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The quotation is accurate. What Dennett has omitted is that the work needs to be buried not because of the conclusions - which may or may not turn out to be right - but because the data were, as far as anyone can tell, extensively and egregiously falsified. The review appeared in the Journal of Human Evolution, 24:69, 1993. What directly preceded the extracted remark is this: "Perhaps you recall Sibley and Ahlquist. In a nutshell, their results were: (1) chimp-gorilla DNA hybrids were more thermally stable than chimp-human hybrids; (2) the differences were insignificant; and (3) reciprocity was very poor when human DNA was used as a tracer. Unfortunately, the conclusions they reported were: (1) chimp-human was more thermally stable than chimp-gorilla; (2) differences were significant; and (3) reciprocity was near-perfect. And they got from point A to point B by (1) switching experimental controls; (2) making inconsistent adjustments for variation in DNA length, which was apparently not even measured; (3) moving correlated points into a regression line; and (4) not letting anyone know. The rationale for (4) should be obvious; and if (1), (2) and (3) are science, I'm the Princess of Wales..."
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