Stranger Fruit

Darwin plagiarizes Wallace … the YEC perspective

Posted by John Lynch on January 29, 2009
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I’ve been picking on creationists for a number for years now, so it is somewhat strange for me to come out and offer one a gold star but, hey!

Todd Wood, a YEC at Bryan College had had a paper accepted over at Answers Research Journal that gives his take on the whole ridiculous “Darwin was a plagiarist” riff that the likes of Roy Davies have been shilling. So to recap, John Wilkins, Jim Lennox, and now Todd Wood (a creationist for cripes sake!) think that Davies is wrong.

Short version of Wood:

According to Davies, these alleged evidences of Darwin’s misdeeds have been ignored by Darwin scholars for more than twenty-five years, ostensibly in an effort to preserve the myth of Darwin as the great discoverer of evolution and intellectual hero of Britain. That charge can hardly be leveled at this author, an American creationist. Some readers might be wondering why a creationist would bother writing a paper defending Darwin. This work should not be seen as merely an exoneration of Darwin but as a genuine attempt to discover the truth. If Darwin had plagiarized, then that should surely be made known, but there is no evidence that he did so. The individual claims made by Davies do not withstand scrutiny, and the argument as a whole simply does not hold together. As Christians concerned with presenting the truth, creationists should avoid Davies’s conspiracy theory. Love him or hate him, Darwin was the author of his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Now let’s move on, shall we?

Wood is one of the prime movers in the YEC baraminological movement. His blog is actually worth checking out.

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Comments

  1. #1 csrster
    January 29, 2009

    Interesting … and yet not. If Darwin were a plagiarist (and he wasn’t) it would be about as relevant to evolutionary science as Einstein’s sex-life is to relativistic astrophysics.

  2. #2 Dave H
    January 29, 2009

    I never thought I’d see the day when an evolutionary biologist and a creationist can agree on something besides the weather…

  3. #3 James F
    January 29, 2009

    This is one of the biggest tragedies of creationism. Highly educated people with some measure of integrity, like Todd Wood and Kurt Wise, consign themselves to a career that will be forever at odds with real science.

  4. #4 JohnnieCanuck
    January 30, 2009

    In perspective, religion must be one of the biggest wastes of human capital ever. Worse than war? Maybe.

    It has distracted, misled and actively worked against reason and an understanding of the universe. It’s not just a few thousand man-years of misspent thought on Sunday mornings. This is millions of people for thousands of years, wasting hours every day.

    Everything from brilliant intellectuals devoting their lives to apologetics to tribal women sewing intricate patterns in clothing to ward off the malevolent spirits.

    Such a naïve creature, this Homo Sapiens. So often content to delude itself that it is the reason the universe was formed. That and an inability to detect when emotions and other primitive aspects of its brain are enabling the delusions.

    Well, I guess we can salvage a little pride. We did devise the Scientific Method to help overcome our failings.