Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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Around June 4, 2011, the usual gaggle of antievolutionists held a closed invitation-only meeting in a rented space at Cornell University. The putative topic of discussion was "Biological Information". After the conference, they set about getting their "conference papers" published by a scientific publisher. In various places around the web, little bits of discussion turned up describing how detractors and critics had been kept out, that the unadulterated antievolution objections would be published by a major publisher not yet to be named, and that all that was needed for this plan to come to fruition was to keep the publisher's name quiet until the volume was printed.
Last week, the major scientific publisher was revealed to be Springer Verlag. Springer automatically generates pre-publication announcements for forthcoming books, so in the course of time going on, the book description popped up on Springer's web site and on Amazon.com. The cat was out of the bag.
Nick Matzke posted on Panda's Thumb that Springer had managed to get suckered by a batch of creationists. Within 24 hours, the Springer page for the book was taken down. In news reports, Springer said that the editorial staff was sending the material out for further review.
On the Discovery Institute blog, a knee-jerk post complaining about "censorship!" went up momentarily, was crawled by the Google bot, and then was taken down. Somebody on the religious antievolution side of the fence figured out, belatedly, that the best shot at getting pretty much what they thought they had in the bag would be aided by not stirring up controversy themselves. And the word appears to be going out to the faithful that it should be so. The various places where gloating comments about the conference and subsequent publication suddenly had the comments or posts deleted. Anything that can provide a record of the intentional subterfuge and misleading material provided to Springer is being expunged even now.
So this thread is open to archive and preserve that record as best we can manage, scraping sources from Google cache to Internet Archive. Please post any finds you make here.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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