It’s been brought to my attention that (young earth) creationist Ray Comfort has decided to give away copies of Darwin’s seminal work, “On the Origin of Species” [1]. The book is to be given out on college campuses across the US to commemorate the 150 year university of the book’s publication. There is only one catch. It’s an abridged copy complete with a brand new 54 page introduction laced creationist propaganda.
I had a look at Comfort’s introduction, which is available here. As you might expect, Comfort pulls out some vintage stuff; “a book can’t spontaneously form, therefore evolution is wrong”, “all us dumb scientists think everything came about after nothing exploded”, and even that old timeless classic “Hitler was motivated by evolution”.
This whole endeavor stinks of an attempt to get creation onto university campuses or into public schools. I suspect that in the next few weeks we’ll learn of plans to donate a number of these copies to various public schools.
Comfort is claiming the original text has been left unaltered and that he hasn’t inserted commentary throughout it. I would love to verify this and so want to get a look at the actual volume they give away. If you’re back to school, and happen to run into this giveaway, please grab me a copy and we can work something out for shipping.
[1] On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
