Creationist "PWNED" by Lenski

June 13, 2008

Dear Professor Lenski,

Skepticism has been expressed on Conservapedia about your claims, and the significance of your claims, that E. Coli bacteria had an evolutionary beneficial mutation in your study. ....snip...

Please post the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it, and note where in the data you find justification for your conclusions.

I will post your reply, or lack of reply, on www.conservapedia.com . Thank you.

Andy Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D. Conservapedia
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Isnt this the same crap that Dawkins was asked on the Youtube "stumped hoax revealed" video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uz1CiDDIq4
 
Olowkow said:
dogjones said:
Here is an exchange between Andy Schlafly, bloke behind "conservapedia", and Richard Lenski. I found it on Ben Goldacre's site. Wonderful wonderful wonderful. Hope the mods agree it's ok to post in its entirety.

Edited by Darat: 


Does anyone know if he is one of Phyllis Schlafly's sons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly
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BTW the site is www.badscience.net not ".com"

According to Dr Aust at Badscience:
comment#2
Dr Aust said,

June 24, 2008 at 10:03 pm

For those unfamiliar with the right-wing fringe of American “politics”, note that Andrew Schlafly is a second-generation right-wing crazy. His mum is (in)famous cold-war warrior Phyllis Schalfly.

Phyllis spent the 60s advocating building lots more nukes to aim at the Russkies and the 70s lambasting “womens’ libbers” and opposing Equal Rights laws. More recently she has called for the impeachment of any judge on the US Supreme Court who is not rabidly right-wing.

They do say the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree…
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That was an extraordinarily good reply from Dr. Lenski. It was so good that I found myself trying to analyze why it was so good, compared to some other very strongly worded exchanges between scientists and creationists. Here's what I came up with.

The exchange between Schlafly and Lenski had two parallel sorts of themes. One was a debate over ideas about evolution, creation, and experimental results that support evolution. The other was a series of personal attacks and counterattacks between the two men. The amazing thing is that Lenski managed to avoid inappropriate mixing of the two. Unlike many other people, Lenski managed to answer the genuine inquiries of knowledge with information, free of personal insult. He didn't say, "You are too stupid to understand this because you are a creationist," or any other variant on that topic.

On the other hand, when he was baselessly defamed, he struck back with a powerful defense. Lenski's own persona attacks were directed at Schlafly's bad behavior, not at his incorrect ideas. There's no doubt that he looks upon the ideas of creationism with some level of disdain, but he quite correctly takes the high road in presenting his evidence which supports his own theory. He is quite patient in explaining his experimental results. When he does decide to mix it up with Schlafly on the personal level, he makes it clear that this is a response to Schlafly's malicious and baseless charges. He makes it clear that he is responding to bad behavior, not to incorrect ideas, and then he does it masterfully.
 
Complexity said:
mijopaalmc is merely an apologist for the fundies and creationists.

Discuss this with him if you wish, but you won't make any headway.
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This is a perfect example of what Meadmaker is talking about when he refers to the "inappropriate mixing of [the debate on creationism/evolution and personal insult" in his analysis of the Shlafly/Lenski exchange. Complexity obviously disagrees with me about Lenski's approach to Schlafly, but, instead of criticizing my arguments, he personally attacks me as an "apologist for the fundies and creationists" and therefore discounts my arguments because of his perception of my apologetics for fundamentalism and creationism.
 
mijopaalmc said:
This is a perfect example of what Meadmaker is talking about when he refers to the "inappropriate mixing of [the debate on creationism/evolution and personal insult" in his analysis of the Shlafly/Lenski exchange. Complexity obviously disagrees with me about Lenski's approach to Schlafly, but, instead of criticizing my arguments, he personally attacks me as an "apologist for the fundies and creationists" and therefore discounts my arguments because of his perception of my apologetics for fundamentalism and creationism.
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No, his dismisses your ability to discuss this situation in an honest and meaningful way, based on your posting history, and he is absolutely correct in doing so. Your position is dismissed because it is wrong, separate from dismissing you as someone more generally not worth discussing things with.
 
JoeEllison said:
No, his dismisses your ability to discuss this situation in an honest and meaningful way, based on your posting history, and he is absolutely correct in doing so. Your position is dismissed because it is wrong, separate from dismissing you as someone more generally not worth discussing things with.
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Plus its dismissed because that annoys him. Lets not forget that bonus effect.
:D
 
Thank you, JoeEllison and BenBurch - you understand my position with regard to mijopaalmc very well.

Utterly Ignorable.
 
BenBurch said:
The "why" is clear; unless they discredit this result, anti-evolutionism is over.
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But it was already "over". This evidence, while important and interesting, is a very small drop in an extremely large bucket. The fossil record, diversity of species, extinctions, computer models, logic, genetics, molecular biology, the physics of radiation and how it affects mutation, increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, etc. etc. all provide overwhelming evidence that evolution occurred and is occurring. Anyone that denies that is plainly not willing to pay attention to evidence, and so I don't see how this result will change much.
 
sol invictus said:
But it was already "over". This evidence, while important and interesting, is a very small drop in an extremely large bucket. The fossil record, diversity of species, extinctions, computer models, logic, genetics, molecular biology, the physics of radiation and how it affects mutation, increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, etc. etc. all provide overwhelming evidence that evolution occurred and is occurring. Anyone that denies that is plainly not willing to pay attention to evidence, and so I don't see how this result will change much.
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This experiment is actually very useful in terms of rhetoric, which is no doubt why conservapedia is taking action.

Specifically, it does refute an important implication of Intelligent Design: that new features that require multiple mutations cannot arise through the natural selection / neodarwinist model due to Irreducible Complexity.

This experiment showed that a neutral mutation that was preserved could be combined later with another new mutation to create a novel function. ie: multiple mutations don't have to happen simultaneously (which Behe is correct to point out is an astronomically unlikely situation) to provide a new function in the organism.

Biologists have argued for mechanisms such as neutral mutations providing scaffolding just waiting for a final piece to be added, but have been unable to show a 'real-time' example until now. Irreducible Complexity has had hypothetical counterexamples, but now has a real-world one.
 
blutoski said:
Irreducible Complexity has had hypothetical counterexamples, but now has a real-world one.
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I don't follow you. There are literally millions - perhaps billions - of such examples. Every organ in the human body. The evolution of flight. The evolution of warm blood, 4-chambered hearts, etc. etc. We have tons of evidence in the fossil record for all that stuff evolving, not to mention in genetics and computer models.

Moreover, the silly fallacy of the evolutionist's argument is obvious to anyone with a feel for probabilities. There is no need to require that those mutations happen all at once, even if individually they are somewhat detrimental, and it was only from that wrong requirement that one finds that it can't have happened. Anyone that doesn't believe the math can do a computer simulation.

Moreover the question being asked is "how likely is it that this particular unlikely thing happened", which is the wrong question. The question should be "how likely is it that some unlikely thing happened". There are an enormous number of things which might have happened, all of which are individually extremely unlikely. But some of them will certainly happen (because there so many possibilities), and the ones that do happen will be very unlikely. It's like asking what the odds are of having picked the particular blade of grass from a meadow that you're holding in your hand. The odds for that are tiny, and yet there is nothing about that which requires an explanation.

So while I suppose this result may help rhetorically, I don't find it as significant as some others here seem to.
 
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Sol Invictus:

The point that Feynman made about seeing a car numberplate "N345 TYD". How unlikely is that? (paraphrased).

Agree entirely.

I am confuesd about Behe: He claims to accept microevolution not macroevolution, which is a meaningless distinction. Why didn't he just claim that it was microevolution of e.coli?

Still... he didn't :)
 
sol invictus said:
I don't follow you. There are literally millions - perhaps billions - of such examples. Every organ in the human body. The evolution of flight. The evolution of warm blood, 4-chambered hearts, etc. etc. We have tons of evidence in the fossil record for all that stuff evolving, not to mention in genetics and computer models.
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No, I disagree about this. It's part of that distinction between evolution-the-fact (which was quite established before natural selection was proposed) versus natural-selection-the-mechanism.

Intelligent Design does not dispute the existence of evolution. It is the rejection of natural selection as sufficient to explain new features.

Behe is correct to assert that it's impossible for all the mutations we associate with a new function to happen simultaneously. However, it's a strawperson, because neodarwinists do not make this claim anyway. Scaffolding and redundancies are just two of many sensible explanations for how a new feature can arise from a longitudinal sequence of non-beneficial mutations.

Up to this point, we didn't have any good examples.



sol invictus said:
Moreover, the silly fallacy of the evolutionist's argument is obvious to anyone with a feel for probabilities. There is no need to require that those mutations happen all at once, even if individually they are somewhat detrimental, and it was only from that wrong requirement that one finds that it can't have happened.
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I'm having trouble parsing this paragraph.




sol invictus said:
Moreover the question being asked is "how likely is it that this particular unlikely thing happened", which is the wrong question. The question should be "how likely is it that some unlikely thing happened". There are an enormous number of things which might have happened, all of which are individually extremely unlikely. But some of them will certainly happen (because there so many possibilities), and the ones that do happen will be very unlikely. It's like asking what the odds are of having picked the particular blade of grass from a meadow that you're holding in your hand. The odds for that are tiny, and yet there is nothing about that which requires an explanation.
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I disagree. Even given large numbers of mutation events, the statistical likelihood of multiple simultaneous mutations gets small enough to be considered impossible.

This is actually germaine to Dawkins vs Gould, in that Dawkins argued that certain evolutionary paths are closed off by sheer statistical unlikelihood. He referred to this as various things, including terms like 'mutation landscape' or 'mutation hyperspace' or 'mutation topogrpahy'.

Gould felt mostly the same, but was a bit more confident that "if the tape was rewound" things might be somewhat different. But Gould at least agreed with Dawkins that there were limited paths for evolution to follow.

That's very high-level, and more macroscopic phylogeny theories, whereas Behe et al concentrate on considering the nuts-and-bolts mutations that would be required to underwrite them.



sol invictus said:
So while I suppose this result may help rhetorically, I don't find it as significant as some others here seem to.
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I think it helps rhetorically very much, since Behe always had the out that if these observed functional gains were caused by sequential inert mutations, it is impossible to know today, after the fact, and therefore technically unproven. This would make the impossibility of such an event 'debatable' (in the rhetorical sense). However, now that we have an example that was observed within human lifespan, calling such an event 'impossible' is, well, impossible. They have lost this card.

Now, just being plain wrong has never stopped Behe before, but ID's central thesis is disproven by counterexample.
 
sol invictus said:
But it was already "over". This evidence, while important and interesting, is a very small drop in an extremely large bucket. The fossil record, diversity of species, extinctions, computer models, logic, genetics, molecular biology, the physics of radiation and how it affects mutation, increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, etc. etc. all provide overwhelming evidence that evolution occurred and is occurring. Anyone that denies that is plainly not willing to pay attention to evidence, and so I don't see how this result will change much.
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Well, it was over for ME the minute I read a real biology textbook when I was a teen.

But the fundy puckered sphincters lump all fossils into a bag and say they are all relics of the Noachean Flood, and that they cannot be organized into a sequence because there are gaps.

They all say; "Show me anything evolving."

Industrial Moths they toss off as selection of an existing trait.

The lizards that appear to have evolved a new organ and lifestyle they claim were not watched the whole time and were replaced by a similar species that had that trait already.

This one they cannot wiggle out of no matter how many lies they tell; We watched this one happen and preserved the steps along the way.

It ends the debate on if complex traits can evolve, on if mutations are ever beneficial, and on the heritability and benign nature of "useless" mutations that potentiate a later change.

After this they have no rational objections left to herd in those who are less learned; All they can say is "It doesn't happen because the Bible doesn't say it happens."
 
The fundamentalist approach is that all the creatures in the universe are members of of one Type or another, and that all Types were created at one time during creation. The fact that flight evolved for them simply says that some Types have flying as a function their bodies can perform. Flightless birds are of a type of birds that cannot fly - always have been, always will be. Why does it look like they evolved from normal birds? Who knows why god does these things? Must be a Mystery.

They have not been able to refute microevolution, that things change in small ways within Types. They deny that Types can change from one to several. While evolutionists don't see the distinction, they do. With these bacteria there is a change that evolutionists would certainly have linked to two different species of bacteria had we not seen the change before our eyes, and we are probably directly on the way to doing just that, and they see that as something that just cannot happen - tantamount to two Types from one. They cannot deny that before the experiment the species of bacteria was unable to metabolize citrate; now some of them can, and the characteristic is inheritable. The catechism doesn't allow for this amount of change.

We surely have proof that it has happened in he past, but we can't demonstrate it directly. This is documented; it happened, and the possible explanations (for them) are dwindling. It's a great pedagogic tool, even if we evolutionists know it has happened millions of times before.
 
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BenBurch said:
The "why" is clear; unless they discredit this result, anti-evolutionism is over.
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As US has already indirectly linked, Behe has already read the result and attributed it to intelligent design. Speaking of which...

blutoski said:
Biologists have argued for mechanisms such as neutral mutations providing scaffolding just waiting for a final piece to be added, but have been unable to show a 'real-time' example until now. Irreducible Complexity has had hypothetical counterexamples, but now has a real-world one.
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I didn't see that Lenski had identified any particular mechanism for features emerging from multiple mutation - I thought he just identified a instance of it. Did he demonstrate scaffolding via an intermediate use of the initial mutation?
 
aerosolben said:
... I didn't see that Lenski had identified any particular mechanism for features emerging from multiple mutation - I thought he just identified a instance of it. Did he demonstrate scaffolding via an intermediate use of the initial mutation?
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Yes, he observed a generation where a potentiating neutral or nearly-so mutation occurred that appears to have made the final two mutations possible.
 
BenBurch said:
Yes, he observed a generation where a potentiating neutral or nearly-so mutation occurred that appears to have made the final two mutations possible.
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Yes, I know - blutoski seemed to be suggesting this revealed a mechanism for accumulating such mutations (beyond chance). I didn't see this, and was asking for clarification.

Actually, now that I reread it, I think he may just be misstating the mechanism of scaffolding. The structures generated by scaffolding are not neutral, they are beneficial independent of the final structure. If the intermediate mutation is indeed neutral (although there could be an as-yet-unknown function), then the only mechanism in play for accumulation is chance. That's not unreasonable in this situation, but does not help finding the stated "real-world" example.
 
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