Get this. You know how Ray Comfort went through all the trouble of creating a new 50-page intro to Origin of Species intended to “show what Darwin was really like”? How he was taken to task for abridging the original book, removing those chapters that challenged his lies the most, then mysteriously forgetting a graph or two in the next revision? Well the hits keep on coming, as Professor Stan Guffey, the guy who wrote a biography on Charles Darwin that Comfort apparently nicked, never gave Comfort permission to use them. That’s right — the only parts of the intro that aren’t spurious and refuted allegations about how Darwin and Hitler were BFFs, the only parts that are actually true, were plagiarized.
Comfort put his introduction on the Web months ago, and several bloggers who monitor anti-evolution efforts noted differences in style between the biography and the rest of the introduction. A brief computer search uncovered the source, and they confronted the author and publisher about the apparent plagiarism months before the book was printed. Guffey says he was never contacted for permission to use the biography. Both the author and publisher declined to comment for this story. Contacted by phone, Bridge-Logos publicist Shawn Myers said it was the first she had heard of matter, so she was unable to respond.
“I am party to a scam,” Guffey says. “The introduction begins with a nice, sweet little biography, then degenerates into intellectually lame, lazy distortions, selective reading of the literature, picking and choosing of facts, and misreadings of the historical record.” He says Comfort “gently moves folks into the notion that they don’t want to read what comes after the introduction. He just wants his 50 pages read, 47 of which are anti-intellectual, dishonest drivel, the first three of which are pretty good because I wrote them.”
And yet Banana Man will probably face no repercussions for it, as Comfort is unlikely to lose his job over it, whereas if the shoe was on the other foot, Guffey could lose his job for stealing something of Comfort’s. Not that you would need to steal something of Comfort’s — just do a Mad Libs and write “Darwin” and “Hitler” and “evil” and “gulags” and “Godless” and “evolution” in the blanks.
As if Comfort could not get any more pathetic, he goes beyond the coll of duty and comes up with something even worse. When will the the rest of the world call this man on what he is and does? Oh, wait… the people that follow and love his every word are the same people that believe the universe is less than ten thousand years old. They’re too misguided to understand. They never turn on their own (unless there’s profit to be made).