From the Guardian

Here’s one you might like. New blog Biologists Helping Bookstores – spotted via Jason Kottke – features a crusading scientist called Ste who tries reorganizing bookshop shelves to prevent pseudoscience featuring in the science categories.

Take this recent entry, where the target was work by individuals like intelligent design “pioneer” Michael Behe:

Four copies of The Edge of Evolution were discovered once more in the science section. I flip a copy and read the back. Here’s the beginning of the first quote from the back cover: “Until the past decade and the genomics revolution, Darwin’s theory rested on indirect evidence and reasonable speculation…” (Dr. Philip Skell, Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University, and member of the National Academy of Sciences). That’s not true! I am emboldened by this bare-faced lie from this well-respected elderly chemist, pick up all four copies, and stroll upstairs.

Now, I aim for accuracy in my recategorization… so I sought out the most appropriate section of the store: Behe’s lie-covered volume now rightly resides in the Religious Fiction section. A job well done.

Behe (if you didn’t know) is one of the leading thinkers behind the intelligent design movement – and the fellow that honed the theory of irreducible complexity that underpins many a Creationist argument.

I’ve heard of people doing this with political books (usually for party political reasons) but I’m liking this effort to increasing amounts of pseudo-scientific gabble that’s taking over.

Now I’m trying to think of some offensively-labelled titles that could do with a little guerrilla librarianship. Hmmm.

This reminds me of the tactics at some college campuses here in the US, involving the shouting down of speakers or the stealing of newspapers/ fliers, amazingly the ACLU is nowhere to be seen. The cases I am aware of involve mainly liberals against conservatives but I’m sure there are incidents flowing the other way also. Both cases are nothing more than intimidation.

The activity described above may seem harmless but the real goal is to get the stores to stop carrying the work. The re-shelvers intend to do that by making it harder to sell the books, making it a hassle to have the books in the stores, and because of decreased sales discouraging publishers from publishing similar books in the future.

If you don’t agree with an idea confront it don’t try to suppress it.

Free Speech

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 6:56 am by Chad and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.