…goes to Sal Cordova.

The Dallas Observer has published a profile of Roy Abraham Varghese, a wealthy computer and business consultant who funnels money into ‘spirituality’ nonsense, that is not only so stupid that it pained me to read it, but but was also poorly and confusingly written — the reporter is utterly credulous and gushes over Varghese like the most pathetic fanboy, but then every once in a while tosses in a paragraph that takes a critical stance, but reads as if he has just cribbed an argument “for balance” and stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea of New Agey, fuzzy religious porridge. It makes one wonder if an editor had tried to sharpen up the slop by telling the writer to throw in some random scientific paragraph. The goofy philosophy is bad enough, but the graceless prose and incoherent structure is agonizing.

You know this article is in trouble from the first paragraph.

For a quarter-century Roy Abraham Varghese has been assembling God proofs. Along the way he won over the world’s most influential atheist.

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Remember Utah Republican Don Larsen? He made a speech recently. It sounds like his proposal to blame Satan for illegal immigrants was just the caboose on a whole trainful of crazy — liberals and Mexicans are Satan’s minions out to destroy America.

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Want to publish something? Worried that you don’t actually have a lab or an opportunity to do real research? Never fear, the Institute for Creation Research has put out a call for papers, and anyone can get published there! (Well, just about anyone. I doubt that anything I submitted under my name could get published, or that any legitimate scientist could stoop this low.)

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I’m off to the Twin Cities again (third time this week!) for a couple of events. Since I’m a cruel, heartless predator who likes to return to the scene of a kill to gloat, though, I thought I’d repost the vicious savagings I gave George Gilder, in The sanctimonious bombast of George Gilder and Gilder: still wailing over his spanking. Gilder, by the way, was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute, and a professional “techno guru” who led many an investor down the path to bankruptcy when the tech bubble collapsed in the 90s. I think he’s well on his way to historical oblivion at this point.

There were a couple of notable things about those posts. They spawned 50-100 comments, which in those days was simply astonishing (now I know that if I write a blank post I can get that many comments). They first sucked in George Gilder’s daughter to protest my brutality, and then George Gilder himself, who just sunk himself deeper in the morass of his own BS. Gilder is the fellow who pompously announced that he had renamed the object of molecular biologists’ study the “Adguacyth”, apparently for “adenine guanine cytosine thymine”. Try googling for that term, or looking in the technical literature; I guess it didn’t take off, since it’s apparently unique to his comments there. Perhaps people who admit to never even taking a single biology course ought to avoid trying to rename major concepts in the field.

Another thing you may notice is that Gilder babbles a bit about Shannon information theory—as a “techno guru”, that sure sounds sophisticated, even though his comments reveal that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. What makes it particularly ironic, though, is that nowadays one of the most embarrassingly ignorant mouthpieces for the Discovery Institute is Michael Egnor, who denies the relevance of Shannon information theory. I guess that was another bubble that popped on poor George.

Oh, come on, Boston Globe. They tip-toed around, avoiding naming me or the weblog, but I think everyone here can figure out what they’re talking about.

Yet even Gilder, seemingly a lightning rod for the socioeconomic controversy of the moment, was blistered by the comments posted on a University of Minnesota biologist’s weblog last fall, language so heated Gilder’s daughter felt obliged to rush to his defense.

Awww. Poor baby. They could have at least mentioned the site url! Here’s the article that made George Gilder cry: The Sanctimonious Bombast of George Gilder. It’s too bad they didn’t give that link in the fluff job they wrote for Gilder, because he repeats the same nonsense again, and adds a new set of lies to the mix.

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Yesterday, I was reading a good article in the October 2004 issue of Wired: “The crusade against evolution”, by Evan Ratliff. It gives far more column space to the voices of the Discovery Institute than they deserve, but the article consistently comes to the right conclusions, that the Discovery Institute is “using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny.” Along the way, the author catches Stephen Meyer red-handed in misrepresenting Carl Woese (by the clever journalistic strategem of calling Carl Woese), and shows how the DI’s favorite slogans (“Teach the controversy” and “academic freedom”) are rhetorical abuses of the spirit of the ideas behind them. It’s darned good stuff. I should probably say more about the good article, but I’m still picking magma out of my ears after reading a one page insert in the article — a ghastly, ignorant broadside by George Gilder that prompted a personal eruption. I’ve calmed down now, so I can tear it apart more delicately than I might have yesterday.

I’m still a bit peeved at the fool, so I’m going to remonstrate against him first—but maybe later I’ll say more about the Ratliff article.

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