Comments on Darwin Devolves Fraud

Aren’t West and Klinghoffer mostly focused on PR rather than scientific details?

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Sure. In this case, West decides to charge us with (bordering) academic fraud. That is fairly surprising, even for them.

I don’t think so. This is typical DI fare. They want this out there in the search results so as to confuse the public as much as possible. It’s what they do.

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Hmmm… I wouldn’t be surprised. :thinking:

Precisely: Squid ink.

Has the DI produced anything that isn’t 100% pure anti-science propaganda? I sure can’t think of any examples.

How in the world can a book review contain academic fraud?

Suppose that I were to write a book under a pseudonym. And then suppose that I wrote a review lavishing praise on that book, but without disclosing that I was the author. Then that would be academic fraud.

So yes, a book review could contain an academic fraud.

In the case that we are actually concerned with – no, that could not be a fraud. When West says it is a fraud, we should take him as merely saying that he dislikes the review.

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Didn’t Dembski get caught doing exactly that with self-reviews using pseudonyms of his book on Amazon?

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I thought I read something about that before, so I did a little googling. Yes, “a reader from Waco” posted a critique of Mark Perakh’s “Unintelligent Design” and promoted a book of Dembski’s. A later glitch at the Canadian Amazon site accidentally revealed the identities of anonymous posters - and “a reader from Waco” apparently was Dembski. You can read more detail here:

Maybe note quite “exactly that”, since it was just a review on Amazon, but a pretty similar event.

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This is an overwhelmingly bad response to a review. I wonder if they really think this was fraud or if they are just that far out on a limb.

Regardless, I still look forward to dialogue with them. Will they show up?