In the Fall of 2000, investigative reporter Patrick Tierney was preparing a book that claimed that a prominent geneticist and anthropologist abetted a deadly measles epidemic among the Yanonami Indians of Venezuela. When scholars reviewed the book galleys, it triggered an immediate and lively Internet debate that evolved far faster than the usual pace of traditional publishing.

Mr. Turner and Mr. Sponsel, anthropologists at Cornell University and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, respectively, knew that the book's most explosive charges would break in The New Yorker, which was planning to run an excerpt in October. And they expected the book to appear in bookstores soon afterward. The association's next step, they thought, was to give scholars a forum for discussion at their annual meeting in November and commission a fact-finding team to review the charges, a process that would take months.

Instead, their e-mail message ignited a swift and furious debate that left scholars with nowhere to go for information but online. Mr. Turner and Mr. Sponsel hit the send button on August 31; within days of entering the Internet's bloodstream, the message was spreading like a virus. By mid-September, it had burst onto popular academic e-mail lists and caught the attention of the media.

Mr. Tierney's charges were challenged so quickly, in fact, that he revised parts of the book before it reached the printer.

Once upon a time, the book's publication would have been the starting point for a deliberate discussion refereed by academic journals and scholarly panels. But the Yanomami affair demonstrates that, for better or worse, those gatekeepers cannot keep up with more nimble combatants on the Internet.

David Hakken, an anthropologist at the State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome who studies Internet culture and research ethics, believes the Tierney episode may have shown Internet discourse at its best and worst. "As an intellectual, I guess I have to believe that the more people know about something, the better off they are in the long run," he says. "On the other hand, there's a tendency when using e-mail to exaggerate the response."

"E-mail really speeds things up," says Northwestern's Mr. Irons. "If you want to coordinate your activities and your thinking, you can do it much more quickly. Of course, so can the guy who's attacking you. I tend to think that actually that's basically a good thing. If people can communicate faster, that's better."

Some professors say they will relish the chance to assign those electronic texts, alongside Mr. Chagnon's book, in their introductory anthropology courses.

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Doug Hume's Anthropological Niche. In a labor of love, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut maintains a comprehensive and growing record of l'affaire Tierney. The original Turner-Sponsel memo is here, as well as links to dozens of position statements, press releases, newspaper articles and reviews, and message "threads" from e-mail discussion groups. Added bonus: A lengthy Yanomami bibliography. http://www.anth.uconn.edu/gradstudents/dhume/index4.htm

In past decades, a controversial book such as this would have lead to a number of scholarly critiques in professional jounals and perhaps a second book refuting the thesis, all unfolding over the time line of two to three years. With Internet listservs, web pages, and online archives, this timeline compressed to a few months with all of the resources open to students even in introductory college-level courses.