What happens when you leave the echo chamber.

[rivka]

Michigan 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:

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...

Comments

[namedphoenix.livejournal.com]

ZOMG.

There are people out there who think they are smart enough to argue with experts about their original research when they haven't read the research????

I had NO idea there were such idiots in the world. I just thought my high schoolers weren't educated enough and they would eventually learn what they don't know and go about changing that. But no. We are doomed. They stay with the same mentality. "That's to hard. can't you just tell me the answer?" sheesh

Belief Loyalty

[adriang.livejournal.com]

It is to this that people reduce themselves when they feel obligated to BELIEVE as a show of loyalty to their religion. It doesn't matter how much evidence piles up supporting the other side. The other side's viewpoint must be denied and discredited at all costs. That's what keeps creationists at these silly positions. In their eyes, if loyalty to these absurd positions is more difficult, it only makes their loyalty all the more impressive.

Of course they don't want to read the paper. Why in the world would that matter to them?

Belief should never be a show of loyalty. When it is, it just makes us look silly.

Adrian