On 3/21/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
If Darwin was responding to the work of others than his book can no longer be considered a primary source.
"Primary" and "secondary" refer to how information is used. And most secondary sources become primary sources over time, anyway (Darwin's _Origin_ is now taken less as a scientific work than as an artifact of the 19th century evolutionary thought).
I think you have it all backwards. I do agree that reading the original is often much more difficult, and that secondary works fulfill a simplifying function. But any secondary interpretation imposes additional views, or creates distortions of the original material, or begins the cherry-picking process.
Of course it does. The goal is that the *experts* should be the ones doing the distortion and cherry-picking of the source material, not the hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. That's the point of WP:NOR.
Oh! It seems as though this approach only reinforces the socally acceptable POV.
It gives it primacy, yes. But that's the point of WP:NPOV. We're not a place to launch theories, we are just a mirror.
What you are seeking is more than a simple acknowledgement of the difficulty of using primary sources. When you put this in terms of patient explanations you are going much further and presuming him to be wrong.
I don't quite follow you on this part. But if you're talking about the courtroom analogy, it is just an analogy. The book itself, if you are curious, is Joseph Dumit, "Picturing Personhood." It's quite good.
FF