Picture this.
You’re a moderately successful businessman, with an amateur interest in evo-devo. One day you dream up a weird theory about how evo-devo works: it’s all to do with geometry, specifically patterns of toroids. Now this is a strange idea, but fortunately it’s one can than be easily tested: all we have to do is point a microscope at developing organisms and compare what we see with the strange “balloon creatures” that your theory predicts. Evidence. Good stuff, that. And the results are not what you hoped for.
But as I said, you’re a successful businessman. You have a little money to play around with. And so, undaunted, you assemble a book to explain your theory. You don’t have much original material to work with, so you include photocopies of unrelated articles by various authors, and you pad it out to 160 pages. You self-publish this puppy, and pretty soon it shows up on Amazon.com priced at $60. At this point, a real scientist who specializes in this stuff finds your book, reads it, and publishes a detailed review which exposes your theory for the nonsense that it is.
So what do you do next? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You sue the reviewer for FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS, for “Assault, Libel, and Slander”.
Sadly, this farce is actually playing out right now. The crackpot amateur scientist is one Stuart Pivar, and the reviewer is our very own PZ Myers, a.k.a. Pharyngula. Inevitably, the blogosphere is all over this, here, here and here. If there’s any justice, Pivar will lose his shirt over this.
UPDATE: Here’s the ultimate take-down from a lawyer, Peter Irons. Pivar’s attorney may wish to draft a letter of apology for wasting the court’s time…