>> I agree that Gish's failure to reply does not help his case, but IMHO
>> it is not proof of lying. He has answered these charges in his book
>> "Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics":
>> [excerpt deleted]
One possible discrepancy between Gish's account and Schadewald's (from
which the FAQ comes) is that Gish says that when he heard Garniss
Curtis, Curtis *accepted* the account of a frog protein being more
similar to that of a human than to that of a chimpanzee (and used it to
cast doubt on molecular clock techniques). According to Schadewald,
Curtis was very *skeptical* about the frog protein, and said the
research would never be confirmed. It is unclear from reading
Schadewald whether Curtis expressed this skepticism when he told the
story and Gish heard it, or later, when contacted by Schadewald.
However a casual reading of Schadewald certainly gives the impression
that Curtis was always skeptical of the claim, which contradicts Gish's
account. It's hard to know what happened without an independent account
Curtis' talk, or perhaps by contacting Schadewald.
Gish says:
[Curtis] mentioned that, according to comparisons based on the
structures of certain serum albumins, humans were nearly as similar to
bullfrogs as they were to apes.
That makes Curtis sound very definite about it. But Schadewald says
that Curtis had merely heard this story from yet another source (and
presumeably didn't have any actual protein sequences). I would be
somewhat surprised if Curtis placed so much trust in the claim on such
flimsy evidence (I would expect such sloppiness from Gish, but not from
Curtis).
The section of the FAQ I wanted to emphasize was:
Doolittle provided sequence data for human and chimpanzee proteins;
Gish could do the same - *if* his alleged chicken and bullfrog
proteins really exist. Gish insisted that they exist and promised to
send me the sequences. Skeptically, I asked him pointblank: "Will that
be before hell freezes over?" He assured me that it would. After
two-and- one-half years, I still have neither sequence data nor a
report of frost in Hades.
Note that Gish *insisted that they exist*, even though he had never seen
them, and they apparently do not exist. I thought this was the most
damning point in the FAQ; the rest of it *is* explainable as sloppy
scholarship by Gish, but I think this was deliberate dishonesty. Gish's
account does not address this point.
-- Jim Foley Symbios Logic, Fort Collins, COJim.Foley@symbios.com (303) 223-5100 x9765