Biologists helping bookstores

Monday 30 July 2007 — This is more than 17 years old. Be careful.

Biologists Helping Bookstores is a light-hearted blog about one man’s attempt to re-shelve pseudo-science books into the bookstore sections in which they truly belong: Philosophy, Religion, New Age, even Religious Fiction.

You’d expect the comments on a blog like this to quickly turn into an evolution vs. creationism debate, but they haven’t: they’ve turned into a bookstore workers vs. everybody else debate, about whether this small gesture does any good at all or just messes up bookstores.

Comments

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andrew 10:44 AM on 30 Jul 2007
I am willing to bet a large sum that he didn't go find Al Gore's books about global warming and file them under "religion", where all purely faith-based writing should go.

File this under "Liberal Biologists Helping Bookstores"
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Eric Florenzano 2:37 AM on 31 Jul 2007
I'm loving the poll on the side of the page:

Is "it's magic" a scientific idea to you?
-Yes
-No
-"Why is he anti-religion?"

But really, I'd love to read more into the fact that the books are placed in possibly inappropriate places, but I can't get past the idea that it's probably ignorance. In my experience, it's usually ignorance that causes these sorts of things, not some conspiracy to subconsciously make this pseudo-science acceptable.
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Ned Batchelder 6:52 AM on 31 Jul 2007
Eric: as people point out in the comment threads on the site, bookstores shelve books according to where they think they will sell best. They have no agenda other than that.

Andrew: I don't even know where to start...
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David St.Germain 8:26 AM on 1 Aug 2007
The lack of creationism debate is due to comment moderation:
"People can post comments. I moderated them because I do not want *another* evolution vs. creation debate blog. There are plenty of places for that on the internets. This is about book reclassification, and what constitutes science."
[gravatar]
Paul 8:41 AM on 2 Aug 2007
I work in a small used bookshop and can tell you that people misplace all sorts of books in all categories constantly. So I say to the biologists: bring it on. At least there's a method to their madness. And yes, we shelve'em to sell'em. I put books where I think a prospective buyer might wind up browsing and that decision process can be highly unscientific.

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