Otherwise known as biologist Dr. Lenski destroys nutjob creationist via email.

Summary: Andrew Schlafly is the owner of Conservapedia, a wiki for crazy Christians, and he is a nutjob creationist. Dr. Richard Lenski recently published a paper on a twenty-year study of bacteria which showed them evolving new traits, which obviously irked Schlafly. Schlafly emailed Lenski with a request for data, and Lenski politely and lengthily replied that it was all in his paper. Schlafly emailed again demanding data, and then Lenski went about not-so-politely beating the crazy person down. I believe the technical term is “owned.”

I offer this lengthy reply because I am an educator as well as a scientist. It is my sincere hope that some readers might learn something from this exchange, even if you do not.

First, it seems that reading might not be your strongest suit given your initial letter, which showed that you had not read our paper, and given subsequent conversations with your followers, in which you wrote that you still had not bothered to read our paper. You wrote: “I did skim Lenski’s paper …” If you have not even read the original paper, how do you have any basis of understanding from which to question, much less criticize, the data that are presented therein?

However, if an incompetent or fraudulent hack (note that I make no reference to any person, as this is strictly a hypothetical scenario, one that I doubt would occur) were to make false or misleading claims about our strains, then I’m confident that some highly qualified scientists would join the fray, examine the strains, and sort out who was right and who was wrong. That’s the way science works.

Everyone should read this letter (the experiment sounds pretty interesting, too).