Conservapedia:Schlafly's alleged Flaws in Lenski's Study

This is a response to Flaws in Richard Lenski Study at Conservapedia.

The original paper to which Conservapedia is responding, Blount, Borland, and Lenski (2008), "Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli", can be found here

Background
On June 9, 2008, the New Scientist website published an article describing preliminary results of a long-running experiment started by Richard Lenski. Lenski and his team had taken a single strain of the bacterium E. coli, separated its descendants into twelve populations, and proceeded to observe their mutations over the course of twenty years (a process discussed on Lenski's website). At one point, one of the populations demonstrated a dramatic change, and evolved to become capable of utilizing citrate, a carbon source in their flasks that E. coli cannot normally use. Thus, evolution had been visibly observed, with an exquisite amount of proof establishing the timeline along the way. The paper also highlighted the role of historical contingency in evolution and the role of potentiating mutations.

Naturally, this news item was posted to Conservapedia, bringing it to the attention of one Andrew Schlafly, BSE, JD. As a creationist, this obviously flew in the face of his views and could not be tolerated. After a discussion in which he expressed skepticism, he proceeded to send Dr. Lenski an email requesting further data, and set up a page on his blog, titled "Lenksi dialog." An amusing exchange of correspondence resulted in the Lenski affair in which Schlafly was humiliated.

Consequently he changed track and now wishes to invent flaws in the study. This article examines those supposed flaws.

Final observations
This was written by an editor on the Conservapedia Challenge talk page (it has not been spell checked it has been left as is).

Just comment/ask the Editor, or the corresponding affiliation.
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. They 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 response are published together. Be specific (you aren't). A request like: "In fig. x the error bars are missing and we believe these are necessary" has much more chances of being followed 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't ask for unreasonable things (which would essentially require screening a collection of 10,000 photos taken over twenty years....).

3) If you suspect scientific misbehavior (such as: 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 lose your job and your title. Refrain from blaming the referees for not hunting scientific misbehavior. The function of a referee is NOT to search for scientific misbehavior, but to check the conciseness, consistency and completeness of the things presented in the paper. (if somebody really fakes data it will be impossible without spending a long time in the lab, some people really fake data in a very tricky way)

If you suspect both, do both. However, if you have nothing more than your scientifically worthless comments about articles, which are, as far as they are read and understood, written to the highest scientific standards, 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 has tempted more scientists into faking data, see the "Schön Affair").