Dive Summary:
- The University of California at Berkeley released a report Wednesday concluding that anthropology professor Terrence Deacon did not commit plagiarism in his 2012 book "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter."
- The investigation did find, however, that he was the victim of a reputation-damaging "relentless e-mail and Internet campaign" conducted on behalf of Deacon's chief critic, Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence executive director Michael Lissack, who alleged Deacon's ideas were lifted from Alicia Juarrero's "Dynamics in Action" and Evan Thompson's "Mind in Life."
- Berkeley's investigative committee determined that while there was "considerable overlap in the issues discussed," Deacon did not plagiarize and had simply pursued a similar line of thought to Juarrero.
From the article:
Terrence Deacon did not commit plagiarism. He did not steal anyone's ideas. Instead he was the victim of a "relentless e-mail and Internet campaign" that unfairly damaged his reputation. Those are the key findings of a report released late Wednesday by the University of California at Berkeley, which investigated allegations that Mr. Deacon, a professor of anthropology at the university, borrowed and then failed to cite much of the material in his 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. ...