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

[electricland.livejournal.com]

I think one of my favourite bits has to be: "But how are we to know if these traits weren’t ‘potentiated’ by the Creator when He designed the bacteria thousands of years ago, such that they would eventually reveal themselves when the time was right? The only way this can be settled is if we have access to the genetic sequences of the bacteria colonies so that we can apply CSI techniques and determine if these ‘potentiated genotypes’ originated through blind chance or intelligence."

Apparently you really can do anything (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_Effect) with those CSI techniques!