Monday, December 14, 2009

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 Epsilon Clue.)

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