The following is not a criticism of the WTS. I am providing this for technical clarification and my expectation for accuracy.
Endnotes 43 and 45 on page 27 of the WTS’s brochure, “The Origin of Life” refer to the New Scientist periodical of 30 May 2009.
The text in the WTS’s brochure does not match the text of the New Scientist’s online article. Further investigation shows that the online text does not accurately replicate the text that appeared in print in the physical magazine. The WTS’s brochure matches the print version of New Scientist.
In an email response dated 9 August 2019, New Scientist advised me:
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“Thank you for your observation, which has been passed to me. As an increasing proportion of publications do, we put news and comment articles online as soon as they are ready. We then cut them to fit the space available in print. Sometimes, as in the case you highlight, this involves rewriting, often to make the text denser and perhaps crisper - and always to fit a rectangular page.”
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So I asked Professor Beard, writer of the item in question, about the amendments to his text and the addition of artwork. In an email of 10 August 2019, Professor Beard responded:
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“My recollection is that both the online and print versions of my original piece were edited by the staff at New Scientist. The prose in the online version is closer to what I originally wrote, but even that version was edited. I think they were trying to emphasize the PR aspects of the episode in the print version of the magazine. The cladogram shown in the online version was produced by New Scientist and not by me. It has some serious problems, notably including the omission of tarsiers and showing ‘Ida’ and other adapiforms as being nested within lorises and lemurs rather than being outside the crown clade, as they should be.”
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Email me if you want to see the direct comparison of the online and print version of Professor Beard's opinion piece in the New Scientist.
Professor Beard referred me to a contemporary 2009 article of his that appeared in “The American Scientist, Volume 97, September-October 2009, pages 410-413. It is available online at: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-weakest-link
I hope that online text accurately reflects the print version. I have not checked.
Doug