When a term starts to gain currency, it inevitably gets misused and, sometimes, abused. Since "intelligent design" now has its own (pretty accurate) entry at dictionary.com, it clearly has currency.

Not surprisingly, people have started attaching the word to all sorts of ideas--including highly eccentric ones. Recently, I received a manuscript allegedly conveying information channeled from extraterrestrials, self-published sometime in the 1980s, in which the author had whited out the name of his theory and typed in (with a different font) the words "intelligent design." It doesn't take keen discernment to distinguish this stuff from, say, Dembski's The Design Inference.

And a few weeks ago, I received an email entitled "The Mechanism Behind Intelligent Design." Despite the category error in the title (intelligent design per se isn't a mechanism), I read it briefly, decided it was probably a hoax, and not worth any more time.

Therefore, I was distressed to see it treated somewhat favorably (with disclaimers) on WorldnetDaily, and then posted on another website. It's now being discussed online as if it's somehow an "intelligent design" proposal. So I thought that I ought to write a critique of it. But, happily, physicist David Mobley has beat me to it. If you're interested in the problems with this idea, go here.