Last week I mentioned an amazing paper by Prof. Lenski reporting the evolution of new traits in a colony of E. coli bacteria. Obviously, since this is bad news for Creationists and the Intelligent Design movement, a number of creationists tried to attack the results or even Prof. Lenski himself (even epithets like ‘fraud‘ were heard by creationists!).

Well, it seems that a prominent creationist, Andrew Schlafly (who is running Conservapedia, a major creationist/anti-evolution/anti-science web site), wanted to ‘verify’ Lenski’s results with his huge expertise in… law!

So, Schlafly asked for the original data. Lenski replied politely mentioning that all related data were in the original paper. Schlafly (obviously never having read the paper himself) asks again. And this time Lenski’s reply is not so polite! In fact, he teaches Schlafly a good lesson and leaves him and his ID fellows in great embarrassment! RationalWiki has uploaded an accurate account of the “Lenski Affair”. The second response by Lenski is just amazing and well worth to read! Small excerpt just to give you an idea:

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

RationalWiki has the accurate account of letter exchanges as Conservapedia has already censored some links and perhaps more… That is why I do not link to Conservapedia. In fact I can only encourage you to visit the site if you are strong enough and can bear the utter stupidity and scientific distortion the site has to offer aplenty!

It is also well worth to read RationalWiki entry on Andrew Schlafly. Hillarious!

He [Schlafly] is currently undefeated in any debate due to his skillful use of the Schlafly Reversal, the Schlafly Rearguard, and the fact that he can just ban anyone who disagrees with him from his site.