Science

Stuart Pivar, an “eccentric collector and inventor," has filed a $15 million libel lawsuit in New York against P.Z. Myers of the Pharyngula blog and Seed Media Group, publisher of Seed magazine and owner of ScienceBlogs, for referring to him as “a classic crackpot” in reviews of his book Lifecode. The complaint identifies Pivar as “an industrialist, inventor, and scientist,” the founder and chairman of the board of Chem-tainer Industries, and co-founder (with Andy Warhol) and original funder of the New York Academy of Art, “a classical graduate school for painting and sculpture, whose current patron is H.R.H. Charles, Prince of Wales.” It claims that Pivar regularly discussed his book with Stephen Jay Gould, who “was working on a refutation of the fundamentalist Darwinian theory of evolution." The complaint claims that Myers’ remarks led to Neil de Grasse Tyson withdrawing a review of the book and causing “considerable mental and emotional distress,” tortious interference with the plaintiff’s business relationships as a “scientist and scientific editor,” and “loss of book sales and diminished returns on ten years of funded scientific research in special damages” exceeding $5 million. The three claims of the complaint are, first, for declaratory relief in removing defamatory statements from the web and an injunction to prevent further such statements; second, for $5 million in special damages from the “tortious interference with business relations”; and third, for $10 million in damages for defamation, emotional distress, and loss of reputation. Seed Media Group may be able to have itself dismissed as a defendant on the libel claim via the safe harbor on online publication of defamatory statements by a user of a site, which has been successfully used as a defense by America Online (in Zeran v. AOL and Blumenthal v. Drudge and AOL) and ElectriCiti (in Aquino v. ElectriCiti). I suspect that Pivar will have a difficult time proving the claimed damages, as well as overcoming the truth defense to a defamation claim, but I’m curious to see if any lawyers (Timothy Sandefur?) have an opinion. The complaint looks a little odd and sloppy to me–it initially refers to “tortuous” interference rather than “tortious,” includes the odd paragraph about the Art Academy, and generally doesn’t appear to me to be a well-crafted case–but I am not a lawyer. The text of the complaint may be found here (PDF). P.Z. Myers’ reviews of Pivar’s book may be found here and here. Another review of Pivar’s book, authored by his friend Richard Gordon, may be found here. Pivar’s claim that Stephen Jay Gould would not have signed the NCSE’s “Project Steve” statement is discussed at CSI’s website. Christopher Mims has commented on the lawsuit at Scientific American’s blog, and Brandon Keim at Wired Science has a good summary of the dispute. UPDATE: I’ve just read through both of P.Z. Myers’ blog post reviews again, and I note that the alleged defamatory reference, “a classic crackpot,” appears in neither of them. In the earlier post, Myers says of Pivar’s book: “It seems no expense was spared getting it published, which is in contrast to the content, and is unusual for such flagrant crackpottery.” The later post does not contain the word “crackpot.” The post that Pivar is complaining about is another Myers post, titled “Pseudoscience by press release”, where Pivar himself commented several times, including to write, “I will ignore your insulting and intemperate language and concentrate on the substantive issues.” Apparently he changed his mind on that point. UPDATE (August 21, 2007): Blake Stacey has put together a nice chronological summary of who said what when, along with links to commentators. He points out that the “review” by Neil de Grasse Tyson which was on Pivar’s website was a quote created by taking one piece out of context and fabricating another–it’s no wonder that Tyson asked for Pivar to remove it. Andrea Bottaro summarizes the case with links to more sources about Pivar’s Stephen J. Gould claims at The Panda’s Thumb, and Timothy Sandefur weighs in with an evaluation of the legal issues at Positive Liberty, where he calls Pivar’s suit a case of “abus[ing] the legal process to try to intimidate and bully people for no good reason” and concludes that “Myers unquestionably has the right to call Pivar a crackpot, and we have the right to consider this lawsuit as proof of the fact." UPDATE (August 22, 2007): Ed Darrell at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub has a nice article about how we determine what a “crackpot” is. Pivar seems to fit quite well. A commenter at Pharyngula has observed that Pivar’s attorney was just admitted to the New York Bar in 2005 and went to law school in the UK. UPDATE (August 24, 2007): Retired UCSD law professor Peter Irons (well versed in the law as it pertains to intelligent design) has written an excellent letter to Stuart Pivar which strongly recommends that Pivar withdraw his suit rather than quickly lose and become subject to monetary sanctions. Irons also says that he knew Gould from the 1950s until his death, and was his neighbor for many years, and that if Gould were alive today he’d probably have a viable defamation action against Pivar. UPDATE (August 29, 2007): Pivar has withdrawn his libel suit (see Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Pharyngula). But now his attorney, Michael Little, thinks he has a case against Peter Irons! Kudos to Pivar for doing the right thing. UPDATE (September 5, 2007): More entertainment regarding Michael Little may be found at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. ...

This is from back in February of 2006, but A Few Things Ill Considered has a nice list of statements from scientific organizations endorsing anthropogenic global warming that includes NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and, perhaps most interestingly, British Petroleum, the Shell Group, and, in the comments, ExxonMobil. A number of the links are broken at this point, but I was able to find numerous statements about the reality of anthropogenic global warming on the Shell web pages with a Google search for “global warming site:shell.com”. Science isn’t a matter of popular vote, but when a scientific consensus is established it certainly puts the burden of proof on the challenger.

I spent most of the last nine days in the Grand Canyon, rafting down the Colorado River on the National Center for Science Education’s 2007 trip. I met interesting people and made new friends, ate great food, and saw amazing sights. This was my third trip down the Canyon, but my first in the last two decades (my previous two were in August 1976 and June 1985). This trip included the presentation of both creationist flood geology and real geology, but there was no contest–when you have hundreds of feet of successive ocean floor beds full of fossils of marine life that has lived and died, and a large variety of completely different kinds of formations that have clearly been deposited in different kinds of events, it’s transparently nonsense to claim that it was all laid down in a single year-long flood. Top photo: Grand Canyon about 25 miles downstream from Lee’s Ferry (mile 0); bottom photo: downstream view of river from Nankoweap Canyon (mile 53). UPDATE (August 7, 2007): Here’s a blog post about our trip by a member of the crew.

The Kentucky Creation Museum is built upon a foundation (literally) that disproves its contents–alternating layers of limestone and shale filled with fossils of ancient marine creatures. This video gives you a tutorial (and is a demonstration of what Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis don’t want people to learn).

Barry Beyerstein, professor of psychology and member of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, a Fellow and member of the Committee of Skeptical Inquiry’s executive council, author of numerous skeptical articles and books, a contributing editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, member of the advisory board of the Drug Policy Foundation and advocate for decriminalization of drugs, brother of philosopher and skeptic Dale Beyerstein, and father of prominent blogger Lindsey Beyerstein, died on Tuesday at the age of 60. His daughter describes him as “among the most ethical people I have ever known” and “also one of the most fulfilled people I’ve had occasion to meet." I had the pleasure of meeting him on multiple occasions at CSICOP conferences and found him to be very friendly and generous with his time; he was the only member of the CSICOP executive council who took me seriously regarding an ethical issue I brought up regarding a prominent skeptic who regularly published in the Skeptical Inquirer. His death is a significant loss to skepticism and advocates for sensible drug policies. He is remembered on the front page of the CSI website. CSI Executive Director Barry Karr sent out the following: ...

Reed Esau, the originator of the celebrity atheists list, has put together a video introducing SkeptiCamp, an “un-conference” where all of the attendees provide the content, based on BarCamp. There will be a SkeptiCamp on August 3-4, 2007 in Denver, Colorado.

Fingerprint matching has been used as an investigative tool by law enforcement and as a key piece of evidence to convict criminals in courts for over a century, but its accuracy has not actually been scientifically tested until recently. It turns out that claims of its accuracy have been exaggerated, and fingerprint matching is often more art than science. In 2004, the FBI claimed that a fingerprint found on a bag at the sign of a terrorist bombing in Madrid, Spain on March 11 was a match to the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield, an attorney in Beaverton, Oregon who converted to Islam and married to a Muslim woman from Egypt. Despite the fact that Spanish police disagreed, claiming that there was no match to Mayfield, the FBI insisted they had a “one hundred percent identification” with fifteen separate points of agreement between the latent print from Spain and Mayfield’s fingerprint, validated by at least three FBI fingerprint examiners. Mayfield was arrested and detained on May 6, 2004. On May 20, Spanish police announced that they had matched the fingerprint to Ouhnane Daoud of Algeria, who–unlike Mayfield–had actually been in Spain. Mayfield was released and the FBI ended up apologizing. This case has resulted in scientific scrutiny of fingerprint evidence that has been long overdue. A decade ago, Tucson printer and publisher of the anarchist periodical The Match!, Fred Woodworth, published “A Printer Looks at Fingerprints," in which he pointed out pseudoscientific reasoning in fingerprint matching methodology as described in fingerprint textbooks. Subsequently, Simon Cole authored the book Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (2002, Harvard University Press), and has just authored an article on the subject in the July/August 2007 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, titled “The Fingerprint Controversy." In Cole’s Skeptical Inquirer article, he states that “The very first study containing accuracy data was finally published just recently, finding very high accuracy rates in a class of trainees on latent prints of unknown difficulty; but the study contains some methodological flaws (Haber and Haver 2006). Moreover, the authors again argue strongly against inferring accuracy rates from their own data (Wertheim, Langenburg, and Moenssens 2006)." No doubt scientific investigation will demonstrate that proper use of fingerprint analysis is a reliable method of identification, but more importantly, it will find its limits and weaknesses so that it does not continue to be pressed beyond its capabilities and result in false judgments of guilt in criminal cases. Unfortunately, law enforcement and prosecutors have a vested interest in the flexibility of techniques that can be used to produce the judgment they want, as demonstrated by the difficulty in getting police departments to modify their procedures of eyewitness identification of suspects to correct for well-known cognitive biases.

Answers in Genesis has announced that it has hired creationist geologist Andrew Snelling, formerly an employee of the Creation Science Foundation, Answers in Genesis-Australia, and Creation Ministries International (the same organization under three names) as well as a contractor for the Institute for Creation Research (they paid him $85,000-$96,000/year to do research for them), to fill their open position. This partially answers the question of how AiG-US will conduct future “scientific” work, a question which CMI had raised since the Australians were the main contributors to such AiG efforts in the past. A question that hasn’t been answered is why Snelling stopped working for Creation Ministries International and went to the ICR. The Briese report contains this tantalizing tidbit of information, which I haven’t seen anyone publicly comment on to date: I clearly remember him saying that Andrew Snelling [a former Australian staff member who was opposed to the notion that a Christian can ever remarry. He was later dismissed by the Australian Board, which at the time included Ken Ham, for matters unconnected to this issue.] had been right about it at the time and that he (Ken) and others had been wrong. But Ken didn’t give me any convincing reason as to why he now saw things so differently and why it was now necessary to make an issue of it.This description makes it sound like Snelling’s departure from CMI was not voluntary, and that he had issues with Carl Wieland (a Christian who divorced and remarried). Snelling is one of the very few young earth creationist geologists on the planet with a Ph.D. from a mainstream academic institution (Steve Austin of the Institute for Creation Research is another). Ronald Numbers’ book, The Creationists, describes how Henry Morris of the ICR wanted to see a young creationist successfully obtain a Ph.D. in geology from a mainstream institution, only to be faced with failures by Clifford Burdick (who was kicked out of the program at the University of Arizona) and Nicolaas Rupke (who succeeded in obtaining his Ph.D., but rejected young-earth creationism as a result of what he learned in the process). ...

In response to Crooks and Liars giving equal time to nonsense, Orac at Respectful Insolence has compiled a list of his posts on the claimed link between mercury/thimerosol and autism.

In an experiment by Friederike Range of the University of Vienna reported in the Washington Post, a border collie named Guinness would demonstrate to other dogs how to use her paw to push down on a bar to get a treat. Guinness would demonstrate in one of two different conditions–with a ball in her mouth, and without a ball in her mouth. Dogs prefer to use their mouths to move the bar, and so dogs that saw the demonstration while Guinness had a ball in her mouth inferred that she was only using her paw because her mouth was otherwise occupied, and would use their mouths. Dogs that saw her perform the demonstration without a ball would duplicate her demonstration, using their paws to push on the bar.