Who is the Danimal?

I remember, many years ago, reading Usenet news and coming up to a posting that just blew my out of the water with its sheer logic. I didn't know it then, but it was The Danimal explaining a part of his "sexual market value" theory. I wasn't the only one who liked it: several other people followed up to it just to note what a great posting it was.

Eventually, I learned that whenever "The Danimal" is the author, the content is always superb. He is truly the Intellectual King of Usenet. A few years ago, I started collecting witty paragraphs and excerpts from The Danimal's voluminous Usenet postings. I have now posted most of my collection into this blog. To dig through the immense bulk of his postings dating back from the year 1991, I try to use different words to search for articles in Google Groups. Different search words bring up new articles unseen to me, which I pore through to see what I can find there. Unfortunately I haven't been able to discover that posting that I first found. But I will keep searching! The constant stream of new writings will keep me in this business for a long time.

The Danimal writes about everything between the Heaven and Earth, but common themes include sociobiology (especially the issues of sexual selection), science and technology (especially the possibility of building sex robots), automobiles and sprawl (he really opposes), bicycling (his transport method of choice), the fat acceptance movement (he really opposes) and Christianity (he is an atheist) and intelligence. His original concept of "Sexual Market Value" is very well-known in the Finnish blogosphere, where he has a number of ideological followers.

From his writings, I have been able to piecemeal together a picture of his life. Raised a fundamentalist Christian, his high intellect eventually led him to reject this faith and choose science and logic instead. As a Ph.D. who owns his own software company, he does well in the financial sense, but he has not been married nor does he own or need a car, riding his bicycle instead to keep in shape while dodging "lazy gaswasting terrorism supporters". (As a voluntarily carfree person myself, I highly sympathise with this choice.)