That seems mostly irrelevant, aside from maybe providing credit. The way in which you "co-opt" it in this piece is not as some questionable hypothesis, whose veracity is unimportant - which seems to be your intent based on this comment and the rest of the actual piece. It's hard to see how you are not explicitly endorsing this hypothesis when you have unquoted lines like "but that answer is wrong, as can be shown by examining historical records of the time." You are not saying that Donald Gibbs thinks this is wrong, you are saying you think it's wrong.
Yes, that's a fair criticism. If I were to rewrite this article today I would try to make this clearer. I think at the time, having recently seen Gibbs speak, I found his argument compelling. But I clearly could (and should) have done a much better job communicating it. Mea culpa.
That's true, but my blog is not a peer-reviewed publication, it is a personal journal, and as such my policy is not to make substantial changes to posts after they're published. I want my blog to be a reliable representation of who I am (or, in this case, who I was) warts and all. Sometimes I'll post corrections and updates, and maybe I will in this case, but geez, it's a twelve-year-old post and this is the first time anyone has brought this up. This probably isn't be the most egregious uncorrected error I've ever made.
I don't think it would be as trivial to fix as you think. I can't just say, "This is Gibbs's position, not mine" because I don't actually know that to be a fact. This happened 12 years ago, and my recollection could be wrong. It's entirely possible that this was actually my position at the time and I just don't remember. So before I can confidently attribute this position to Gibbs I'd have to verify that this was indeed Gibbs's position at the time, and that seems like a non-trivial undertaking.
I'll tell you what, though, if you can find a reference that this really was/is Gibbs's position I will make the correction.