Duane Gish - Biography

Biography

Gish, a twin, was born in White City, Kansas, the youngest of nine children. He received a B.S. degree from UCLA in 1949 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1953. He worked as an Assistant Research Associate at Berkeley, and Assistant Professor at Cornell University Medical College performing biomedical and biochemical research for eighteen years, joining the Upjohn Company as a Research Associate in 1960.

A Methodist from age ten, and later a fundamentalist Baptist, Gish has long held that the Biblical creation story is a historical fact. After reading Evolution: Science Falsely So-Called in the late 1950s, Gish became persuaded that science had produced falsifying evidence against biological evolutionary theory, and that various fields of science offered corroborating evidence in support of Biblical creation. He joined the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), an association of Christian scientists, mistakenly assuming the group to be aligned with creationism. Through his affiliation at the ASA, Gish met geneticist and creationist, William J. Tinkle, who in 1961 invited Gish to join his newly formed anti-evolution caucus within the ASA.

In 1971 Gish became a member of the faculty at San Diego Christian College working in their research division, before accepting a position at the Institute for Creation Research (independent since 1981). He is the author of several books and articles espousing the tenets of creationism. His best known work, Evolution: The Fossils Say No!, published in 1978, has been widely accepted by antievolutionists as an authoritative reference for creationist concepts.

Gish initially "assigned low priority to the question of age ". Gish currently holds the position of Senior Vice-President Emeritus at the ICR.