Palerider, I used to be the assistant science curator at the Louisville Musem of History and Science (now called the Louisville Science center). Here is what I know about Dr. Patterson. He doesn't subscribe to creationism and in fact, has responded quite vocally against what he has said being taken out of context by creationists:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html
n 1993 I attended a public lecture on the Queensland University of Technology (Australia) campus by Carl Wieland, the director of the Creation Science Foundation here in Brisbane. That was my first encounter with Carl Wieland and the CSF, and it wasn't to be my last. In his lecture Wieland made a string of absurd claims, to which I objected vocally much to his chagrin. On each point Wieland refused to answer my objections and stated that questions would be allowed at the conclusion of the lecture (where I was allowed to ask one whole question!). Anyway that's another story...
During the lecture a quotation of Dr. Colin Patterson was used to justify the standard creationist argument that 'there are no transitional forms.' Numerous other creationists I have encountered have used the quote, and an extended version (which fills in the text between the ellipsis) appears in the CSF "Revised Quote Book", published in 1990. So the quote is in wide usage, at least in Australia:
"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument."
-- Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.
I decided to get to the bottom of the matter. The quote is from a personal letter dated 10th April 1979 from Dr. Patterson to creationist Luther D. Sunderland and is referring to Dr. Patterson's book "Evolution" (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.). My first step was to read the book. (I believe it is now out of print, but most university libraries should have a copy.) Anyone who has actually read the book can hardly say that Patterson believed in the absence of transitional forms. For example (p131-133):
"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . ."
Patterson goes on to acknowledge that there are gaps in the fossil record, but points out that this is possibly due to the limitations of what fossils can tell us. He finishes the paragraph with:
". . .Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else."
It is actually this statement which is the key to interpreting the Sunderland quote correctly; it is not possible to say for certain whether a fossil is in the direct ancestral line of a species group. Archaeopteryx, for example, is not necessarily directly ancestral to birds. It may have been a species on a side-branch. However, that in no way disqualifies it as a transitional form, or as evidence for evolution. Evolution predicts that such fossils will exist, and if there was no link between reptiles and birds then Archaeopteryx would not exist, whether it is directly ancestral or not. What Patterson was saying to Sunderland was that, of the transitional forms that are known, he could not make a watertight argument for any being directly ancestral to living species groups.
Of course, my opinion on the interpretation was never going to impress a creationist -- I don't think anything is enough to convince a creationist -- so I decided to see if I could get the full text of the letter and see if it would clarify the context. Since the quote appears in the "Revised Quote Book", and the editor claims in the introduction that the text of each quote is held in full, I faxed the CSF and asked if they would supply me with the text of the letter. I received the following fax back from Carl Wieland (Dated 18 June 1993) who apparently remembered our exchange at QUT:
FAX to: Lionel T
From: Carl Wieland
Re: Your requests.
Our past exchanges would have served to show you (if your intention was bona fide) not only the bona fides, but the validity of many of the things you were challenging. Instead of coming back for a genuine discussion in the interests of discovering truth, you have sidestepped these issues and are moving into a totally unrelated area.
I can only assume that your intention is not, and is unlikely to become, bona fide and will therefore not permit our staff to give you the references etc you seek as you are clearly simply looking for the negative and cannot be relied upon to give an objective assessment (not meant as any personal disrespect, but from our encounter at Uni you are clearly so emotionally involved and hostile to our platform that it would serve no useful purpose for us to do your work for you. the quotes in the RQB are extensively referenced, and you have access to public libraries, etc. You are even free to write to the authors yourself, since most would be still alive.
The very reason the RQB is the Revised Quote Book is that the original "Quote Book", published in 1984, had been withdrawn due to an embarrassing number of errors. (Some quotes even seem to have been fabricated.) The introduction of the RQB coyly refers to that fiasco as follows:
"With CSF, as usual, sorely under-funded and overworked at the time, the original Quote Book had been hastily put together from quotes sent in by a number of people. Some of these turned out to have been simply written down on a card after listening to a creationist speaker at a lecture. . ."
It is ironic that so-called Creation 'scientists' (including those of the CSF) often complain that they are not treated with the respect they feel they deserve. Yet any scientist who published a work of such appalling scholarship would probably lose his or her job and certainly would never be taken seriously by the scientific community again. If the sort of 'science' peddled by those responsible for the "Quote Book" is not being taken seriously, it is because creationists are treated exactly the same way that any scientist who acts incompetently would be.
Looking through the RQB does not inspire any confidence that it is any better than the original "Quote Book". Many of the quotations are clearly out of context. Also, out of the 130 quotes, at least 13 (10%) are secondary references. Secondary quotes are a convenient way to misrepresent. Sure, the 'quote' might accurately reproduce the secondary text, but does the secondary text accurately reflect the original text? Then there are the 'uncheckable' quotations: sources like personal letters, lectures, TV interviews, etc. which cannot be referenced in a library. Interestingly, Dr. Colin Patterson is quoted five times. Every single one is from a source uncheckable in a library.