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Science Blogger Sued for Unfavorable Book Review

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hope-he-countersues-and-buys-a-nice-summer-home dept.

tigerhawkvok writes "Recently, new author Stuart Privar provided Professor PZ Meyers of Pharyngula a copy of his book, Lifecode, for review. Over the course of the review itself and a few follow-ups, it became evident that the content was nonsense (including, among other things, ten-legged spiders and other phenomena strongly at odds with developmental biology). However, the common threat of lawsuits finally became a reality, and now Privar is suing Myers for $15 million. Can calling someone a 'classic crackpot' in the face of such incorrect data have any chance at making it to court, or even winning the suit?"

22 of 588 comments (clear)

  1. When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Contrary to this "this is the first time this has happened!" tone of this article, religious nutballs (as this Picar guy appears to be), frauds, and crackpots actually have a long history of suing when someone challenges them. The Church of Scientology has sued many people. Uri Gellar sued James Randi and others. Crackpots sue all the time (that part of what makes them crackpots). Some, like this Pivar guy apparently, have the financial resources to use their lawsuits to harass (like the aforementioned Scientologists). It's just a sad reality, here in the U.S. anyway (where we have no "loser pays" lawsuit system).

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by pimpimpim · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not just in the US, in Netherlands the society against quacks had to pay a considerable amount to a quack, by court order! And because of the 'loser pays' system, even had to pay for this quacks lawyer costs :( Face it: stupidity has settled itself in all social layers and is international, no way to run or hide from it anymore.

      --
      molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
    2. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by Goaway · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Scientologists aren't crackpots, though. They're a very deliberate scam. The things they teach are a mixture of self-help material and crackpottery, but don't think for a second that the leaders actually believe in any of it.

    3. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by ColonelPanic · · Score: 5, Funny

      The very real danger to the book's reviewer is that he may be placed in the position of defending rationality before a jury comprised of people who find it perfectly reasonable to symbolically eat the flesh of a cosmic Jewish zombie and telepathically implore him to save them from the consequences of a snake-deceived rib-woman's consumption of magic fruit.

      Which is to say, in our rapidly medievalizing former republic, crazy nutbag plaintiffs are granted a decisive advantage.

      --
      "Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
    4. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by plague3106 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think its fair that if its ok to bash and debunk Scientology that Christanity is fair game too.

      I don't see you complaining about Scientology being bashed. I can only assume you think THAT is ok because you are a Christian, otherwise you'd have mentioned that as well.

      If I makes you feel better:

      Jewish religion is bunk.
      Christian is bunk.
      Islam is bunk.
      Scientology is bunk.
      Buddism is bunk.

      There... did I miss any major religion? Does it make you feel better that I'm not just picking on Christians?

    5. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by Llywelyn · · Score: 5, Informative

      So someone who belives in god (aka invisible friend) isn't a crackpot, as long as they accept science is the best way to the truth about the universe?

      To quote Stephen Jay Gould:

      To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God's method of action). Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example). Forget philosophy for a moment; the simple empirics of the past hundred years should suffice. Darwin himself was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), but the great American botanist Asa Gray, who favored natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian. Move forward 50 years: Charles D. Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct a history of life according to His plans and purposes. Move on another 50 years to the two greatest evolutionists of our generation: G. G. Simpson was a humanist agnostic. Theodosius Dobzhansky a believing Russian Orthodox. Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs--and equally compatible with atheism, thus proving that the two great realms of nature's factuality and the source of human morality do not strongly overlap.
      --
      Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
    6. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by gordo3000 · · Score: 5, Funny

      What's a religion without nasty threats?

      Philosophy?

    7. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by pimpimpim · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Just click the link I put in the original post, they also have the text in Dutch. Somewhere half way they mention the lawsuit, they won for the lower court in 2005, and lost for the higher court in 2007. The whole lawsuit took about 7 years and 90.000 euro, since this all started when they made a list of 'biggest quacks of the century' in 2000. They lost because the higher court used the definition of a quack as someone who intentionally fools people with non-working remedies, and didn't thought the woman promoted her non-working remedies with the intent of doing so. Put otherwise, they probably assumed she was too stupid to know what she was doing. Personally, I don't think "intent" should be part of quakery, instead the guilt of quakery lies in the fact that you, knowingly or unknowingly, are a potential harm to people who are in real need for a remedy, and are not working within the rules that are laid out for medical treatment. Hospitals and medicine are institionalized for a reason!

      This court order defeats the centuries of learning by suffering that lead to the strict way medical treatment is organized.

      --
      molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
    8. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by samkass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Anti-Catholicism: The last acceptable prejudice."

      Is saying something negative about the Pope really being anti-Catholic? Is saying that Jewish laws are probably based more in practical guides to avoiding ancient diseases rather than commandments from God anti-Semitic? If criticizing any belief system of someone's religion is being "anti" that religion, we start going down a path of extremist dogma where all rational thought is lost.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    9. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      The guy who wrote the review looks pretty guilty to me.
      That's because you're a crackpot too.
      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    10. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The 100% effective defense against a libel or slander suit is (1) The statements are true (2) it is clear you are stating your personal opinion.

      If the blogger made a firm accusation, i.e. the writer kills baby seals, and that turns out to be knowingly false, then if written, that's libel, if it is said publicly, it is slander.

      However, It is clear that the blogger is expressing his "opinion" about the man and his works. He is 100% protected in his capacity as someone reviewing a work to form an opinion and state it publicly either verbally or in written form.

    11. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by spun · · Score: 5, Informative
      Thankfully, he has to prove that this review is knowingly false, written with intent to harm, and actually caused harm to prove libel. It will never happen. I read the review and NOWHERE does PZ Myers make ANY malicious claims about the author of Lifecode. He writes factual statements about the book only. He never called the author a crackpot. Even if he had, crackpot has an accepted definition that actually applies to this author.

      He is, in fact, a crackpot. Saying so is not false. From wikipedia:

      Pejoratively, the term Crackpot is used against a person, subjectively also called a crank, who writes or speaks in an authoritative fashion about a particular subject, often in science or mathematics, but is alleged to have false or even ludicrous beliefs If it can be shown that his beliefs are false, which is completely trivial to do, then the label of 'crackpot' applies and is not libel.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    12. Re:When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack! by immcintosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In philosophy, a subject in which I have specialized, we use a greek word qua frequently. Put simply, this word means, generally, "in the capacity of." I think it is fairly obvious that the author of this book qua biologist is demonstrably a crackpot. He writes on a very intensively studied branch of science, and proposes a number of theories which are blantantly contrary to well established and observed fact, on no better grounds than an active imagination. This, I would argue, is the very definition of crackpottery. Most sensible people in the modern world would call a doctor who proposed leeching as a panacea to be a crackpot for much the same reason--it is contrary to well established medical fact and commonly available evidence.

      In any case, it seems quite clear to me that PZ is describing this man as being a crackpot qua developmental biologist, and not qua businessman or any other number of things he might be talented at. As such, I believe this accusation is absolutely true and utterly defensible by anybody with a rational understanding of modern science.

      P.S. I would have liked to moderate this rather than reply, but none of the options seemed to adequately represent my feelings about it...

  2. I see dollar signs by Sierpinski · · Score: 5, Funny

    If someone can be sued for their opinions... man I'm going to make a TON of money from my mother-in-law!

    --
    And they said zombies weren't real!
  3. new business plan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Aha, I see the floodgates opening now:

    1). Write ridiculously inaccurate book
    2). Send it to a well-known, respected scientist for review
    3). Wait for the scathing reviews to come in
    4). Sue
    5). Profit!

    But, at the expense of respect. Hey, who needs respect when you have 15 million dollars?

  4. Bestest. Review. EVAR. by plover · · Score: 5, Funny
    I love this quote:

    The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while, I realized what this book is actually about.

    This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.

    It's that bad. This is a book suitable only for use at clown colleges, and even there, I suspect the clowns would tell us that it is impractical, nonsensical, and has no utility in their craft.

    --
    John
  5. Real scientists don't sue by pzs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This may not be true in all cases, but people who actually know what they're talking about don't usually need the law to back up what they say.

    The other case of this was "Dr" Gillian McKeith a "nutritionist" who sells a lot of books about how you should eat less chips and more salad. This is all very well, but of course it also includes a bunch of quakery about eating leaves so that their photosynthesis can oxegenate your gut. As the article I link points out, that wouldn't work too well unless you had a torch up your arse.

    Naturally, McKeith is mighty litigious at people who point out that she bought her doctorate from the web.

    Peter

  6. the power of the web... by apodyopsis · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seems like word gets around, already the book reviews are flooding in....my word, he has really not done himself any favors here - I sense another internet laughing stock in the making.

    from: http://www.amazon.com/LifeCode-Theory-Biological-S elf-Organization/dp/0976406004

    I do not own this book. I do not propose to read it. My "rating" is based solely upon the fact that the author has chosen to sue a reviewer for "Injury - Assault, Libel, and Slander", because he didn't like the review. (Unlike the author, the reviewer is a professional biology professor who actually understands this subject.) No reputable scientist would react in this way - indeed the whole point of science is to prove things wrong! (As Richard Feynman wrote, "We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.") So caveat emptor...

    A 164 page book for $60?
    And from an author without any doctorate in the sciences he purports to write about? With a non-peer-reviewed 'theory'?
    Don't waste your money.

    The reviewer above wrote everything I intended to, but I just thought I would add my voice here. By sueing a critic of his theories, the author of this book threw away any claim he might have had to any kind of scientific credibility. A scientist might argue with his critics, but the fact that this author has instigated a lawsuit against someone for criticizing his theories suggests to me that even he is aware that said theories have no merits to argue.

  7. Re:hmm. by Larus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As Niels Bohr said, "Your idea is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true."

  8. Re:Professor's mistake? by Qzukk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the security of a contract?

    Since when does one need the security of a contract to read a book and tell people what you thought of it?

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  9. Re:Bestest. Review. EVAR. by Andrewkov · · Score: 5, Funny
    It's that bad. This is a book suitable only for use at clown colleges

    I would prefer it if you not refer to Princeton in that manner.

  10. Vulgar Abuse by giafly · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just because someone publishes something that is wrong, doesn't mean you're allowed to publish statements that they're a crackpot. It's libel.
    ShieldW0lf, you're a fucking retard! Vulgar abuse is not defamatory. Thus you can't win a libel suit against me for calling you a fucking retard and the plaintiff in this case probably shouldn't sue for being called a crackpot.
    --
    Reduce, reuse, cycle