I’ve already gloated over having two posts worth of material generated by Sal Cordova’s new Intelligent Design blog, Young Cosmos. But I’m starting to think that the entire site might be a clever hoax.
Case in point is this short post:
I would like to present John Davison’s website. He was a biology professor for 42 years and accepts Intelligent Design. He studied under some of the great ones like James Crow. He deserves a fair hearing.
http://john.a.davison.free.fr/
Merry Christmas, John.
Seems inconspicuous enough, no? But the thing is, John A. Davison is, as far as I can tell, the retired Vermont U physiologist who ran for Governor of Vermont, at least in his own mind. And put simply, it’s very very difficult to read through Davison’s writings and history and not come away with the idea that he is very much a complete crackpot, calling into question anyone that claims to take him seriously.
An oft noted case in point are his previous blogs. And when I say previous blogs, I don’t mean that in the sense of one person writing on different blogs. I mean in the sense that Davison was so confused by the very concept of blogging that his “blogs” consisted of a single post each, followed by hundreds of follow up comments. The majority these were, in fact, Davison himself randomly updating his latest thoughts, periodically interrupted by a few passersby trying in vain to explain to Davison that you’re supposed to add new blog posts to update a blog, not simply endlessly reply to yourself in the comments.
This first outing was called Prescribed Evolution, which at last count has 883 comments, most of which end with Davison’s trademark exclamation “I love it so!” At some point, Davison declared (emphasis mine):
The original Prescribed Evolution blog got pretty cluttered so I am starting a new one. Hopefully I will be able to better manage this one than the original.
This, in fact, was to be the first and only post of his second blog, New Prescribed Evolution, now weighing in at 654 comments. This soon came to a close as well:
I am abandoning this blog with all its revealing comments about and by my many enemies. Don’t expect any further responses from me here.
I am opening a new blog with the tantalizing title – The end of evolution. Let’s see what kind of perverts that will attract.
theendofevolution.blogspot.com/
I love it so!
It didn’t stop there either (the different blog title format of the third and all follow blogs was, by the way, almost certainly due to the fact that some jokester, recognizing the trend, registered “New New Prescribed Evolution” before Davison could get to it). But you get the long, sad picture.
I’m generally not one for poisoning the well. I could try to go into some of Davison’s actual arguments against evolution (though that would be hampered by the fact that his writing style and lack of coherent organization is very very hard to make sense of what he’s even claiming). Normally I would. But if you spend any time reading through his “posts” (i.e. the comments), or catching sightings of his rambling comments at the Expelled! blog and elsewhere, I think you’ll come to the conclusion that going with the “crackpot” label and leaving it at that is perfectly forgivable.
Then again, these many bizarre blogs could have been a clever caricature of a much savvier real-life Davison (though no one has ever admitted to it, nor has the real Davison has ever denied authorship). Of course, telling truth from parody would be much easier if the actual arguments weren’t so close to rambling parody of themselves to begin with. If these Intelligent Design blogs are really all just a put on, I still think I have a pretty good excuse as to how I got hoodwinked into thinking it was all for real.