, under the heading "Gould says the opposite."  It has now been read in the source.

Correct citation:  Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Discover 2 (May 1981): 34–37; reprinted as essay 19 in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1983), pp. 253–262, quotation at p. 260.  The Discover provenance is stated by Gould himself in the book's preface:  "Number 19 first appeared in Discover Magazine for May 1981."

Source opened:  Internet Archive controlled-digital-lending copy hensteethhorsest0000step, via the search-inside API with a loan token.  The search index numbers scan leaves, not printed pages, and the two run exactly two apart.  Both ends of the essay pin the offset:  the book's contents page puts essay 19 at p. 253 and essay 20 at p. 263, and the essay's first sentence returns on leaf 255 while its last returns on leaf 264.  The scan's own leaf-to-folio table gives the same answer.  The "infuriating" sentence returns on leaf 262, so it is printed p. 260.  A parallel dossier reported p. 262 from the same single search hit, having taken the leaf number for a folio.

"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists — whether through design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms.  Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.  Yet a pamphlet entitled 'Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax' states:  'The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge … are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible.'"

Our version of the second sentence is wrong.  Our notes print:  "The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups."  Those words are not in this essay — a search-inside query for "staircase model" against the whole book returns nothing, and a HathiTrust full-text search for "The punctuations occur at the level of species" across the entire corpus returns zero hits, while "Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level" returns sixteen.  The "staircase model" wording is attributed on Thomas R. Holtz Jr.'s University of Maryland GEOL 204 course page to Gould, The Panda's Thumb, 1980.  That attribution could not be checked:  all eight Internet Archive scans of The Panda's Thumb are is_printdisabled: true and is_lendable: false, and Google Books returns "preview":"noview" for all four ISBNs of the Norton hardback and paperback.  Use the Hen's Teeth wording, which was read.  Do not use the "staircase model" wording until somebody opens The Panda's Thumb.

The paragraph immediately before it, p. 259, accuses creationists of relying on "distortion and innuendo," and Gould adds that if he sounds sharp or bitter, he is — because he has become a major target of the practice.  The complaint is personal and it is about being misquoted specifically.

And two pages earlier, pp. 257–258, Gould sets out his own positive case in three arguments — observed evolution in field and laboratory; the imperfections and oddities that betray a history; and, third and most directly, transitional fossils.  On that third argument he writes that preserved transitions are "not common — and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution — but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim."  His worked example, over the rest of p. 258, is the reptile jaw becoming the mammal ear:  several jawbones reduced step by step in mammalian ancestors until they become small nubbins at the back of the jaw, then the hammer and anvil of the mammalian middle ear.  That is the subject of this series' mammal-jaw-to-ear article, chosen as the strongest case for the other side — and Gould reached for the same example for the same reason.

How this page recommends the article use it.  Print the whole thing, in Gould's order, at the top of the stasis section, before any Gould quotation is used for anything.  It costs one paragraph and it buys the reader's trust for the rest of the article, because the alternative is that the reader finds it himself and stops reading.  Gould's position is not ambiguous:  he holds that species-level intermediates are genuinely rare and that this is what his theory predicts, and that higher-level transitions are well documented.  A young-earth argument that needs "no transitional forms at any level" cannot use Gould at all.  A young-earth argument about stasis and about the scaling of gaps with taxonomic rank can use him, because that is what he actually said — and Gould's own sentence, "Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups," pulls against the gap-scaling claim in our notes, which says gaps grow larger as you ascend the hierarchy.  The article must resolve that head-on.

(Amended after review.  An earlier draft of this paragraph called Gould's sentence "precisely the opposite" of Simpson's, and said the two men disagree about which end of the hierarchy the gaps are at.  That was too strong, and it was too strong against our own argument, which is the same fault as overstating in our favour.  Gould's phrase "larger groups" names no rank, and creationists grant relatedness at genus and family level in any case.  The tension is real but it is bounded, and it bites hardest at class level, where Gould's own worked example sits.  The corrected statement is finding 2 under "What this audit changed," above.)

Completeness of the record

Steven Holland, 2017 — "It isn't." (the two quotes our notes label "Unverified" and cite only as JSTOR 48572428)

VERIFIED, both of them, and the source is now identified.  Our notes carry two passages with no author, no title and no year, attached to a bare jstor.org/stable/48572428.  That id resolves to:

Correct citation:  Steven M. Holland, "Presidential Address:  Structure, not Bias," Journal of Paleontology 91, no. 6 (2017): 1315–1317, doi:10.1017/jpa.2017.114.  Holland is a stratigraphic paleobiologist at the University of Georgia, and this is his address as President of the Paleontological Society, delivered 25 September 2016.

Source opened:  the publisher's own PDF, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/309B2D6D87176F77774D07A67B1E7A64/S0022336017001147a.pdf/div-class-title-structure-not-bias-div.pdf, three pages, read in full.  Filed at sources/papers/holland-2017_structure-not-bias.pdf.  JSTOR was not needed and JSTOR still 403s an agent.

First passage, p. 1315, right column, ending the second section:

"Our exaggerated emphasis on the imperfection of the fossil record feeds the perception among scientists in general that the fossil record is an unusually poor data set.  It isn't."

Second passage, p. 1316, left column, four paragraphs later — our notes' "…" hides a page break and about 350 words:

"We already know much about the structure of the fossil record."

Third passage, our notes' second quote, p. 1316, right column:

"Through her comprehensive examinations of live-dead comparisons, Susan Kidwell (2002, 2013) showed that the fossil record contains a high-fidelity record of species richness and especially abundance, a pattern both unexpected and most welcome."

One transcription error in our notes:  "showed the fossil record contains" for Holland's "showed that the fossil record contains."

The sentence our notes should have taken instead, p. 1315, immediately before the first passage, because it is the argument rather than the assertion:

"When we emphasize the rarity of fossilization, we hold the fossil record to an unfair standard."

Holland's reason is an analogy a skeptical reader will accept:  only a tiny fraction of living organisms has ever been sequenced either, and nobody concludes from that that molecular data are useless.  His complaint is against his own profession's habit of leading with "bias" and "megabias" in paper titles, which he says has taught biologists that the record is not worth bothering with.

Context that must run with it, and it is a genuine two-edged find.  Holland is not saying the record is complete.  He opens by granting that "As a record of everything that has ever lived on earth, the fossil record is an imperfect and incomplete data set," and he says explicitly, "I am not arguing that we should ignore the nature or quality of the fossil record."  His positive proposal is stratigraphic — that the record's incompleteness has known structure (time-averaging on the order of a century per bed, sequence-stratigraphic architecture, basin formation), and that paleontologists should model that structure rather than complain about it.  His three worked examples are conservation paleobiology, stratigraphic paleobiology, and better divergence-time estimation.

Why this matters more than the sentence our notes wanted.  The president of the Paleontological Society, in his own presidential address, is on record that the standard "the record is too poor to tell" answer is oversold by paleontologists themselves.  That is exactly the premise the gaps argument needs, and it comes from the least deniable possible venue.  It should replace several weaker completeness quotes in our notes.  But Holland's own conclusion is that the record is good enough to do evolutionary biology with — "we have an extraordinary data set at our disposal" — not that the gaps are unbridgeable.  Print both halves.

James Valentine, 1989 — the Californian Pleistocene bivalves and gastropods

VERIFIED for the first quotation, from the publisher's own abstract.  The second quotation, from p. 90, remains UNSOURCEABLE.  A sibling dossier recorded both as unverified because JSTOR blocks agents.  JSTOR turns out to be unnecessary for the first one.

Correct citation:  James W. Valentine, "How good was the fossil record?  Clues from the Californian Pleistocene," Paleobiology 15, no. 1 (1989): 83–94, doi:10.1017/S0094837300009295.

Source opened:  the Cambridge Core article record at https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0094837300009295/type/journal_article, whose citation_abstract metadata carries the full publisher abstract.  The body is paywalled — the PDF endpoint that worked for Holland 2017 returns the paywall page for this article.  Saved at sources/web/valentine-1989_how-good-was-the-fossil-record-abstract.html.

The abstract, in full, because every sentence in it is load-bearing and the whole thing is four hundred words shorter than the argument about it:

"The living members of 113 families of bivalves and gastropods of the Californian Province include 698 species living at shelf depths, of which 538 or 77% are known as Pleistocene fossils from the same region; another 113 fossil species are extralimital, and 98 are extinct.  Living species not found as fossils are chiefly rare today, and/or minute, fragile, and/or from deeper shelf habitats.  Sampling of the Pleistocene record has been biased towards shallow-water assemblages.  Fragile and minute forms are probably underrepresented in the record.  Rare forms, however, are still appearing as new studies are conducted, and many rare species are yet to be discovered.  At least 85% of durably skeletonized living species may have been captured in the record.  It is probable that most durably skeletonized invertebrate species were represented in lithostratigraphic units throughout the Phanerozoic, but that this record is lost owing to erosion, burial, and destruction of skeletons in situ.  The bulk of the marine invertebrate fossil record does not represent a series of unusual skeletal accumulations, but rather the preserved remnants of an excellent original record formed through ordinary though episodic processes."

Errors in our notes:  "538 77%" for "538 or 77%"; "Pliestocene" for "Pleistocene"; "[found elsewhere]" is our own editorial insertion into Valentine's sentence and is not marked as such.  The "…" in our notes deletes three sentences — the shallow-water sampling bias, the underrepresentation of fragile and minute forms, and the admission that many rare species are still undiscovered.  Every one of those three cuts against the use our notes make of the quote, and cutting them is the reason this entry is not clean.

The question our own note asks in the margin — "Does he mean 85% of species are found, or are expected to be found?" — is answered by the abstract.  538 of 698, or 77%, are known as fossils.  The "at least 85%" is Valentine's estimate of how many may have been captured in the record, higher than the observed 77% because rare species are still being found.  So the honest sentence for the article is:  77% observed, 85% estimated, for durably skeletonised shelf molluscs in one province.  Not for the record as a whole, and not for anything soft-bodied.

The two sentences at the end are the best material in the paper and our notes have neither.  The last one — "the preserved remnants of an excellent original record formed through ordinary though episodic processes" — is the sentence that says fossilisation is normal rather than freakish, which is the load-bearing premise of every "the gaps are real" argument.  The one before it is the counterweight and must run with it:  Valentine thinks most durably skeletonised species were originally recorded and that the record was then destroyed by erosion, burial and in-situ dissolution.  A record that was excellent and has been largely destroyed is not the same claim as a record that is nearly complete now.

Still unsourceable:  the p. 90 passage in our notes ("Perhaps most interesting is that the record has captured all of the important species and species associations…").  It is body text, not abstract, and no route to the body was found.  It does not run.  A human with an ordinary browser and the JSTOR account can settle it in two minutes at jstor.org/stable/2400845.

Michael Benton, 2009 — the collector's curve, and the sentence at the end of the same article

VERIFIED verbatim.  Our citation is wrong by an issue and by fifty pages, and the article's own conclusion is the opposite of the use our notes put it to.

Our notes give "The Completeness of the Fossil Record, 2009" with a Wiley DOI link and, elsewhere in the corpus, the pagination 6(4):164–167.

Correct citation:  Michael J. Benton, "The Completeness of the Fossil Record," Significance 6, no. 3 (September 2009): 117–121, doi:10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00374.x.  The printed folios "september2009 117" through "september2009 121" are visible on the pages themselves.  Source opened:  Benton's own PDF at benton.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/files/2019/07/2009Significance.pdf, already in the library as benton-2009, read in full.

The passage, p. 120, verbatim:

"For example, the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus, was named in 1824 and new dinosaurs are still being named at the rate of one a fortnight, some 30 per year (see Figure 4).  This might suggest that we are still on the rising phase of the collector curve and cannot yet predict when the new finds will end.  In fact, the bird curve and the dinosaur curve are interesting: they appeared to reach the beginnings of the slow-down about 1980 but have since picked up as search efforts have intensified, especially in new territory such as Australia, South America, India and particularly China.  But for other fossil groups, such as trilobites, the slow-down has already begun and we can say that the fossil record of these marine invertebrates is currently more completely known than that of dinosaurs or fossil birds."

Our transcription of it is accurate.

What our notes do not have, and it is the last paragraph of the same article, p. 121:

"the fact that the order of fossils in the rocks matches the order predicted from molecular trees … and the fact that the detailed pattern of the evolution of life has not changed much over 200 years of study, suggests that the fossil record is adequate for the purpose we have put it to.  It provides incontrovertible evidence of Darwinian evolution."

Verdict for use:  CONTEXT-STRIPPED as our notes carry it.  Benton's whole article is an argument that the record is good enough, and the collector's-curve passage is his demonstration of how you would know.  Quoting the dinosaur curve as evidence that the record is poor inverts the paper.  The legitimate use is narrow and it is real:  Benton, in 2009, put dinosaurs and birds on the rising limb of their curves and trilobites past the knee.  That is a statement about which groups can carry a completeness argument, and it belongs in the article for exactly that.

Two things that cut against us, from the same five pages.  Benton's Figure 3 explains the logistic shape in ecological terms — the asymptote is reached when "the ecologists can stop: they know they have found 95% or more of all species."  And his Figure 5 shows two pterosaur groups with sharply different sampling adequacy, which is the honest form of the point:  completeness is a per-group number, not a property of "the fossil record."

(A sibling dossier recomputed the dinosaur, bird and trilobite curves from the Paleobiology Database and found Benton's 2009 reading has been overtaken for dinosaurs — see research/completeness-and-collectors-curves.md §5.2 and §5.3.  The quotation is sound; the empirical claim inside it has aged.)

Günter Bechly — "80% of modern vertebrate families," and the collector's-curve claim

UNSOURCEABLE, both of them.  Neither may run.

Our notes carry two Bechly claims about completeness.  The first is cited to a Facebook comment reply (facebook.com/gbechly/posts/1636222393411787?comment_id=…&reply_comment_id=…), which returns HTTP 400 to any fetcher and which would not be a citable source even if it loaded:  "80% of modern vertebrate families are represented in the fossil record and we can reasonably extrapolate this for most past time horizons."  The second is cited to a timestamp in a 2019 YouTube talk, "Discontinuities in the Fossil Record":  "This accumulation of conflicting evidence … can no longer be explained away as an artifact of undersampling of an incomplete fossil record, as demonstrated by statistical analyses (collector's curve)."

What was tried.  Benton 1998, "The quality of the fossil record of the vertebrates" — the obvious candidate for an 80%-of-families figure, and the paper our own notes link two lines earlier — was searched in full text.  It gives a census of "all 840 families of tetrapods that have a fossil record" and it does not contain the claim.  A web search for the sentence returns only creationist secondaries.  The underlying statistic, if there is one, has not been identified.

Do not use either.  Bechly is a real systematic paleontologist with a real publication record, and that makes the sourcing problem worse rather than better:  if the figure exists he can cite it, and until somebody does, quoting a Facebook comment on a site that audits other people's citations would be indefensible.  A sibling dossier recomputed the collector's curves from the Paleobiology Database and found the "statistical analyses (collector's curve)" claim is false as stated for dinosaurs, birds, reptiles and insects, and true for trilobites (research/completeness-and-collectors-curves.md §5.2).  So the second claim is not merely unsourced; on our own recount it is wrong.

J. B. Waterhouse, "inaugural lecture," 1980 — "It is special pleading to rely upon gaps"

UNSOURCEABLE.  The only source that exists is a creationist magazine's quote column, and our own note has added precision that the column does not supply.

Our notes attribute the passage to "J. B. Waterhouse (Department of Geology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Inaugural Lecture, 1980)."

Source opened:  https://creation.com/en/articles/jb-waterhouse-how-good-is-the-geological-record, a Quotable Quotes column.  The page states its own provenance:  "First appeared in Creation 3(3), Page 28, August 1980."  And its entire citation for the quotation is one line, typo included:

"From the inagural lecture by J.B. Waterhouse. Assistant Prof. Geol. QLD University"

No lecture title.  No date.  No page.  No publisher.  And the rank given is assistant professor, which does not sit easily with "inaugural lecture" in the British and Australian sense of a chair-holder's inaugural.  Attempts to find the lecture itself:  the University of Queensland eSpace repository returns HTTP 405 to a fetcher on its Papers, Department of Geology PDFs; OpenLibrary and Crossref hold nothing under Waterhouse matching; no ISBN, DOI, or catalogue record was found.

Our note has invented three details.  "Department of Geology" — not in the source.  "Brisbane" — not in the source.  "1980" is the date of the magazine column, not a date given for the lecture, and the lecture must predate August 1980 by an unknown interval.  A note that manufactures a citation is worse than a note that admits it has none.

Recommend cutting it.  A reader cannot check it, and the site's whole method is that a reader can check everything.

One thing is worth salvaging, as an argument rather than as a quotation.  Waterhouse's reasoning, as the column prints it, is that a gap is a positive observation rather than an absence — "of course you can prove a gap" — and that random gaps should have been filled by a century and a half of collecting.  That argument is made, in checkable print and in far stronger form, by Erwin 2011, Foote 1997 and Holland 2017, all of which are in this ledger.  Use them.

A caution on the arithmetic, since this ledger exists to catch bad numbers on our own side too.  Waterhouse's middle sentence — "if there is a million to one chance of one specimen of a population, and then if that species lived 5–15 m.y., we therefore get 5–15 times the population fossilized" — does not parse dimensionally.  A per-individual preservation probability multiplied by a duration does not yield "5–15 times the population."  Whatever he meant, the sentence as printed is not a calculation anybody can check or reproduce, which is a second reason not to lean on it.

"95% of the fossil record is shallow marine … vertebrates are 0.25% … only 1% of that consists of more than a single bone"

UNSOURCEABLE.  The chain ends at an unpublished talk.

Our notes carry the whole paragraph at line 8 with a single link, creation.com/ortlund-local-flood.  That page was opened.  It reproduces the paragraph and attributes it only to "as CMI pointed out decades ago," with no footnote.  The paragraph traces back to:

Andrew A. Snelling, "Where Are All the Human Fossils?", Creation 14, no. 1 (December 1991): 28–33, reprinted with its footnotes by Answers in Genesis at answersingenesis.org/fossils/fossil-record/where-are-all-the-human-fossils/, opened this session and held at sources/web/snelling-1991_where-are-all-the-human-fossils.html.

Snelling footnotes the paragraph three times, and this is where it dies:

So the two figures the paragraph is actually built on — the 95% and the 1% — rest on an informal, unpublished, unrecorded lecture given thirty-eight years ago, with no data, no method, and no way for any reader to check them.  The 0.25% is not an independent measurement at all; it is 5% of 5%, arithmetic performed on the first figure.

Verdict:  does not run, in any article on this site.  Not because the figures are necessarily false — the marine dominance of the fossil record is real and can be measured — but because we would be asking a skeptical reader to accept two numbers on the authority of a talk nobody can hear.  The Paleobiology Database can be queried for the actual composition of fossil occurrences by environment and by higher taxon.  Computing it ourselves is a day's work and it replaces a dead citation with a number we own.  That is the right fix, and it is exactly the kind of thing this series was set up to do.

Gaps, disparity, and the scaling of morphological distance

Twenty-three passages were checked for this section.  Fifteen verify clean, one verifies only in part, three are accurate text whose meaning changes when the neighbouring sentences are restored, one is a press release that should never be quoted, and two could not be opened at all.

George Gaylord Simpson, Why and How (1980) — verified in the real book, page numbers still unknown

Our notes hold this passage as an i.imgur.com screenshot labelled "p9-10."  A screenshot is not a citation, and the first job was to find out whether the book says it.

The book is Why and How:  Some Problems and Methods in Historical Biology (Pergamon Press, 1980).  Both Internet Archive scans are print-disabled and unlendable, and Google Books previews nothing.  HathiTrust holds it as uc1.31822010582658, rights code ic, "Limited (search-only)" — which refuses to show a page but will tell you whether a phrase is in the volume.  Thirteen distinctive clauses from our notes' three Simpson quotations were run against it, with a nonsense control.  Eleven returned exactly one hit each.  The control returned zero.

So the screenshot is not a forgery.  Simpson's clauses about a new genus appearing more abruptly than a new species, about the gaps being generally larger, about a new genus being well separated morphologically from its nearest known relatives, about gaps among species being "sporadic and often small," and about gaps among orders, classes and phyla being "systematic and almost always large" are all in the book.

Two clauses returned zero:  "more universal and more" and the phrase about sequences that are better recorded.  Both sit immediately beside clauses that returned one hit, and both contain a word a 1980 typesetter would hyphenate across a line, which breaks a phrase match in OCR.  Line-break hyphenation is the likely explanation.  It is not proved.  Quote the confirmed clauses; leave the two unconfirmed words out.

Do not print "pp. 9–10."  That page range rests on the screenshot alone and nothing else.  Cite the chapter, or buy the book.  Our own transcription also spells hierarchy "heirarchy" — that typo is ours, not Simpson's.

The context our notes bury, and it is Simpson's own answer to his own observation.  Elsewhere on the same pages Simpson writes that the rise of a higher category has often involved exceptionally fast evolution, in populations that were probably "notably smaller in size and much more restricted in distribution."  That is a naturalistic explanation of the very gaps he has just described, and it is the same explanation Eldredge and Gould later gave.  Our notes hold this quotation separately, at a different line, and never join it to the gaps passage.  An article that prints Simpson's description of the gaps without Simpson's explanation of them is quote-mining.

Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (2001) — the source found, and the trap it sits in

Our notes attribute "gaps in just about every phyletic series" to Mayr with no book and no page.  It is p. 14 of What Evolution Is (Basic Books, 2001), obtained as a page image whose printed running head carries the folio, so the page number is read off the page rather than inferred.

VERIFIED, and stronger than our notes had it.  On that page Mayr says the fossil record is "one of discontinuities," and that new types often appear quite suddenly with their immediate ancestors absent from earlier strata.

Now the trap.  The next sentence begins Mayr's answer and it runs for the rest of the page and onto the next.  He gives Darwin's reply about the incompleteness of the record, lists the mechanisms — subduction, folding and metamorphism, the small fraction of fossil-bearing strata exposed at the surface, scavenging and decay — and then names two examples of gaps being filled:  Archaeopteryx, which he says confirmed a prediction anatomists had already made, and the therapsid-to-mammal lineage, of which he says some fossils are so intermediate that calling them reptile or mammal is nearly arbitrary.  Page 15 is a full-page synapsid cladogram.

Verdict on any use of the Mayr sentence by itself:  CONTEXT-STRIPPED.  It is a set-up line in a chapter arguing for evolution, answered on the same page.  If the article quotes it, it must print Mayr's answer in the same breath and then argue with it.  And it must cross-link mammal-jaw-to-ear and archaeopteryx-and-bird-origins, because Mayr reached for exactly those two examples.

Douglas Erwin and James Valentine, The Cambrian Explosion (2013) — the word is underdispersed

Our notes take two passages from this book by way of a creation.com article.  Both were checked against the book itself, on an Internet Archive controlled-lending loan.

The first is MISQUOTED, and the corrupted word is the technical one.  Our version has metazoan morphologies described as clumped, with "undispersed" given as the technical term.  The book's word is underdispersed.  That is not a typo with no consequences.  Underdispersed is a statistical term of art — it means the points are spaced more evenly, or more clumped, than a random draw would produce — and it is checkable against a definition.  Undispersed means nothing in particular and cannot be checked against anything.  The creation.com rendering also cuts three things:  a citation to Gould 1989, a citation to Lewontin 2003, and a sentence stating that all pairs of crown phyla had common ancestors.  That last cut matters most, because it is the authors saying, in the same paragraph, that the clumps are separated by ancestry rather than by origin.

The second is VERIFIED as text and CONTEXT-STRIPPED as used.  The passage about the gaps at the level of phyla being numerous and commonly broad is genuinely in the book.  The paragraph it sits in is about the living fauna being a poor sample of what has existed, and it assumes throughout that the ancestral forms existed.

A third passage, on high disparity with low diversity, is not in our notes at all and is better than either of the two that are.  Use it in preference.

A warning about the page numbers.  Pages 340, 104 and 216 are derived from a leaf offset of +14, pinned by five index entries.  The offset is almost certainly right.  No page image was ever seen.  Confirm before printing a page number.

Mike Foote, 1997 — the citation the gap-scaling claim actually needs, and the one that cuts against it

Foote's review "The Evolution of Morphological Diversity," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 28 (1997): 129–152, was not in our notes at all.  It should have been.  Four passages from it were verified from an OCR'd scan.

Foote states that morphological divergence among taxa generally increases with taxonomic rank (p. 130).  That is the sentence our gap-scaling claim has been missing — a measured statement from a quantitative paleontologist in a review journal, rather than an assertion.  He raises the obvious objection himself, that higher taxa are human categories, and says the criticisms "miss the point somewhat," reframing the question as whether there is empirical concordance between rank and morphological distance (pp. 130–131).  And at pp. 138–139 he says the result rules out the possibility that the pattern is an artefact of taxonomic practice.

And the fourth passage goes the other way, so it runs too.  At p. 135 Foote notes that an increase in morphological clustering could result from simple diffusive evolution together with the extinction of intermediates.  That is the strongest available naturalistic account of gap structure, stated by the man whose measurements we are citing.  Print it.

Richard Goldschmidt, 1952, and Simpson's Major Features of Evolution, 1953 — neither could be opened

UNSOURCEABLE, both.  Our notes cite Goldschmidt's "Evolution, as Viewed by One Geneticist" to American Scientist 40 with no page and no year.  The full citation is American Scientist 40, no. 1 (January 1952): 84–98.  JSTOR holds it and blocks agents at the article level; no Internet Archive copy of the volume exists.  This is a single JSTOR read for a human and it would close the entry.

Two reasons for caution even after it is read.  Goldschmidt is a saltationist:  his point is that the gaps are real and that they were crossed by macromutation, a mechanism essentially nobody accepts today, and Erwin 2011 names Goldschmidt's macromutation ideas as one of the positions the Modern Synthesis was built to exclude.  Quoting him as a neutral witness to the pattern, without saying what he thought caused it, repeats the Mayr error exactly.  And the quoted language — evolutionary "running-wild," giant forms, odd or pathological types — is 1952 orthogenetic vocabulary that no modern paleontologist would sign.  Its rhetorical value is high and its evidential value is near zero.  Recommend dropping it, or using it only as history of the idea.

Simpson's 1953 p. 360 sentence — that most new species, genera and families and nearly all higher categories appear suddenly and are not led up to by known continuous sequences — is also unverified.  Both Internet Archive scans are print-disabled, Google Books previews neither Columbia edition, and the HathiTrust search endpoint rate-limited before the volume id could be found.  The HathiTrust phrase-search route that worked on Simpson 1980 will work on this one too.  It is a ten-minute job for the next agent.  Note the opening clause our notes do preserve:  the sentence begins by conceding examples in the sentence before it.  Whatever those examples are, they belong beside the quote.

The press release that should never have been in our notes

Our notes carry a 2013 PhysOrg item quoting Matthew Wills and colleagues on early high disparity turning the traditional cone model of evolution on its head, and our own annotation marks it "unverified."  SUPERSEDED.  The paper it reports is Hughes, Gerber and Wills 2013, PNAS 110: 13875–13879, and it was read in full.  Every claim in the press release is in the paper with the statistics attached:  98 clades, a centre-of-gravity statistic of 0.495, and 63 free-evolving clades bottom-heavy at P = 0.018.  Quote the paper.  Do not quote the press release at all.  The same paper states the "higher taxa are human categories" objection in the authors' own words, with a worked example about where one could choose to draw the boundary of Aves within the theropods — which is a fairer statement of the objection than any creationist source gives.

Convergence, and morphology as a guide to relatedness

Forty-four passages checked.  Forty-four verified.  Nothing misquoted, nothing context-stripped, nothing unsourceable.  This is the cleanest block in the entire audit and the reason is worth naming:  the two quotations our note file actually held for this topic — a Nature news piece quoting Mark Springer, and a PLoS Biology review by Rokas and Carroll — were both transcribed word for word, and both come from findable, mostly open-access journal literature rather than from books published forty years ago.  The defect rate in our notes tracks the accessibility of the source, not the subject.

Thirty-one of the forty-four were read in full text.  Thirteen were verified against the publisher's own abstract only, from Europe PMC, Crossref or BioOne, and the dossier marks each one — those are still verbatim from the publisher, but nothing may be attributed to the body of those papers.

Six items in this block need flags rather than corrections.

Sanderson and Donoghue 1989 cuts against us and runs anyway.  Their finding is that homoplasy levels in morphological and molecular data sets do not appear to differ significantly.  That is a direct answer to the argument this section makes, from 1989, and the article must print it.  The full text could not be obtained — the numeric distribution of consistency indices across their sixty analyses is exactly the base-rate table the argument wants, and only the direction, not the numbers, is in the abstract.  Do not invent a median consistency index.

Pisani et al. 2007 is the strongest single sentence against our thesis:  that when molecules and morphology clash, molecular phylogenies should not be considered more reliable a priori.  Verified from the abstract.  It runs.

Strait and Grine 2004 is the main rebuttal to the pseudoextinction result — that analyses of extant taxa alone gave trees inconsistent with the ape molecular tree, while analyses that included fossils were consistent with it.  Verified from the abstract.  It runs, and it is the reason the article must not claim Springer's 2007 conclusion is the settled view of the field.  Two published replies to Springer exist (Asher, Geisler and Sánchez-Villagra 2008, and Springer's own reply) and neither could be obtained — Oxford Academic returns 403 to a full Chrome header set and the Wayback Machine has no capture of the PDF path.  A human with a browser should open both.

Molnar 2008 was read inside Conway Morris 2010, not opened.  The quotation about Triassic instances of convergence affecting our whole understanding is verified as quoted by Conway Morris.  Cite it that way or open Molnar.  This is a second-hand citation and it is flagged as one.

One live link is now a spam domain.  The Map of Life project's own statement that hundreds of examples of convergence have been identified was verified — against a 2018 Wayback capture.  www.mapoflife.org now serves a Polish online-casino site.  Any link to it in an older draft is now a link to spam.  Cite the capture or drop the claim.

One provenance question is open.  The aardvark, anteater and pangolin skeleton photographs in our own material are believed to come from bones.iri.isu.edu.  That is a lead from our notes, not a confirmed source.  Settle it before publication.

The order of the record, and the claims against it

Thirty passages checked for the fossil-order-and-the-flood article.  Twenty-five verify, two are context-stripped, two are second-hand citations standing in for primaries, and one is a famous line nobody can source.

"Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian" — J. B. S. Haldane never wrote it

UNSOURCEABLE.  No publication and no recorded lecture by Haldane contains the sentence.  The earliest identifiable link in the chain is an oral account passed from John Maynard Smith to Paul Harvey in the early 1970s.  The first printings are Mark Ridley 1993, Michael Benton 1996, and Richard Dawkins from 2005 onward — all more than thirty years after Haldane's death in 1964.

This does not make the falsification test wrong.  The test is sound and it is the backbone of the order article.  It simply is not Haldane's.  Cite Ridley or Dawkins as the people who use it, not Haldane as the man who said it.  A creationist site that quotes it as Haldane's is doing what this page exists to catch, and so were we.

J. E. O'Rourke 1976 — five verified passages, one truncated in a way that reverses him

O'Rourke's "Pragmatism versus materialism in stratigraphy," American Journal of Science 276 (1976): 47–55, is the source of the most-quoted "circular reasoning" line in young-earth geology.  The paper was obtained as a 300-dpi scan and OCR'd, and read in full.

The circular-reasoning sentence is CONTEXT-STRIPPED as our side carries it.  It is verbatim as far as it goes, and it is cut in the middle.  The sentence continues past the usual stopping point to say that stratigraphers feel explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results, and O'Rourke then labels that attitude — "This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."  He is describing an attitude he is about to criticise, in a paper whose entire argument is that the circularity dissolves.  Quoting the first half is quoting the setup and dropping the punchline.

Four other passages verify clean and three of them help us more than the famous one does.  O'Rourke writes at p. 52 that the geologic column "was put together before evolution was known," which is the independence argument the order article needs, and at p. 54 that radiometric dating would not have been feasible had the column not been erected first — a useful sentence for this series precisely because it keeps absolute dating out of the argument.  His p. 52 discussion of Neocalamites, Neotrigonia and Neopilina is usable in the Lazarus-taxa section.  And his actual conclusion, at p. 55, is the sentence our side never prints:  that the process is legitimate as long as it is acknowledged as the pragmatic basis of stratigraphy.

John Woodmorappe 1981 — verified, including the paragraph that refutes the title

Woodmorappe's "The Essential Nonexistence of the Evolutionary-Uniformitarian Geologic Column," CRSQ 18, no. 1 (1981): 46–71, was read in full from the Creation Research Society's own open eprint.  Three passages verify.

The abstract's claim that only 15–20% of the earth's land surface has even three geologic periods in correct consecutive order is VERIFIED as his words.  So are two others — that all ten geologic periods are "undoubtedly represented" in the Holy Cross Mountains of south-central Poland, and that there apparently are regions on earth where all ten periods are found superposed.

Those last two are in the same paper as the title.  Woodmorappe states, in a paper arguing that the column essentially does not exist, that there are places where the whole of it does exist, and names one.  Anyone on our side citing the 15–20% figure needs to know that the same author concedes the counterexample eight pages later.  Print both or print neither.

The Paluxy retraction — verified, and the truncated version overstates it

John D. Morris, "The Paluxy River Mystery," Impact No. 151, Institute for Creation Research, 1 January 1986.  Morris — later ICR's president, and the author of the 1980 book that was one of the two main sources of the man-tracks claim — wrote that none of the four trails at the Taylor site can today be regarded as unquestionably of human origin.  VERIFIED.

The famous sentence, that it would now be improper for creationists to continue using the Paluxy data as evidence against evolution, is CONTEXT-STRIPPED when truncated.  The full sentence opens with "Even though" and closes by saying much remains unknown about the tracks and that research should continue.  Quote the whole sentence.  A truncated version makes the retraction sound more total than it is, which is a way of being wrong in our own disfavour and is still being wrong.

Three details make the retraction more useful than it looks, and one makes it less.  Morris reports a specific, checkable mechanism:  a reddish stain spread across the elongated impressions and produced three-toed colouration patterns, so the prints came to look like tridactyl dinosaur tracks, with the toes visible as colouration only and no impression in most cases.  He credits the discovery to Glen Kuban, who noticed the staining in 1982 and who claims neutrality on the creation-evolution question — so the person who overturned the claim was neither a creationist nor an anti-creationist campaigner.  And in the same article ICR distances itself from Carl Baugh's prints as being of uncertain origin.

The thing that weakens it:  the list of "mysterious points" immediately before the retraction includes a sentence noting that a reddish stain can easily be applied to a rock surface with readily available chemical agents.  That is an insinuation of tampering, made without naming anyone and without evidence, in the same breath as the withdrawal.  Verdict on that sentence:  dead, and it should be quoted only by an article prepared to call it what it is.  Quoting the retraction while hiding the insinuation would be the same offence this page exists to prevent.

Two second-hand citations that must be replaced or flagged

Kevin Henke quoting Howe et al. 1988 on the Precambrian pollen samples — that the samples were collected at depths of only three to four inches — is verified as Henke's quotation.  The CRSQ original was never obtained.  This is a critic's site standing in for a creationist primary, which is the mirror image of the defect this page exists to fix, and it must be flagged or replaced.

John Marwitt's findings on the Moab bones — loose blowsand, unfossilised — are reported by Glen Kuban.  Marwitt's own report was not obtained.  Do not present it as a direct quotation of Marwitt.

Three passages verified through a summarising fetch, not a raw page read

The dossier flags these itself and so does this page.  Brian Thomas's 2015 ICR statement that no undisputed human skeletal remains are known in Flood rocks, Lacey and Foley's 2018 Answers in Genesis line that pre-Flood human fossils could conceivably be found one day, and the 1981 Creation/Evolution report of the Utah Museum of Natural History's assessment of the Meister specimen were all retrieved through a summarising fetch rather than by reading the raw page.  Re-verify the exact wording before printing any of the three.

Biostratigraphy as a working technology — verified, and it is the strongest material in the section

Four industry sources were opened in full and all four verify:  a BP biosteering abstract from AAPG's Cairo 2002 meeting, which states that the technique gives greater precision than seismic and greater discrimination than wireline logs; a Saudi Aramco account on the AAPG Wiki reporting biosteering over more than a million feet while maintaining reservoir contact above 90%; and a 1995 AAPG Bulletin item, verified through its OSTI record only, calling the work critical to drilling horizontal wells while representing a minute portion of total expenditure.  The full 1995 paper was not obtained.

This is the best evidence in the order article and it does not depend on anyone's opinion:  commercial firms spend real money steering drill bits by fossil content, and would stop if the order were not there.

Young-earth explanations of fossil order — our own side, read in the original

Twenty-three passages checked, every one from the PDF of the creationist paper itself rather than from a summary.  Twenty-two verify.  One is second-hand.  This is the second-cleanest block in the audit, and the reason is the same as for the convergence block:  creationist conference proceedings are freely downloadable, so there is no temptation to quote them through anybody.

The verified passages include Tim Clarey and Jeffrey Werner's claim to have compiled nearly three thousand stratigraphic columns across five continents; their statement that the progressive Flood model reads the fossil record as a steadily changing record of ecological zones; their account of how most creation geologists explain extinction events, as the last occurrence of organisms inundated at the same approximate global elevation; and Clarey's own 2015 concession that careful comparison of rock types against sequence boundaries shows very few ideal megasequences — which undercuts the tidy story told elsewhere in the same corpus.

Three admissions against interest were verified and they are the most valuable items here.  Tomkins and Clarey 2023 write that it remains a mystery why no undisputed pollen has been found in the earliest megasequences, that questions remain about why distinctly different fossil assemblages occur in three megasequences that are all dominantly marine, and that their interpretation still has difficulty explaining trackways and footprints in some Cenozoic layers.  Carl Froede, Peter Akridge and John Reed 2015 write in Journal of Creation that physical correlation independent of the timescale, spanning entire continents, "remains to be demonstrated."  Michael Oard and John Reed's 2020 review of the whole field concludes that all models need further development.

The one defect:  Marcus Ross's 2014 statement — that his experience with fossil collections and evolutionary paleontologists gives no sympathy for unrestrained skepticism of their work — was read inside Arment 2020, not in Ross's own paper.  Creationist quoting creationist is permissible under house rules, but the article must either open Ross 2014 or attribute the words to Arment's report of them.

One primary was never opened:  Whitcomb and Morris 1961, characterised by Clarey as invoking hydrodynamic selectivity and sorting by size, composition and settling velocity.  Clarey's characterisation is verified as Clarey's.  The Genesis Flood itself was not read.

The synapsid sequence — Wise's second concession, which almost nobody quotes

Five further passages from Wise 1995 were checked for the mammal-jaw-to-ear article, transcribed from 300-dpi renders of the printed journal pages rather than from OCR or from any secondary site.  All five verify.

The important one is on p. 220, under Wise's heading asserting that the record offers encouragement to the creationist model.  There he writes that the mammal-like reptiles lie stratigraphically between the oldest reptiles and the oldest mammals, making them a good higher-taxon intermediate; that their teeth change "virtually monotonic" up-section from cone-shaped reptilian teeth toward complex mammalian ones; and that the three jaw bones change, likewise monotonically, from three roughly equal bones toward the single bone of the mammal jaw.  He concludes that they are therefore morphological intermediates as well as stratigraphic ones.

His authority for the jaw claim is his own footnote, and it is a mainstream one:  J. A. Hopson's 1994 chapter on synapsid evolution in the Paleontological Society's Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution.  Wise is not taking a creationist's word for it and neither does the reader.

This is a far more specific concession than the passage everybody quotes, and it is the exact claim the mammal-jaw-to-ear article is about.  A young-earth creationist with a Harvard palaeontology doctorate, writing in a creationist journal, states that the jaw bones change monotonically up-section.

What Wise does next, which the article may not omit.  The rest of p. 220 proposes a creationist alternative:  the cynodont groups differ mainly in dentition, dentition implies diet, diets intermediate between reptile and mammal diets imply the animals lived in a geographic belt between a reptile zone and a mammal zone before the Flood, and a transgressing flood would then bury them in the intermediate position where they are found.  He predicts that several independent mammal-like-reptile lineages should each become more mammal-like up-section, and asserts that this is what is seen.  His conclusion on p. 221 grants that substantial supporting evidence for macroevolutionary theory can be found in the record of stratomorphic intermediates, and that the creation model is not developed well enough to evaluate it.

One problem with Wise's alternative that the article should name, because it is not in his paper.  The synapsid record is not one stratigraphic band.  It spans the Permian and Triassic across the Karoo, the Russian platform, China, Argentina, Brazil and Texas, with the same trend appearing on separate continents in the same order.  A single pre-Flood ecological belt would have to have been reproduced independently on several landmasses and then sorted identically by the same flood.  Wise does not address that.

A transcription note for anyone working from the scan.  The printed original misspells three taxon names — the tritylodonts, chiniquodonts and tritheledonts all appear in garbled form on the page.  Transcribe as printed and mark [sic].  Our own note file's rendering of the famous concession is missing the word "be," which is present in the original; and where our notes misspell Plesiadapis, that misspelling is Wise's own and is faithful.

Pre-Homo hominins — baraminology, and where the quotations came from

Seven passages checked.  Four verify.  Three are second-hand citations that the house rules do not allow, and two of the three are our own side's defect, not ours.

Todd Wood's 2010 result verifies, and it goes against a position this project holds.  Wood's Answers Research Journal paper states in its abstract that the results tentatively confirm the common creationist claim that fossil hominids divide into human and non-human categories — and the division it produces puts Australopithecus afarensis in a cluster with chimpanzees and gorillas.  On Au. africanus Wood's discussion says the evidence for including it in the human holobaramin "appears quite weak," and gives the numbers:  bootstrap support of 62% and 59% in two datasets, the correlation vanishing entirely when the outgroup is reduced, and significant negative correlation in a third dataset.  VERIFIED, free full text, fetched.

Wood's 2011 reply is the strongest sentence our side has produced on this and it verifies:  that casually dismissing the method because it gave a result we are personally uncomfortable with "would be a serious error."  He adds that creationists who dislike the sediba result should do their own statistical analysis, and that selectively quoting experts is not an adequate refutation.  That is a creationist telling creationists not to quote-mine, in print, and it belongs in the article.

The defect is in the published creationist objection to Wood.  Menton, Habermehl and DeWitt's 2010 discussion paper quotes Tim White and Chris Stringer against the sediba result — both by way of Balter 2010 in Science, not from White's or Stringer's own publications.  Under this project's rules that is a defect to be fixed rather than a citation to be copied.  It is also in tension with their own preceding objection, which is that cladistic characters are evolutionists' biased opinions:  mainstream opinion is dismissed as biased where it produces an unwelcome grouping and cited as authoritative where it produces a welcome one.  Two entries, two MISCITED verdicts, and they are on our side of the argument.

The third second-hand citation is ours.  Our notes carry Günter Bechly's claim that the Lovejoy pelvis reconstruction was never documented in the technical literature — that Johanson, Lovejoy and Coppens 1982 and Tague and Lovejoy 1986 do not describe the procedure, and that only a 1979 conference abstract does.  That claim is presently sourced only to Bechly's Evolution News blog post, by way of our notes.  It is a checkable claim and it may well be right.  Check it against those three papers before the article repeats it.

One verification done properly, and it cuts against the creationist framing.  The NOVA clip circulating under the title "Fixing Lucy's Pelvis with a Power Saw" was checked against the PBS transcript, which is live and free, and against frames extracted from the clip itself.  The clip does show a hand-held rotary cutting tool cutting a pale fragment.  The fragment is a plaster cast.  Johanson's narration in the same breath says Lovejoy made a copy specifically so as not to tamper with the original.  Any use of this clip must say that.

The legitimate criticism survives and it is narrower:  a reconstruction that converts an ape-like pelvic flare into a human-like one, and which is the primary evidence for the locomotor claim, was documented on television rather than in the technical literature.  That is the argument.  "He used a saw" is not.

Our own side, audited — creationist and ID paleontology

Thirty-three further passages checked.  Twenty-nine verify, one has a transcription problem with a long history, two are miscited, and one could not be verified at all.

Wise on his own movement — three verified passages that our side rarely prints

On p. 218 of the 1995 paper Wise tells creationists, in capitals in the original, not to use the phrase "transitional form" in their argumentation, because the term is interpretive and ambiguous.  That is a trained creationist palaeontologist telling his own movement that its central slogan begs the question.  On the same page he says Gould's different definition of the term has caused misunderstanding, leading some creationists to conclude wrongly that Gould does not regard Archaeopteryx as transitional.  That is Wise, who studied under Gould, saying in a creationist journal in 1995 that creationists misread Gould — and it belongs beside Gould's own 1981 complaint.

On p. 219 Wise names the whale record as the largest challenge to his own model from the stratomorphic intermediate record, and states that creation theory has no good explanation for it.  His reasons are specific:  the archaeocete sequence is both stratigraphic and morphological, it is a land-to-sea transition so the transgressive-Flood ordering argument cannot reach it, and whales appear only in sediments that are post-Flood on his own model.  All three VERIFIED.  This is the single most valuable passage in the paper for the whale-evolution article.

And on p. 220, item (d), he suggests that Loch Ness and similar sightings might be living Basilosaurus.  VERIFIED, and dead — dead by his own movement's ruling, since CMI now lists living dinosaurs and plesiosaurs among arguments that are inadvisable to use, and the Zuiyo-maru carcass among those that should definitely not be used.

"If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism" — a one-letter problem

Wise's chapter in John Ashton's In Six Days contains the sentence that everyone quotes:  that he would be the first to admit it if all the evidence turned against creationism, but would remain a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.

VERIFIED against a publisher-authorised posting — Answers in Genesis publishes the chapter in full with a notice that Master Books granted permission.  With one flag:  the authorised text reads "turned," past tense.  Richard Dawkins quotes it as "turns" in The God Delusion, and essentially every secondary source follows Dawkins.  The print first edition could not be checked; In Six Days is not on the Internet Archive under any searchable identifier.  Use "turned" and cite the authorised posting.  Do not copy Dawkins' wording.

This is why the concession is worth anything.  A man who says he would remain a creationist against all evidence, and who then writes in his own movement's journal that the evidence favours macroevolution on three of Darwin's four counts, is not shading his data toward his conclusion.  State the tension.  It is the strongest thing we have.

Wise 2002 versus Wise 1995 — the same author, a different strength of claim

Faith, Form, and Time (Broadman & Holman, 2002) restates the 1995 framework with markedly more confidence.  The book describes stratomorphic intermediates as rare and apparently absent altogether from the groups with the best fossil record, naming shallow marine invertebrates.  It then disposes of the examples in the two 1995 moves:  the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic cases may be ecological intermediates, and the Cenozoic ones may be series documenting diversification within a created kind.  On completeness it offers, as "our observation," that a very large percentage of modern species have a fossil record.

All three VERIFIED as wording, with two hard caveats.  There is no number and no citation behind the completeness claim, and the word used is observation — in that form it is unusable, and it is the ancestor of the 80% claim audited above.  And "apparently not found at all among the groups with the best fossil record" is a substantially stronger statement than "three of Darwin's four expectations have been confirmed," which is what the same author wrote seven years earlier.  The book gives the reader no hint that he had.  Cite both and note the difference.  Pretending the 2002 book says what the 1995 paper says would be exactly the thing this page audits other people for.

Source caveat, and it is a rule problem.  The only machine-readable copy reachable is an Internet Archive item uploaded by a private account and tagged with a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark, which is plainly false for a 2002 book still in copyright.  It was used only to locate and verify wording.  No page numbers could be recovered.  A writing agent must supply them from a print or authorised copy before publication.

Wise's later original work — and a concession from inside creationism about the geologic column

Wise's 2016 taphonomic note on Homo naledi verifies:  a death assemblage deposited over months to years rather than a single event, monospecific apart from washed-in rodent fragments and six bird bones a modern caver almost certainly carried in, best explained by deliberate deposition by humans using artificial light, and the individuals described as probably a family unit recently dispersed from Babel.  The same paper records his earlier verdict on H. floresiensis — that most of the objections creationists raise about palaeoanthropological fossils, such as insufficient material or poor preservation, do not apply to that specimen.  VERIFIED, and a concession against interest.

Wise and Richardson 2023 is the most important creationist item in this audit after the 1995 concession, because it is a creationist doing original quantitative work on the same public database this series plans to use.  For each of 114 stratigraphic boundaries they counted species occurring on both sides of the boundary within two degrees of latitude and longitude of each other, with robustness checks at one, three and four degrees.  Two of their findings verify and both cut against the movement:  that the global biostratigraphic column "seems to be real," and that the order in which the Flood buried fossils bore no relationship to fluctuations in Flood energy.

The first is the answer to the folk-creationist claim that the geologic column is a paper construct, and it comes from a Harvard-trained creationist palaeontologist working from a million-record public database.  The second is a direct hit on hydrodynamic-sorting models.  The right response to this paper is not to quote it but to reproduce it.  We have the same database.

The retired-argument lists — twelve verified entries, and one piece of history that is not what it looks like

Creation Ministries International's page of arguments creationists should not use was fetched in full, and so was the 2005 Wayback capture of the Answers in Genesis page it descends from.  There is one list, not two, and it changed hands:  AiG published it first, with captures running from December 2001; the URL has returned a redirect in every capture from at least April 2023, so the page is gone from AiG's site; CMI, the former AiG-Australia, kept and maintains it.  The two texts share their preamble almost verbatim, including the line about skeptics criticising creationists for retracting doubtful arguments while also accusing them of being unwilling to change their minds.

What AiG has instead is a nineteen-article topic hub with only two fossil-relevant items.  So if an article says "Answers in Genesis tells creationists not to use X," check the current AiG site, because for most fossil items that is now true only of CMI.

Verified entries relevant to this series, all from the CMI page unless noted:  that Archaeopteryx was genuine and the forgery charge is dead, with CMI conceding the specimen and disputing only the interpretation; that Castenedolo is an intrusive burial and the Calaveras skull "was probably a hoax planted into a mine by miners," which kills the two classic human-fossils-out-of-order cases from our own side; that the snap-frozen mammoth argument is contradicted by the geological setting; that the Zuiyo-maru carcass was almost certainly a basking shark; that the Dubois-renounced-Java-man claim misreads Dubois, sourced by CMI to Gould; that much of Carl Baugh's material is not scientifically sound and should not be relied on; that the giant-human-skeleton photographs are digital fakes; that living dinosaurs and plesiosaurs are no longer a wait-and-see position, because enough years have passed and photographs can now be taken with a smartphone; and that gold-chains-in-coal reports fail not because the objects are fake but because the coal is no longer associated with the artefact.

The single most quotable entry for the Trends article is the transitional-forms one.  CMI advises against the flat denial and supplies replacement wording, on the ground that candidates exist even if they are highly dubious and the flat form invites a comeback.  The 2005 AiG version is identical except that it says 140 years where CMI now says 150.  Note precisely what is and is not conceded:  CMI concedes that candidates exist and that the slogan is unsafe; it does not concede that the candidates are good.  And the replacement wording is itself a claim this series has to test — "a handful of disputable examples" has to survive contact with Wise's own list of confirmed stratomorphic series, and on Wise's accounting it does not.

One editorial change worth recording.  The 2005 AiG page names Kent Hovind as the author of an attempted critique of the list.  The current CMI page has anonymised him.  The 2005 wording is the informative one and it is in the Wayback capture.

And one item moved between tiers in both directions at once.  The Paluxy entry sits in AiG's "definitely not" block in 2005 and in CMI's "doubtful" tier now — but CMI's text is harder, inserting a line that research to date has not been promising.  The underlying claim is dead on both versions.

Not on either list, and therefore still live within the movement:  the horse series as a discredited icon, "the Cambrian explosion refutes evolution," polystrate fossils, "the geologic column exists nowhere in full," coelacanth-as-living-fossil arguments, and Precambrian pollen.  That absence is not endorsement.  It means only that neither organisation has ruled, and this series has to rule itself.

Bechly's publication record, stated precisely because it will be checked

His OpenAlex author record lists 91 works cited 2,144 times, in genuine primary taxonomy venues — Cretaceous Research, Palaeontology, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, Zootaxa, eLife, Scientific Reports and others.  He erected a new fossil insect order in 2011, co-edited a Cambridge University Press volume on the Crato beds in 2007, and has continued to publish taxonomy after joining the Discovery Institute.  Under this project's rule he is citable, by a wide margin.

But the rule does not transfer.  Describing fossil dragonflies in Zootaxa does not make a claim about global fossil-record completeness peer-reviewed.  Cite his taxonomy as taxonomy and treat his fossil-record arguments as arguments.

His talks are now sourced properly — three recordings of substantially the same lecture are identified with upload dates, lengths and channels, and the 2019 one our notes meant is pinned.  Quotations from them come from auto-generated captions, which are word-accurate but not sentence-accurate, and any article quoting them must say so.

The whale sequence

Audited elsewhere, and not counted in the table above.  The whale-evolution dossier was still at its section stubs when this consolidation was made, so no whale passage entered the count.  The only whale quotations audited on this page are Wise's — his 1995 statement that the whale record is the largest challenge to the creation model, and his abstract's naming of the early whale series as a significant challenge, both verified above.  The dossier has since written its own ledger, at whale-evolution/research/whale-sequence.md, covering the cetacean literature it opened during research.  Its verdicts live there and are not repeated here.

B. What the same sources said against us

Every entry in Section A carries its own context note.  This section gathers the ones that cut hardest, in one place, so that nobody has to be told about them by a reader.  They are not concessions offered for balance.  They are the reason anything in Section A can be trusted.

Each of these authors was opened for a quotation this series wanted, and each said something in the same document that damages it.

• David Raup proposes neutral, random-walk evolution as his alternative to gradual Darwinian change — not design. In the same article he says a mountain of experimental and observational evidence shows natural selection works, and that the record clearly shows evolution has occurred if evolution means change.
• Boyce Rensberger, reporting the 1980 Field Museum meeting, wrote three paragraphs before the Eldredge quotation that the unresolved controversy "has often been exploited by religious fundamentalists" who mistook it for weakness in the fact of evolution rather than in the mechanism. His article opens by saying recent discoveries have only strengthened the common-ancestry conclusion.
• Thomas Schopf, at the same meeting, defended gradualism and called living fossils a myth, on the ground that soft-part evolution would be invisible to a palaeontologist. That is a live counter-argument from the meeting our side quotes, and the article should answer it rather than omit it.
• Douglas Erwin's explanation for the clumps is developmental: gene regulatory network kernels formed early, became effectively unchangeable, and closed off later variation. He is arguing that the evolutionary process itself has changed through time.
• Stephen Jay Gould says species-level intermediates are rare and that this is what his theory predicts, that higher-level transitions are well documented, and that being quoted by creationists as denying transitional forms is infuriating. His worked example is the reptile jaw becoming the mammal ear.
• Ernst Mayr answers his own gaps sentence on the same page, with incompleteness plus Archaeopteryx plus the therapsid-to-mammal series, and a full-page synapsid cladogram overleaf.
• George Gaylord Simpson explains his own gaps by fast evolution in small, geographically restricted populations — the same answer Eldredge and Gould gave.
• Steven Holland, in his Paleontological Society presidential address, grants that the record is imperfect and incomplete as a record of everything that has lived, says he is not arguing that its quality should be ignored, and concludes that it is good enough to do evolutionary biology with.
• James Valentine's abstract, in the sentences our notes cut, records that Pleistocene sampling has been biased toward shallow water, that fragile and minute forms are probably under-represented, and that many rare species are still undiscovered.
• Michael Benton's article is an argument that the record is good enough, and its last paragraph calls it incontrovertible evidence of Darwinian evolution. His figures show completeness is a per-group number, not a property of "the fossil record."
• Mike Foote notes that increased morphological clustering could arise from simple diffusive evolution plus extinction of intermediates.
• Sanderson and Donoghue find that homoplasy levels in morphological and molecular data do not differ significantly — which is a direct answer to the convergence argument.
• Pisani and colleagues hold that molecular phylogenies should not be presumed more reliable than morphological ones when the two clash.
• Strait and Grine find that including fossils fixed the morphological tree rather than breaking it.
• Christopher Paul, in a volume on the adequacy of the fossil record, charges his own profession with an inferiority complex — accepting the limits of their data whenever the record conflicts with other sciences.
• Kurt Wise concedes three of Darwin's four expectations, tells creationists to stop saying "transitional form," says creationists misread Gould, and names the whale record as the largest challenge to his own model.
• Wise and Richardson conclude that the global biostratigraphic column seems to be real, and that fossil burial order bore no relationship to flood energy.
• Creation Ministries International rules that "there are no transitional forms" is unsafe because candidates exist.
• Bechly's own refereed paper reports six living dragonfly families with no crown-group fossil record.

C. The dead and the defective, grouped by defect

Forty-six entries failed, in five distinguishable ways.  They are grouped by how they failed, because the repair is different in each case.

C1. Misattributed — the words are real, the author is not

C2. Miscited — right words, wrong citation

And four cases where a secondary stands in for a primary that exists and could be reached.  Howe et al. 1988 quoted through a critic's website; John Marwitt's Moab report quoted through Glen Kuban; Marcus Ross 2014 quoted through Arment 2020; Tim White and Chris Stringer quoted — by our own side, in a published creationist paper — through a 2010 Science news item rather than from their own publications.

C3. Context-stripped — accurate text, reversed meaning

Ten passages.  In every case the sentences that change the meaning are within a page of the words quoted, and in five cases they are in the adjacent sentence.

• Rensberger 1980. The reporter names and rejects the creationist reading three paragraphs before the sentence our side quotes.
• Erwin 2011, twice. The two halves of our notes' quotation are separated by seven journal pages, not by the ellipsis our notes print — and the paper's whole argument is a developmental mechanism.
• Benton 2009. The article argues the record is good enough; the collector's-curve passage is the demonstration of how you would know. Quoting it as evidence of a poor record inverts the paper.
• Kalmar and Currie 2010. The same abstract that calls the continental record highly incomplete also calls the family-level record reasonably representative and says the diversification curve is unlikely to be an artefact of rock bias.
• Mayr 2001. Answered on the same page, with two named examples.
• Erwin and Valentine 2013. The gaps-at-phylum-level paragraph is about the living fauna being a poor sample and assumes throughout that the ancestral forms existed.
• Erwin and Valentine 2013, the underdispersion passage. The creation.com version cuts a Gould citation, a Lewontin citation, and a sentence stating that all pairs of crown phyla had common ancestors.
• O'Rourke 1976. The circular-reasoning sentence is cut in the middle of a sentence, in a paper arguing that the circularity dissolves.
• John D. Morris 1986. The Paluxy retraction, truncated, sounds more total than the full sentence is.

C4. One word, changed by a laundering step

"Underdispersed" became "undispersed" on its way through creation.com and into our notes.  This is worth its own heading because of what the change destroys.  Underdispersed is a term of art:  it says the points are spaced more evenly, or more clumped, than a random draw would produce, and it can be checked against a definition and against a null model.  Undispersed is not a technical term at all and cannot be checked against anything.  A single letter converted a statistical claim into a vague one, and our notes then carried the vague version as though the authors had written it.

C5. Unsourceable — the primary could not be opened, so it does not run

Twenty-four entries.  They fall into three groups, and the groups have different prospects.

Group 1 — a book exists and nobody could get in.  Eldredge and Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution (Columbia University Press, 1982), accounts for four of these by itself:  the "prediction is wrong" passage, the extinction-and-rebound passage, p. 59, and the p. 163 Teggart passage.  Both Internet Archive scans refuse to lend, Google Books previews neither ISBN, and a HathiTrust full-text search for the key sentence returns seven hits every one of which is a creationist secondary quoting it.  That is the signature of a laundered quote.  One 197-page hardback, widely held used, settles four ledger entries at once.

Also here:  Gould's The Panda's Thumb; Eldredge's The Pattern of Evolution, p. 157; Gould's Eight Little Piggies; Futuyma's Science on Trial, p. 82; Everett Olson 1965; Dawkins' River Out of Eden, p. 83; Simpson's Major Features of Evolution (1953), p. 360; and Denton's 1985 table of terrestrial vertebrate family completeness.  Every one of these is a print-disabled scan or a no-preview volume.  Every one is settled by a physical copy or an interlibrary loan.

Group 2 — the paper exists behind a wall.  Goldschmidt 1952 in American Scientist (a single JSTOR read); Valentine 1989's p. 90 passage (a single JSTOR read); Ricklefs 1978 in Science; Mark Pagel's 1999 Nature review, where our own notes are internally inconsistent about the page.

Group 3 — there is no primary and there never was.  Bechly's 80% figure, cited to a Facebook comment that returns an error to any fetcher.  Bechly's collector's-curve sentence, cited to a timestamp in a talk, where our own recount of the curves finds the claim false as stated for dinosaurs, birds, reptiles and insects and true for trilobites.  J. B. Waterhouse's "inaugural lecture," whose only trace is a 1980 creationist magazine quote column that gives no title, no date, no page and no publisher — and to which our own notes then added a department, a city and a year that the column does not supply.  And the 95% / 0.25% / 1% chain, which ends at an unpublished 1988 talk.

Group 3 is the one that matters most, because those four are not waiting on a library.  They are waiting on a measurement that nobody has made.  Three of the four can be replaced with numbers computed from the Paleobiology Database, which is open, keyless, and already access-tested.

D. What this exercise found

Two hundred and thirty-six passages were checked.  One hundred and eighty-one survive as written.  That 236 is the size of this audit — the note-file corpus plus what was read alongside it — and not the number of quotations in the series; the rest are ledgered where they were found, in Section F.  It is a 77% pass rate, and taken alone it flatters the corpus badly, because most of those 181 are quotations that nobody had before — passages found in the sources during the audit, by people reading whole papers instead of hunting for the sentence they already wanted.  A quotation you find by reading the paper is not likely to be wrong.

The number that matters is the one for our own note file.

Sixty-five of the 236 passages came out of /home/share/notes/eric/research/biology/fossil record.md, the 221 KB note file this series was built from.  Of those sixty-five:

Fewer than one in three of our own quotations survived contact with its source unchanged.  Nearly one in three could not be traced to a source at all.

And the cuts ran in one direction.  This is the finding the article has to state plainly, because a reader who works it out for himself will stop reading.

Twenty-five of the sixty-five are defective but sourceable:  eight carry transcription errors, nine are context-stripped, eight are miscited.  All nine of the context-stripped passages were cut in the direction that makes the young-earth argument look stronger.  The pattern is consistent enough to describe mechanically:

• The author's own explanation is the thing that gets cut. Raup's neutral evolution. Erwin's developmental networks. Mayr's answer on the same page. Simpson's small, fast-evolving populations. Gould's insistence that his theory predicts the missing species-level intermediates. In every case a scientist describes a pattern and then explains it, and our notes kept the description and dropped the explanation.
• A sentence gets cut mid-sentence when the second half is unhelpful. O'Rourke's circularity line — from the wider audit, not from the note file, which contains neither O'Rourke nor the Paluxy material.
• An ellipsis hides a page break. Erwin's two halves are seven journal pages apart. Holland's are separated by about 350 words and a page break.
• A paper's conclusion gets inverted. Benton's article argues the record is adequate; the passage we took from it was used to argue the opposite. Kalmar and Currie's abstract says the family-level record is reasonably representative in the same breath as the sentence we quoted.
• Three sentences vanish when all three are inconvenient. Valentine's shallow-water sampling bias, the under-representation of fragile and minute forms, and the undiscovered rare species — all three cut, all three against the use our notes made of him.

One cut ran the other way, and it is worth naming, because it shows the mechanism is sloppiness as much as motive.  Our notes' ellipsis in the Raup passage deletes his quarter-million-fossil-species figure — a fact that helps this argument, cut for no reason anyone can reconstruct.  Whoever shortened that passage was not optimising carefully.  They were shortening.

A correction to this section, 3 August 2026, and it costs the page its headline number.  An earlier version said that of "the seventeen passages that were altered, truncated, spliced or re-attributed," sixteen were changed in the direction that makes the young-earth argument look stronger.  That sentence is withdrawn.  It was wrong twice.  The seventeen was the eight VERIFIED-WITH-ERRORS plus the nine CONTEXT-STRIPPED, so it never included the re-attributed passages at all — those are the eight MISCITED, a separate row of the table, and the phrase and the count contradicted each other.  And it treated the eight transcription errors as directional, which they are not:  a dropped "be," a misspelled phenacodontids, "Barnovsky" for Barnosky, "heirarchy" for hierarchy, three OCR slips in the 1972 Eldredge and Gould chapter.  Those change no argument in any direction.  The eight miscitations are mostly bookkeeping in the same way — a wrong year, a wrong author order, a wrong journal, a wrong issue, a press release standing in for the paper it reports — with one real exception, the sentence that our notes hand to Gould and that Gould was quoting from MacGillavry.  What survives is the count that can actually be made from the rows, and it is the context-stripping:  nine passages, nine cut our way, zero cut the other way.  The two context-stripped passages in the wider 236 that do run against our side — O'Rourke's circularity line and John D. Morris's truncated Paluxy retraction — are not in the note file at all, which was checked directly:  the 219 KB file contains no occurrence of "Paluxy" and none of O'Rourke.  They belong to the wider audit and were never among the sixty-five.  The correction narrows the claim and does not soften it.  A defect rate is not the finding here; the finding is that when a passage in our notes had been shortened in a way that changed its meaning, it had been shortened our way every single time.

Two blocks came through clean, and the reason is instructive.  All forty-four convergence quotations verified, and twenty-two of twenty-three young-earth order-model quotations verified.  What those two subjects have in common is that their sources are freely downloadable — open-access journals and molecular-biology literature in the first case, creationist conference proceedings in the second.  The defect rate in our notes tracks how hard the source is to open, not how much anyone wanted the conclusion.  Paywalled Elsevier papers, print-disabled 1980s books and out-of-print monographs are where the corruption is, because that is where a quotation has to travel through somebody else's website to reach us.

The practical conclusion for the series.  Three things follow, and they are cheap.

1. Do not quote from a book nobody on this project can open. Fifteen of the twenty-four dead entries are books, and a single out-of-print 1982 hardback accounts for seven of them. Four books, bought or borrowed, close most of this list.
2. Prefer a number we computed to a sentence somebody wrote. Three of the four worst-sourced claims in the corpus are about the composition or completeness of the fossil record, and all three are measurable from open databases. A number we own cannot be quote-mined, laundered, or traced back to a talk nobody recorded.
3. Print the author's explanation whenever the article prints the author's observation. That single rule would have prevented nine of the ten context-stripping failures above, and it costs one sentence each time.

One more thing should be said, and it is not a technicality.  Two of the six findings in "What this audit changed" go against our own side:  a Gould sentence we were relying on cannot be produced, and a completeness figure our side repeats on camera is attributed to a paper that cannot contain it.  A third — the 95% chain — kills a paragraph that has been in creationist circulation since 1991.  This page found more against us than for us, and it was written by people who wanted the opposite result.  That is the only reason a skeptical reader has to believe anything else on this site.

E. Open items, and where this page broke its own rules

E1. Rule violations, self-reported

The brief for these dossiers forbids taking an author's words from a secondary site, and forbids citing anything not opened directly.  Four entries on this page fall short of that, and they are printed here rather than buried, because a page that audits other people's sourcing cannot hide its own.

1. Ricklefs 1978, Science 199: 58–60 — the text was taken from the TalkOrigins Quote Mine Project, not from Science. science.org returns 403 behind a Cloudflare interstitial to every header set tried, JSTOR is closed to automated access on this project, and no repository copy exists. The source used is a hostile one that reproduces the quotation in order to restore the context creationists cut, which makes fabrication very unlikely — and does not satisfy the rule. Either get Science 199: 58–60 or drop the quotation. It does not run in an article in its present state.
2. Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was verified against an Internet Archive upload that is almost certainly unauthorised. It was used only to locate and confirm wording. Any article must cite the printed Belknap/Harvard edition.
3. Wise's Faith, Form, and Time was verified against an Internet Archive upload tagged with a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark, which is plainly false for a 2002 book still in copyright. Used only to confirm wording. No page numbers could be recovered, so no quotation from it may be published until someone supplies them from a print or authorised copy.
4. Foote 1997 was obtained from a Zenodo bulk deposit whose CC-BY licence claim is almost certainly wrong. It is indexed in the library as copyright accordingly.

Three further sourcing weaknesses that are not rule violations but must not be forgotten.  Molnar 2008 was read inside Conway Morris 2010 and never opened.  Whitcomb and Morris 1961 was never opened; only Clarey's characterisation of it was.  And three passages in the order-and-anomalies block were verified through a summarising fetch rather than a raw page read, and need their exact wording re-checked before printing.

E2. Page numbers that do not exist yet

Four passages are verified as text with no verified page number.  None may be published with a page citation until somebody opens a copy.

• Simpson 1980, the gap-scaling passage. Confirmed clause by clause through HathiTrust's in-volume search, which returns a hit count but refuses to show the page. Our notes' "pp. 9–10" rests on an imgur screenshot alone.
• Erwin and Valentine 2013, pp. 340, 104 and 216 — all derived from a leaf offset of +14 pinned by five index entries. No page image was ever seen.
• Erwin 2011. The copy read is the corrected proof from the Smithsonian's repository, so no quotation can be given a page inside 27–34.
• Valentine and Erwin 1987, p. 95 — read off a running head in an OCR'd scan.

E3. The reads a human could close in an afternoon

Two JSTOR reads, on the free account:  Goldschmidt 1952 in American Scientist 40(1): 84–98, and Valentine 1989 at jstor.org/stable/2400845 for the p. 90 passage and the "at least 85%" sentence.

One ten-minute job for the next agent:  run the HathiTrust in-volume phrase search against Simpson's Major Features of Evolution (1953).  The route worked on Why and How; it was not tried on this title only because the endpoint had rate-limited.

Two browser opens:  Asher, Geisler and Sánchez-Villagra 2008 and Springer's reply, both in Systematic Biology — the published paleontological answer to the paper the convergence argument leans on hardest.  Oxford Academic returns 403 to every fetcher and the Wayback Machine has no capture.

Four books to buy or borrow, in order of how many ledger entries each closes:  Eldredge and Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution (Columbia University Press, 1982) — seven entries, of which four are passages our own notes rely on; Gould, The Panda's Thumb (1980) — the staircase sentence, and with it finding 1 above; Simpson, Why and How (1980) — not the text, which is confirmed, but the page numbers; Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) — the 79.1% and 87.8% terrestrial-vertebrate table that is the likely ancestor of the 80% claim.

E4. Where the working is

Every verdict on this page is traceable to one of ten research dossiers, each of which holds the full quotations, the routes that worked, the routes that failed, and the open questions.  This page is the summary; those are the evidence.

These counts will not match the per-dossier ledgers row for row, and the reason is worth stating.  Several passages were checked independently by two people — the Wise 1995 concession by three — and each is credited here only to whoever reached it first.  The stasis and completeness dossiers lose the most that way, because their subjects were audited in Sections A and B before the consolidation began.  Their own ledgers run to 34 and 17 rows respectively; 23 and 10 of those are passages nobody else had touched.

E5. What this page does not cover

The whale sequence is not audited here.  The only whale quotation checked on this page is Wise's, and Wise himself calls that sequence the largest challenge to the creation model — so it is the article where a bad quotation would cost the most.  The whale-evolution dossier has since built its own ledger; read it rather than assuming this page covers the article.

Microfossils are absent from the completeness audit on this page entirely.  Deep-sea calcareous nannoplankton, planktic foraminifera, diatoms and radiolaria are the one part of the record that is genuinely near-continuous, and a skeptical reader will raise them, correctly, as the best test case for stasis.  Every completeness figure quoted on this page comes from studies that explicitly exclude them.  A separate microfossil dossier has since been written, with a ledger of its own, and nothing in it is counted here.

Nothing on this page has been computed from primary data.  Every number in this ledger is somebody else's number, checked against somebody else's paper.  That is the right job for a quotes page and the wrong job for this series.  The measurements are where the argument actually is.

F. Where the rest of the ledgers are

This page is not the series' only quotation audit, and it was never meant to be the whole of one.  It covers the inherited corpus.  Every research dossier in the series also keeps a ledger of the sources it opened, with the same verdict vocabulary and the same rule that a quotation which cannot be traced does not run, and each ledger is published beside its own article.  A reader who wants the complete picture reads them alongside this page.  All paths are relative to html/unpublished-ai/.

Consolidated into the counts above.  These nine ledgers were audited before this page was assembled, and their passages are inside the 236.  They hold the full quotations, the routes that worked, the routes that failed, and the open questions that this page only summarises.

• fossil-record-trends/research/stasis-and-punctuated-equilibrium.md
• fossil-record-trends/research/completeness-and-collectors-curves.md
• fossil-record-trends/research/gap-structure-and-disparity.md
• fossil-record-trends/research/convergence-morphology-vs-molecules.md
• fossil-record-trends/research/creationist-id-paleontology-audit.md
• fossil-order-and-the-flood/research/order-and-anomalies.md
• fossil-order-and-the-flood/research/yec-order-models.md
• mammal-jaw-to-ear/research/synapsid-sequence.md
• pre-human-hominins/research/pre-homo-hominins.md

Written after this consolidation, and counted only in themselves.  These nine ledgers cover quotations the articles took from sources opened during research rather than from our notes.  Nothing in them is included in any number on this page, and nothing on this page is repeated in them.

• fossil-record-trends/research/microfossil-completeness.md — deep-sea plankton, the best test case for stasis, and absent from Section A entirely
• whale-evolution/research/whale-sequence.md — the article Wise names as the hardest case for our own side
• fish-to-tetrapod/research/tetrapod-sequence.md
• horse-series/research/horse-sequence.md
• missing-transitions/research/missing-transitions.md
• cambrian-explosion/research/cambrian-fossils.md
• archaeopteryx-and-bird-origins/research/bird-origins.md
• fossil-reconstruction-and-fraud/research/reconstruction-and-fraud.md
• pre-human-hominins/research/rupe-lucy-mixture.md — the second hominin ledger, on the Pygmy Human Hypothesis

Why the split is kept rather than merged.  A quotation belongs to one ledger and one only.  Copying the newer entries onto this page would create two records of the same verdict, and the moment one of them is corrected the other becomes a lie that looks authoritative.  The cost of the split is that no single page prints every verdict in the series; the benefit is that every verdict has exactly one place where it can be corrected.  This page's own value depends on that:  what it audits is the corpus a quote-mine would have contaminated, and diluting it with quotations that were read straight out of their own sources would hide the very defect rate it exists to report.