It looks like Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education isn’t going to be able to get away with her defamation of California parent Larry Caldwell after all. (For the history of the Caldwell case, see here and here and here.) In a press release issued this week, Caldwell states that the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) has agreed to permanently remove Scott’s defamatory article from the world wide web and will be printing a retraction letter by Scott in the next issue of California Wild. In addition, CAS will give Caldwell the opportunity to accurately present his views in his own words in the next issue of the same magazine. Denyse O’Leary has an excellent blog about this latest development, here.
It’s lucky for Caldwell that he is an attorney. The NCSE and the California Academy of Sciences initially refused to respond to his demand for a correction, perhaps because the NCSE is used to defaming people without being called to account (read about the NCSE’s refusal to retract its false claims about Jonathan Wells here). One hopes that the Caldwell case will cause the newsmedia to be a lot more careful about spreading defamatory allegations put out by the NCSE and its spokespersons.