How Much Do You Have To Quote Before You're Not "Quote mining"

I couldn't find any documentation of the first use of the term "quote mining" from a standard reference source.  Lacking that, I went to the alternative which is free, if there's one thing you can say for it, Wikipedia.  Which, considering the un-professional level of editing there,  is ironic in itself.   Here's what it says about that, at least for today:

Scientists and their supporters used the term quote mining as early as the mid-1990s in newsgroup posts to describe quoting practices of certain creationists.[10][11][12] It is used by members of the scientific community to describe a method employed by creationists to support their arguments,[13][14] [15] though it can be and often is used outside of the creation-evolution controversy. Complaints about the practice predate known use of the term: Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in his famous 1973 essay "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" that

"Their [Creationists'] favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin."

This has been compared to the Christian theological method of prooftexting:

The tone of the Wiki article on "quote mining", clearly influenced by the anti-religious bias of this last decade,  is made ironic by reading all of Dobzhansky's essay with ends with this:

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness. 

 One of the great thinkers of our age, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote the following: "Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems much henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of though must follow this is what evolution is. Of course, some scientists, as well as some philosophers and theologians, disagree with some parts of Teilhard's teachings; the acceptance of his worldview falls short of universal. But there is no doubt at all that Teilhard was a truly and deeply religious man and that Christianity was the cornerstone of his worldview. Moreover, in his worldview science and faith were not segregated in watertight compartments, as they are with so many people. They were harmoniously fitting parts of his worldview. Teilhard was a creationist, but one who understood that the Creation is realized in this world by means of evolution.

Dobzhansky would certainly be flamed out of any discussion of this topic on the ScienceBlogs, not to mention de Chardin who, while I don't agree with his theology or existentialism and find his science a bit outmoded, I've defended against new atheists on those very blogs.  And you should read what he says  before then:

Was the Creator in a jocular mood when he made Psilopa petrolei for California oil fields and species of Drosophila to live exclusively on some body-parts of certain land crabs on only certain islands in the Caribbean? The organic diversity becomes, however, reasonable and understandable if the Creator has created the living world not by caprice but by evolution propelled by natural selection. It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.

Imagine him saying that on PZ Myers or just about any "science themed blog",  especially those that are really atheist themed blogs.   I doubt his position as one of the greatest geneticists of the 20th century could  have protected him from the united wrath of PZ's Sci-Rangers.   Jerry Coyne, sort of Dobzhansky's scientific grandson (through Richard Lewontin) would fulminate mightily and unhingedly against him.

Anyway. For this series, the question is how much of Darwin do you have to quote before you aren't "quote mining" anymore?  I ask because in my recent long fight at Sandwalk Blog the two lifejackets in the form of quotations that are always thrown to the eugenics-free Darwin got hauled out by one "Diogenes", as ironically named a scientistic crackpot as inhibits the comment threads.

He'd been heaving the old "quote mining" charge against me for days.   Only, when the boy got around to quoting Darwin - which I suspect he took from Darwin fan club websites-  he clipped off both passages in a way that distorted their meaning.  That is something I've seen done over and over gain on pro-Darwin websites and in other media.  I was very familiar with both quotes clipped in that way.   Needless to say, I pointed it out and gave the entire passages in context to show what they really mean.  Not that that impressed the congregated atheists, one of whom accused me of quote mining what his  buddy "Diogenes" had  clipped off.

I will be discussing each of those oft mined passages in the context of what Darwin wrote what he said, pointing out that in both cases they are mischaracterized  by Darwin's defenders just as creationists misuse other passages.  I know that whenever someone quotes Darwin to criticize what he says that they will be accused of "quote mining".  Of course, if you ask them how you committed that sin they'll get flummoxed and never address your question because 1. they just throw the phrase around like it meant whatever is convenient, 2. odds are, they never read what the quote is taken from.

In the long argument last week, I challenged "J Thomas", "Diogenes", Allan Miller and others to list books they'd read on the topic.   Other than Miller claiming to have read On the Origin of Species,  none of them could list a single work they'd read, including the ones I cited and quoted.  And yet they all resorted to the accusation of "quote mining" freely and wrongly.

The new atheism is a fad that relies on the ignorance of its adherents.  It is a shallow, bigoted, dishonest intellectual fad that exists primarily to convince them that they are superior to the majority of the population without requiring that they fulfill the first duty of anyone engaging in an intellectual discussion, knowing what you're talking about.

Update:   While going through my notes to write the post about Darwin and W. R. Greg today,  I noticed a possible incident of quote mining by none other than Charles R. Darwin, himself.   Here is the section of that post:

John Wilkins did the service of posting the essay of W. R Gregwhich Darwin took that passage from.  With Wilkins commentary.  You can see in the comments that I was engaged in researching Darwin back then.  I don't know why there is text in the original as given by Wilkins which is not present in The Descent of Man.  I would propose that Darwin might have been sanitizing it a bit, making it slightly more palatable.  Also, Darwin took it from a longer paragraph.  Was Charles Darwin guilty of "quote mining"?   It makes you wonder what a careful inspection of other quotes in the book would show in that line.  Here is the passage with what Darwin left out in bold. 

‘The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes,  living in a pig-stye, doting on a superstition, multiplies like rabbits or ephemera: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts,and in a dozen generations, five sixths of the population would be Celts, but five sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed,and prevailed by virtue not of its qualities but of its faults, by reason not of its stronger vitality but of its weaker reticence and its narrower brain. "

Greg's comment "fed on potatoes" is a cruel and despicable thing to say  two decades after the famine ended.  It is impossible to think that Greg and his readers were unaware of what it meant in that context.  Especially considering it was largely because the Anglo-Saxons left them little choice because they exported grain, fish and meat from Ireland for the profit of the English and Scottish landowners and to keep the price of food in England lower than it would have been.  And they so did in huge quantities during the famine of the 1840s.  During the famine of 1782, the ports had been closed to prevent exporting food.  Clearly the government during Darwin's time, enlightened by Malthus and the current scientific thinking decided to not take a chance at preserving the surplus population of  the "carelessness, squalid, unaspiring" race.