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Writer's pictureBible Brian

Darwin was fake news before it was cool


For reasons I consider to be fairly obvious, Christianity and science have always had a healthy relationship. Specifically, the pioneers of science were some of God's most faithful servants. Sir Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, the Wright brothers, Galileo Galilei, all of these great men, and more, were Christians. Matthew Maury, known today as the Father of Oceanography, even lifted some of his theories straight out of the Bible.


Christians never gave up their love for science. Unfortunately, many scientists gave up their love for Christ. Although a significant number of scientists today are Christians, who continue to contribute greatly to their fields, most scientists now profess a very different religion. That religion is called Evolution.

Evolution, you might be surprised to hear, is not new. Its present form is new, as is the incorporation of science into its argumentation, but Evolution itself has existed in various forms for at least 3,000 years.

Charles Darwin is the man most associated with having "discovered" Evolution. In reality, Darwin was almost as fake as Evolution itself. That's not to say that no one ever saw Darwin, of course. He was a real human being who genuinely walked the earth. But his reputation as one of history's great scientists is exaggerated, to say the least.

One of the reasons for this is that he was a raging plagiarist. To quote Jerry Bergman, "Many, if not most, of Darwin’s major ideas are found in earlier works, especially those by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Charles Darwin rarely (if ever) gave due credit to the many persons from whom he liberally ‘borrowed’." (1)


Among those plagiarised by Darwin was Edward Blyth, a Creationist (of course, as most scientists were back then) who wrote about natural selection and speciation in two separate papers in 1835 and 1837, more than two decades before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin chose the same examples as Blyth, used similar phrases to Blyth, and even included the same rare words as Blyth. The University of Cambridge even has (or at least did as of 2003) Darwin's own copies of Blyth's articles, complete with Darwin's handwritten notes! (2)


Blyth is not the only one Darwin plagiarised. In fact, it seems that Darwin's only skill was hoovering up other people's work and spitting it back out with his name written next to a suspicious scribble. It is utterly embarrassing that this man was considered so great as to be worthy of being on the British £10 note from 2000 to 2017!

Darwin's less than ethical writing practices have been well documented throughout history. In fact, Darwin himself experienced the bitter sting of karma when his own contemporaries spotted the similarities between his works and the works of others. This was so difficult for him that in 1861, he added a Historical Sketch to the third edition of his book, which he continued to enlarge until the 6th edition, when he confessed that 34 authors had beaten him to the punch on describing speciation. Even this was not enough to get the monkey off his back, as Samuel Butler later published an entire book comparing his theories to Buffon, Lamarck and even Erasmus Darwin, Charles' own grandfather. Charles Darwin was an utter fraud. Why should we be surprised that his followers do likewise?


References


1. Bergman, Jerry - Did Darwin plagiarize his evolution theory? Journal of Creation 16(3):58–63, December 2002 (link)


2. Bradbury, Andrew J. - Charles Darwin—The truth? Part 7—The missing link, October 2003 (link)

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