Here’s an interesting item from yesterday’s BoingBoing: PZ Myers, the creator of the popular science blog Pharyngula, wrote two items about a new book called Lifecode, in which industrialist and art collector Stuart Pivar outlines his theory about biological self-organization. “I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery,” Myers reported, imagery which “has almost nothing to do with reality.” In a follow-up item, he got more creative with his putdowns: “This is a book suitable only for use at clown colleges,” he wrote, “and even there, I suspect the clowns would tell us that it is impractical, nonsensical, and has no utility in their craft.”
So Pivar’s suing Myers and his publisher, Seed Media Group, accusing them of “assault, libel, and slander,” and he’s asking for $15 million in damages. Jim Lippard—small world! he used to be my ISP sysadmin back in the ’90s—obtained a PDF of the complaint, in which Pivar admits that he’s specifically upset about being called “a classic crackpot,” and claims that the bad review, among other things, made noted scientist Neil de Grasse Tyson withdraw a previous endorsement of Pivar’s theories. Meanwhile, Brandon Keim summarizes the case for Wired. He observes that “what [Myers] says falls well short of the American definition of libel, which requires that a claim be false,” dismissing the lawsuit as a “PR stunt” on Pivar’s part to get people talking about his book on the blogosphere. (If so, I guess I fell for it.)
Keim also passes along a question from a blogger for Scientific American, who gets at the heart of why this case caught my eye: “What if PZ didn’t work for Seed? If people start going after individual bloggers without the resources to defend themselves, that would have a chilling effect on the whole field.” Or, to reframe it in terms familiar to GalleyCat veterans, what happens when Richard Ford decides to launch a counteroffensive on the basements of Terre Haute? What do you think?