![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaMichigan State biologist Richard Lenski has been following an E. Coli population for 20 years, and has produced evidence of a major evolutionary shift in response to environmental conditions.
Some puffed-up "Conservapedia" hacks decided that they were competent to take apart Lenski's conclusions, and wrote to him demanding that he release his raw data for "examination by independent reviewers."
The resulting exchange of letters is pretty entertaining. Here's my favorite bit from the exchange:
The Conservapedia talk pages are hilarious. My favorite unintentional bit of comedy: the plaintive heading on the talk archive page "Anyone a biologist?" (Answer: sadly, no.)
(Via Pandagon)
Edited to add: Wait, wait, here's another favorite bit from the talk pages: "I asked Zachary Blount to clarify his statements about whether evolution of Cit+ (citrate-eating) E. coli bacteria was a goal of the experiment. He answered by asking me to go on a wild goose chase by reading the whole paper, which has 8 pages of fine print -- this is called "bibliography bluffing." And when people balk at going on these wild goose chases, they are accused of not wanting to learn."
Man. I can't believe that charlatan Blount expected that anyone wishing to argue about the merits of a scientific paper would read all eight pages of the paper itself. Why would you set up such ludicrously rigorous standards? Only if you have something to hide...
Some puffed-up "Conservapedia" hacks decided that they were competent to take apart Lenski's conclusions, and wrote to him demanding that he release his raw data for "examination by independent reviewers."
The resulting exchange of letters is pretty entertaining. Here's my favorite bit from the exchange:
It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]
The Conservapedia talk pages are hilarious. My favorite unintentional bit of comedy: the plaintive heading on the talk archive page "Anyone a biologist?" (Answer: sadly, no.)
(Via Pandagon)
Edited to add: Wait, wait, here's another favorite bit from the talk pages: "I asked Zachary Blount to clarify his statements about whether evolution of Cit+ (citrate-eating) E. coli bacteria was a goal of the experiment. He answered by asking me to go on a wild goose chase by reading the whole paper, which has 8 pages of fine print -- this is called "bibliography bluffing." And when people balk at going on these wild goose chases, they are accused of not wanting to learn."
Man. I can't believe that charlatan Blount expected that anyone wishing to argue about the merits of a scientific paper would read all eight pages of the paper itself. Why would you set up such ludicrously rigorous standards? Only if you have something to hide...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 03:14 pm (UTC)To be fair (and I haven't looked at the original paper at all), I read this (poorly written) excuse as "Can you imagine that he wanted me to read the whole paper!!! Which includes 8 pages of paper/article citations in the bibliography, and I can't evaluate the relevance of those without even *more* reading!!! Geez, can't he just put up a 30-second video of his eColi on YouTube?"
Still, asking someone to read the actual paper rather than the abstract, and at least try to understand it before accusing the author of Unscientific Conduct, is just So Gosh-Darn Mean. :P
Plus even if that wasn't a goal of the original experiment, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a valid observation or result. I believe I've read (there I go again, *reading*) have been a few scientific discoveries that started as accidents or just someone noticing something unusual and following up on it...
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 03:25 pm (UTC)The 'theory of evolution' is as much a theory as the 'theory of gravity'.
Oblig.: It's not Gravity, it's Intelligent Falling. Angels are pushing from above.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-03 09:15 am (UTC)Hee. "Intelligent Falling". Love that.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 04:50 pm (UTC)Like this one? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin)
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'"
- Isaac Asimov
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 05:31 pm (UTC)Not to mention my childhood heroine:
"...is never gonna change the world
Change the world overnight
Any more than the invention of the six-gun, child...
Any more than the discovery of Radium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie)
- Thomas Dolby, "Screen Kiss"