Richard Lenski Hands Conservapedia Their Backsides

If you get any kind of a kick out of the science side of the culture wars, you'll want to see this. I recently drew attention to a 20-year E. coli experiment. Here is some quick background:

Richard Lenski, a new member of the National Academy of Sciences, has been growing E. coli for 20 years. His lab has a recent paper where they report that around generation 30,000 the bacteria gained the ability to grow on citrate. A defining characteristic of E. coli is their inability to get citrate across their membranes, but these bugs have evolved a way to do so. That's a very bare-bones description, so please follow the link in my original post.

This result is threatening to creationists who refuse to allow that random mutations can do anything but destroy. The yahoos at Conservapedia (i.e like Wikipedia, but without all the liberal bias, like science) had the gall to write Lenski and demand that he release his data (reminding him of his taxpayer support) for them to examine. Lenski responded with a polite letter that corrected some of their misconceptions, and suggested that they actually read the paper. The yahoos demanded again.

Lenski has responded again, and it's a doozy. I want to touch on part of it in another post, so for now I will simply urge you to read it.


Addendum: The correspondence back and forth is posted at RationalWiki.

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