Libel lawsuit against Science Blogger P.Z. Myers

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.

Karl Rove's adoptive father and genital piercing

Apparently Karl Rove's adoptive father, Louis Rove, an oil geologist, was a gay man who was an avid fan of genital piercing, whose piercings were frequently pictured in Piercing Fans International Quarterly.

(Via Stan Schwarz on the SKEPTIC list, who also reports that he personally met Louie Rove.)

Bush says FISA law change is just advisory

The Bush administration, commenting on Congress' expansion of the Executive branch's warrantless wiretapping powers without needing approval of the FISA Court, says that the legislation is "just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do."

Constitution? What Constitution?

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

The consensus for anthropogenic global warming

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.

Melanie Morgan vs. Naomi Wolf

Crooks and Liars has a video clip of Melanie Morgan and Naomi Wolf appearing on Chris Matthews' Hardball to discuss Cheney's position of 1994 about why invading and occupying Iraq was a bad idea. Morgan immediately descends into dissembling, claiming that 9/11 changed everything, when in fact it changed nothing about Iraq. Naomi Wolf calls her on it, and correctly describes how the Bush administration has engaged in deception and lies to get us into the war and to seize unconstitutional powers for the Executive branch. Morgan's response to Wolf: "You're going to look super in a burqa."

Morgan seems to think that radical Islamic fundamentalists are about to take control of the United States, and that invading Iraq (one of the few countries in the Middle East which actually had a secular government) and turning it into a breeding ground for radical Islamic insurgents is an essential step to prevent it from happening. That's wildly insane.

The Cheney of 1994 was exactly right in his predictions of what would happen if we invaded Iraq, and no one has yet explained what changed his mind. September 11 is not an answer to that question. I think part of the answer can be found in James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans--groupthink from the Project for a New American Century crowd infected him, and he thought he could be at the center of power of a new American empire controlling the Middle East. But they were completely wrong about what would happen.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Lying at the Weekly Standard

Julian Sanchez points out the staggering misrepresentation by those arguing that the recent increase in wiretapping power amounts to nothing more than an update of FISA procedures to reflect current technology.

(Hat tip to Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front.)

The top six lies of Alberto Gonzales

At Talking Points Memo.

Answers in Genesis Wikipedia edits

Thanks to Wikiscanner, here are a few of the anonymous Wikipedia edits made by people at Answers in Genesis:

November 18, 2005: Changed a sentence in the entry on "Answers in Genesis" from "...according to Biblical myth, there was no death in the Garden of Eden" to "...according to the Biblical record, there was no death in the Garden of Eden."

December 5, 2006: Vandalized the entry on "Football" to add the words "Football sucks".

December 28, 2006: Added an entry for www.articledirect.com to the entry on "Free content." Does an AiG employee have another business on the side?

May 24, 2007: Modifies a sentence in the entry on "Creation Museum" from "This museum portrays the Earth's history interpreting the genesis literally" (ick!) to "The museum presents the account of man's origins and early history according to the Book of Genesis."

There are several other edits of "Creation Museum" and I didn't review them all, but most were reasonable improvements to the article, with the occasional biased statement that propounded creationism as true.

Jeffrey Dahmer and Answers in Genesis

(I've had this in draft since June 21, but forgot about it--I was making an effort to verify that Dahmer was actually raised as a creationist or Christian, but didn't find anything to indicate when Lionel Dahmer became either one. I raised the question in comments at Ed Brayton's blog, and one commenter, Kristine, replied that Lionel Dahmer says he only became a creationist after his son was arrested. That undermines the specifics of the case below. There have certainly been serial killers raised as Christians (such as Ted Bundy), but I've not heard of any that have been specifically raised as creationists. I don't think police departments look at Christianity or creationism as a relevant factor in a serial killer profile, the way they look at, say, possession of a copy of the Satanic Bible, except in extreme cases, which is probably as it should be.)

Ken Ham likes to argue that evolution is the cause of a variety of social ills--teen pregnancy, pornography, drugs, abortion, racism, the Holocaust, etc. His book The Lie: Evolution argues that evolution is responsible for all of these things.

I just learned (thanks to Ed Brayton's blog) that Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer, was raised as a creationist, and his father, Dr. Lionel Dahmer, is listed on the Answers in Genesis website as an analytical chemist who accepts the biblical account of creation.

If evolutionists used Ken Ham's technique, they would argue that being raised as a creationist causes cannibalism. Answers in Genesis specifically suggests that it was belief in evolution, rather than issues from his upbringing, that caused Jeffrey Dahmer to kill, quoting a 1994 statement from him that "If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…"

The Wikipedia entry on Dahmer observes that he "dissected already dead animals as a child" (he collected and sexually interacted with roadkill), began abusing alcohol at 14, had extremely low self-esteem, and his parents divorced after "constant fighting" when he was 18. His father "forced him to enlist" in the Army for six years, but he was discharged after two due to excessive drinking. He built an altar of candles and human skulls in the closet of his apartment that was found when he was arrested. In prison, he declared himself a born-again Christian (which he was when he made the above statement), and was beaten to death in prison in 1994.

Psychiatrist George Palermo testified at Dahmer's trial that he killed his victims because he hated his own homosexuality.

UPDATE (September 6, 2013): It has been pointed out to me that if Lionel Dahmer claimed to have become a creationist after his son's arrest, this is false--Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, but Lionel Dahmer co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, a conference which was held in 1990.

UPDATE (December 15, 2023): Glenn Branch brought to my attention that Lionel Dahmer died on December 5, 2023, and received an obituary in the New York Times (December 12th) that is as much about his son as him, but makes no mention of the creationism. He also noted that Lionel Dahmer's memoir says that he was inspired to return to Christianity in 1989 via the influence of young-earth creationist Bert Thompson of Apologetics Press.  Bert Thompson was subsequently fired from Apologetics Press after allegations of grooming and sexual abuse of teen boys.

UPDATE (December 27, 2023): Glenn Branch has published an article: "Like father, like son: Jeffrey Dahmer's claims about evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer's creationism"

God Hates Roman Catholics?

...Or is it Peruvians? Or perhaps Peruvian Roman Catholics?

From Yahoo News:

Hundreds had gathered in the pews of the San Clemente church on Wednesday — the day Roman Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary's rise into heaven — for a special Mass marking one month since the death of a Pisco man.

With minutes left in the Mass, the church's ceiling began to break apart. The shaking lasted for an agonizing two minutes, burying 200 people, according to the town's mayor. On Thursday, only two stone columns and the church's dome rose from a giant pile of stone, bricks, wood and dust.