Talk:Lenski affair

Blocked users participating in Lenski-related pages Conservapedia
The following users participating in the CP discussions about the topic experienced blocks (Please correct the list, these are the ones i have noticed):

By Andrew Schlafly Himself: Jirby, Raul, Argon, MickA, Kallium, KimEide, Stitch75, BenHur, Drek, Carolyn

By others: Toffeeman, AlexaJ, DRamon, DinsdaleP, YoungA

Emphases in reposted/quoted letters ...
The letters contain emphasised text (in boldface). It would be good to see some clarification in the article on whose emphases they are; if they are not Lenski's, they should probably either be clearly identified as non-original or edited out. If they are not part of the original Lenski material, a brief explanation of the intended significance of the added emphases might be worth considering.
 * I see now that in looking straight at it I somehow missed the explanation that the bolding marked material censored from CW. Mea maxima culpa.

Citations?
"By refusing to include the link to RationalWiki in Prof. Lenski's second reply, Mr. Schlafly did more than any other individual to raise RationalWiki's profile on the net."

The question is, is RW in a higher reputation in the internet? Dandtiks69 (talk) 20:58, 22 June 2015 (UTC).
 * Higher than CP, anyway. FU22YC47P07470 (talk/stalk) 21:40, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Brilliant
I know I'm late to the party, but this article is brilliant. I feel amazing how after that Schlafly still came for more and did not bury his head on the sand until the dust had settled. --Panzerfaust (talk) 21:26, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Yay, just yay!!! Aside from the original mess, that the letter had a link to RatWiki removed with the spam filter (which still stands there or see archive copy.) being an excuse was quite funny, demonstrating that excluding mention of RationalWiki is a higher value than truth or accuracy or historical relevance. There are simple ways around spam filters, even if the person doesn't have admin access. Rather, this was active censorship, as if conservatives cannot tolerate Bad Opinions and need protection by Daddy Assfly. --Some random Smith (talk) 21:37, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

In Schlafly's PNAS letter....
What does he mean by this line, his fourth point?

"4. It was error to include generations of the E. coli already known to contain trace Cit+ variants. The highly improbable occurrence of four Cit+ variants from the 32,000th generation in the Second Experiment suggests an origin from undetected, pre-existing Cit+ variants."

When did Lenski Et al. "include generations of the E. coli already known to contain trace Cit+ variants"? What exactly does this mean? I am not a biologist, but isn't the point of the experiment that the mutations allowed the bacteria to digest citrate while the wild bacteria could not? I'm having a hard time understanding what the criticism is here. Reading Lenski's paper and replies, it seems that no Cit+ genes appeared until after 20,000 generations. They would have sequenced the genome of the wild bacteria when they started, right? Is this is actual criticism, or just BS? Actually, thinking about it, they're just trying to say "beneficial mutations can't happen and goddidit", aren't they?--Lgmr (talk) 21:25, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * His claim is that the thing that suddenly arose naturally was actually there all along, in spite of the material evidence that it was not. It's complete and utter bullshit.  ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 21:40, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Haha. I looked at the Nature article from 2012 explaining how the trait arose. It's very informative and confirms that the criticism is total BS. It's so stupid that some people's criteria for truth is simply "Does it agree with my totally subjective and non-scientific beliefs?" Ugh.--Lgmr (talk) 22:05, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

I believe this (non)-issue arose due to a poor and bad-faith reading of these two sentences from Lenski's first reply:

"Moreover, we found that Cit+ mutants, when they first appeared, were often rather weak at using citrate. At least the main Cit+ line that we studied underwent an additional mutation (or mutations) that refined that ability and led to a large improvement in growth on citrate." If you're really dumb or at least think your followers are really dumb you could deliberately misconstrue this to mean that Lenski 'started' with bacteria that already had 'weak' Cit+ action, when in fact Lenski is referring to a subsequent 'refining' of the 'weak' version of the mutation that first appeared from the original wild sample of E Coli. &mdash; Unsigned, by: 108.180.92.37 / talk