Conservapedia talk:Articles related to the Lenski affair

I'm really sorry but could someone stick the following in an appropriate place - I'd have a look round but I'm about to go sleepybies.

Quote:

Just comment/ask the Editor, or the corresponding affilliation.
1) First look at cited publications. Publishing data does not necessarily mean that he sends you the datafiles.

2) If you doubt a scientific publications content on a scientific basis, just write a comment in an appropriate form (title, abstract, length depending on the journal). Send it to the address of the editor of the original article. He will screen it for form, content, and style (if you dont write it in a more calm mood that you write your rants here, it will not be accepted). A comment is a standard way of forcing somebody to reply, because the editor will ask the authors to respond and both, comment and reponse are published together. Be specific (you arent). A request like: "In Fig.x the error bars are missing and we believe these are necessary" has much more chances of beeing followd than "which data? where how certain?". Make in the following paragraph explicitly clear what you problem is. e.g.: The region (x) inf Fig.(y) is not displayed in a resolution high enough to exclude (z). Make it clear that you are not the only one who believes that this is necessary by citing other works, where the author do capture a certain point in higher resolution. Don ask for unreasonable things (which would essentially require screening a colletion of 10000 Photos taken over twenty years....).

3) If you suspect scientific misbehaviour (like: falsifying data, faking results etc), report it to the responsible person in the research organization the other person works for. For such things you can loose your job and your phd title. Refrain from blaming the referees for not hunting scientific misbehaviour. The function of a referee is NOT to search for scientific misbehaviuor, but to check the conciseness, consitency and completeness of the things presented in the paper. (if somebody really fakes data it will be impossible withpout spending a long time in the lab, some people really fake data in a very tricky way)

If you suspect both, do both. Howver if you have nothing more than your scientifically worthless comments about articles, which are, as far as i read and understood them, written to the highest scientific standards (i have seldom read a more clear and concise paper than Lenskis one), spare your readers from your whining. Sadly the highly statistically nature of the experiment makes it in principle difficult to reproduce (which in the past hast tempted more scientists into faking data, look for "Schön Affair"). But the befault in scientific publications is to believe that the author did at least not fake data, so i trust the authors in this point fully because all of them seem to have a clean scientific record.

End quote'

from: i thought it'd better be preserved. Night Night all! 21:36, 3 July 2008 (EDT)