One of the critiques of intelligent design that you used to hear centered on the question of peer review. “A final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant is the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory,” as Judge Jones remarked. Funny, it wasn’t true then, and it’s certainly not true now — ID is well supported by such publications, so that Darwinists don’t even try to promote that talking point anymore.
This is all well and good, yet the idea of peer review as the “gold standard” of science remains the puffed-up myth that, we suspect, it has been for a long time. It’s fun to report, then, the hoaxing of a mathematics journal, Advances in Pure Mathematics, which provisionally accepted for publication a proposed journal article that had been randomly generated — a mishmash of important-sounding nonsense — by Mathgen. What’s that?
Mathgen is a program to randomly generate professional-looking mathematics papers, including theorems, proofs, equations, discussion, and references.
Here, try it out yourself!
In just 10 days, the randomly generated author, “Professor Marcie Rathke” of the “University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople,” received a warm congratulations from the journal, noting just a few minor critical comments that arose from the peer-review process. This, for eight pages of pure nonsense. See it here, “Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE.” Priceless.