No surprise at all


The copy-&-paste creationist is a familiar figure in internet debates — they don’t have an original idea in their head, but they know how to copy some long screed off the internet and paste it into a comment box, almost always without attribution, or even a link back to their source. I am completely unsurprised by the fact that Ray Comfort is a plagiarist who ripped off a brief biography of Darwin.

He stole the one piece of his introductory essay to the Origin that wasn’t awful. I suspect the rest, though, is of similarly dubious provenance.

The remainder of the pamphlet is as expected. DNA is too improbable to arise by chance, there are no transitional fossils, Hitler was a “Darwinist”, evolution and atheism share joint ideology, the eye is irreducibly complex, et cetera et cetera. He even trots out old nonsense about evolution and thermodynamics.

Anyone want to bet that if you take pieces of the creationist part of Comfort’s essay and plug them into google, you’ll find he’s parroting lots of familiar creationist sources?