Ray Comfort, Plagiarist?
Looks like Ray Comfort found it too hard to write a 50-page introduction to Origin on his own: Metropulse.com, a Knoxville, TN local paper, has a story about Stan Guffey, a University of Tennessee lecturer who wrote a brief bio of Charles Darwin. Turns out that bio bears a striking resemblance to the first few pages of Comfort’s introduction (you know, the part that isn’t batshit crazy).
(HT Unreasonable Faith and AIG Busted.)
I find it ironic that the approach investigators use to detect plagiarism are similar to that taken by biologists to find homologies, which are one of the bits of evidence pointing to common descent.
So maybe Ray can use creationist arguments in his defense: “You cherry-picked your examples to make your case. If you look at the other 47 pages of the introduction, you’ll see that it’s nothing like anything Dr. Guffey has written”, or “Similarities do not mean that I copied from Guffey. It’s more likely that both texts were written by God.” Or the ever-popular “Did anyone see copying take place? Then how do you know it happened?”
(Cross-posted at UMD Society of Inquiry.)
arensb wrote:
Today’s XKCD seems rather apropo.
Given about one day, my own knowledge, some books in my personal library, and the Internet, I could probably come up with three pages of Darwin bio that would get a respectable grade in any high school English class, without actually plagiarizing any of it. Comfort is too stupid and lazy to do his own work — he’s like the kid who always just copied paragraphs from the encyclopedia and submitted that.
That’s this one. (Hopefully that’ll save me a long search through the archives if I stumble upon this thread in a year or two.)
arensb Says:
I’d actually embedded the panel in my comment but it again got eaten by wordpress.