The givers-away of the cult edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species have been spotted! A graduate student at Virginia Tech, Josette Torres, reports via Twitter that she was handed a copy yesterday. She thought this was just random. But now she knows better. It’s not random, it’s divine!

If you recall, Living Waters, the California-based ministry of creationist Ray “Bananas Prove That God Exists” Comfort, has been gearing up to give away on college campuses 50,000 free copies of a revised edition of Darwin’s book in honor of this month’s 150th anniversary of its publication. Kirk Cameron is on board! Two things to know about the effort: 1) the anniversary edition contains an introduction declaring that “the legacy of Darwin’s theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, racism, infanticide, and abortion”; and 2) Cameron is a crazy person.

The sighting is big news, though! When I called Living Waters in September to find out where the books would be distributed, I was told the list was not being publicized in advance because of “atheists who do not appreciate what we’re doing.” The head of the “Origin into Schools” project, Tony Miano, promised to email me if any area schools took part, but he must have forgotten. Or he read my blog post called “When Did Kirk Cameron Become So Fucking Weird?”

Anyway, Cameron himself was not there yesterday, Torres reports, just “a few people in a grey/silver minivan… A photog missed them by minutes.”

A Roanoke TV station did catch up with the folks handing out the books, but they were told not to talk to the media. Why are creationists so unfriendly?

UPDATE: I reached Torres by email and asked what she did with the book. “It’s sitting at the top of a book pile on the staircase in my apartment foyer. I’ll probably read it at some point, but not right now, as I’m swamped with graduate school coursework.” On Kirk Cameron: “He seems nice, though I haven’t really gone out of my way to follow his career since my days as a 1980s teen fan magazine reader. He can believe what he wants, it’s a free country, etc.” On creationism: “Generally I am down with the evolutionists.”