The Mistakes That Argue for Evolution

Dr. Miller told an anecdote of how he caught two students plagiarizing. Two of my students cheated on a written assignment by submitting the same paper. And I called them in and said, “Guys, I caught you.” They said, “Well, our papers aren’t that similar. We have different titles. We begin in a different way.” What they had done was rearrange all of the paragraphs and put in new words and stuff like that. At superficial glance, they looked entirely different. And they said, “Our thinking is the same, because we’re roommates, of course. And we had discussed this, we talked about it, so it’s not surprising we come to the same conclusion. But look, none of the paragraphs in our two papers match.” And they were right about that. So they said, “How would you think we copied?” I said, “I ran your papers through a program that looks for unusual matching strings. You guys misspelled the same six words in the same six ways. And when you have matching mistakes, there is no other explanation other than a common ancestor for the paper.” And they broke down, and they threw themselves on the mercy of the court. In the same way that the spelling errors pointed to the students’ copying from an earlier paper (or one another), Dr. Miller said, genetic errors point to the lineage of different species. The rest here.

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