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TalkOrigins Archive
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The TalkOrigins Archive is a popular website that presents mainstream science perspectives on the antievolution claims of young-earth, old-earth, and "intelligent design" creationists. With sections on evolution, creationism, and hominid evolution, the web site provides broad coverage of evolutionary biology and the socio-political antievolution movement.
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The TalkOrigins Archive began in 1994 when Brett J. Vickers collected several separately posted FAQs from the talk.origins newsgroup and made them conveniently available from a single anonymous FTP site. In 1995, Vickers created the TalkOrigins Archive web site. Vickers, then a computer science graduate student at the University of California at Irvine, produced a distinctive, spare "look" for the web site. Certain creationist web sites have utilized elements of the style Vickers established. Vickers established an easily browsed site, coded a feedback system, and handled all the updates to the Archive from 1995 to 2001.
In 2001, Vickers transferred the TalkOrigins Archive to Wesley R. Elsberry, since Vickers's work demanded much of his attention, leaving little time to maintain the web site. Elsberry organized a group of volunteers to handle the maintenance of the Archive, now including Troy Britain, Reed Cartwright, Mike Dunford, Kenneth Fair, David Iain Greig, Mike Hopkins, David Horn, Kathleen Hunt, Mark Isaak, Adam Marczyk, Larry A. Moran, Ross Myers, Steven Pirie-Shepherd, Douglas Theobald, Brett Vickers, and John Wilkins.
In 2004, Kenneth Fair incorporated the TalkOrigins Foundation as a Texas 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The Foundation's purposes include funding and maintaining the TalkOrigins Archive and holding copyrights to Archive articles, thereby simplifying the process of reprinting and updating those articles. The copyright issue has posed a particular problem since the FAQs started off as a small collection with little thought given to copyright but have since mushroomed. In 2005, the Foundation was granted tax-exempt status by the IRS.
The FAQs and FRAs (frequently rebutted assertions) on the TalkOrigins Archive cover a wide range of topics associated with evolutionary biology and creationism. These include Mark Isaak's Index to Creationist Claims, a list of creationist positions on various issues, rebuttals, and links to primary source material. The TalkDesign sister site fulfils a similar role with the Intelligent Design movement. Also hosted is Jim Foley's fossil hominids sub-site studying the evidence for human evolution and an extensive list of links to websites on both evolutionary biology and creationism. Lastly, the 'Quote Mine Project' examines out-of-context quotes on the subject of evolution.
The archive maintains a feedback system involving reader comments and posts a compilation of these, along with responses, each month. The "Awards" page lists the notice given to the Archive by scientific societies, journals, magazines, and also lists college courses that make use of materials from the Archive.
The archive has been criticised due to its lack of peer review, a procedure normally considered a benchmark of scientific validity. The Archive has responded to this by saying, "While materials on the Archive have not necessarily been subjected to formal peer-review, many have been subjected to several cycles of commentary in the newsgroup prior to being added to the Archive. Most of our materials provide links and/or bibliographic references to enable the reader to evaluate the evidence for themselves."[1]
The Archive engages in something of an informal peer review by refusing to publish badly written, badly sourced, or unsupported articles, and it should be noted that many of the participants in the newsgroup, as well as the Archive, are practicing scientists. Many scientific organizations recommend the site, and its contents have been incorporated into many college courses. This attests to the veracity of the information at the site and a generalized attitude toward its contents by the members of the conventional science community. However, the Archive publishes no original research and focuses instead upon deploying information in scientific journals to counter criticisms of evolution. It is not in the format of a scientific journal and the peer review method of these journals may well be inappropriate for such a secondary source.
Talkorigins.org has gained many awards and achieved substantial recognition[2].
- In August 2002 Scientific American recognized Talkorigins.org for its "detailed discussions (some of which may be too sophisticated for casual readers) and bibliographies relating to virtually any objection to evolution that creationists might raise." ("Other Resources for Defending Evolution", June 2002)
- The webpages of the National Academy of Science, Smithsonian Institute, The Leakey Foundation and other organizations recommend Talkorigins.org.
- Biomednet gave the Archive four stars.[specify]
The Archive is also referenced in college-level textbooks[3] and has had material from the archive incorporated into over 20 college or university courses.[4]