From: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com>

Date: 1/30/08, 12:35

Over at Uncommon Descent, the web's preeminent outlet for pro-intelligent design scribblings and ridiculously out-of-context quotes, a contributor going by the name of DLH has linked approvingly to a Seoul Times op-ed piece the very existence of which he chacterizes as evidence that South Korea "appears to allow significant freedom of speech and inquiry," which is technically true insomuch as that it certainly does appear that way to DLH based on his zero minutes of research into the subject but is nonetheless not true in the sense of it actually being true. But this is only a resin hit of foolishness smoked out of a glass pipe of perfidy, whereas for the real needle full of black tar nonsense, one must go to the Seoul Times piece in question. What?

The op-ed, which sets out to declare who is and isn't a scientist and what is and is not a scientific way of looking at the world, is authored by Babu G. Ranganathan, a self-described "experience Christian writer" and a proud graduate of the ultra-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, where, being of Hindi origin, he was presumably forbidden from dating whites, this having been that institution's express policy until just a few years ago when university administrators buckled under media pressure and decided to abandon the charmingly traditional rule. But I digress, as I am keen to do.

Ranganathan starts out with a robot-fueled metaphor intended to shed some light on the ID-versus-naturalistic evolution conflict and which he himself admits is "not perfect" even as he proclaims it to be "sufficient to reveal the fallacious thinking of those who attack intelligent design behind life and the universe." Later, he tells us the following:

The best little article ever written refuting the origin of life by chance is "A Few Reasons an Evolutionary Origin of Life Is Impossible" by scientist and biochemist Dr. Duane T. Gish. Dr. Gish presents "simple" but profound scientific barriers to evolution of life which aren't mentioned or covered in Johnny's high school biology textbook or in college textbooks for that matter. This article is truly great!

It sounds like this article is truly great! I haven't had the pleasure of reading it myself, though I have read some other fine works by Dr. Gish, whom I made fun of briefly in my own "truly great" book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny. I don't remember what it is exactly that I wrote about him, but you can bet your sweet bippy that it was very ribald. Or perhaps it wasn't. As I said, I don't remember.

However, I do recall a few things about Gish, having not only written about him but also having a friend who used to debate him back in the day. And thus it is that I can confirm Ranganathan's assertion that Gish's "profound scientific barriers" are indeed "simple." For instance, Gish believes that evolution is rendered impossible by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which itself holds that, in a closed system, entropy must increase, and which thus precludes simple organisms from developing into more complex organisms because all of the entropy will be bumping their little heads and distracting them with folk songs, but not really. This would be a great argument against evolution (and pretty much everything else) if the Earth were actually a closed system, which, incidentally, or rather not-so-incidentally at all, it is not. That big red orb in the sky, for instance, provides the Earth with light and heat, among other things, and thus the Earth is not a closed system by any stretch of even the most misguidedly active imagination, and therefore not subject as a unit to the Second Law of Thermodynamics - which is to say that Gish's density is of such a degree that it can proverbially block out the sun.