Conservapedia:Articles related to the Lenski affair

This Conservapedia-related article is of largely historical interest and is no longer the focus of RationalWiki today. Conservapedia (and religious fundamentalism to an extent) was a major focal point in the early history of RationalWiki, but long ago ceased coming up with new ways to appall and amuse. Our energies are now spent debunking other, fresher examples of pseudoscientific claims, authoritarianism, and deceit. For RationalWiki's less ancient content, try the Best of RationalWiki.

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The following articles are a direct result of the Lenski affair, one of Andrew Schlafly's greatest screw ups.

• Lenski dialog: Where it all began.

• Conservapedia challenge: "The first [and only - ed.] Conservapedia challenge is to find a legal means for obtaining public disclosure of Lenski's federally funded data." This exists only to create another talk page for Schlafly to run to, as his critics follow him around.

• Digital organisms: Minor two line stub which mentions Lenski because of his earlier work on the study of cellular automata using computers, like Conway's "game of life".

• Federally funded research: Suddenly, federally funded research is the most important thing in the world. Every example on the page refers back to Lenski, and how he is not handing over his data - even though Andy's personal taxes paid for it - no one else contributed, he asked the Internal Revenue Service and they confirmed that his tax money wasn't spent on law enforcement or defense or paper clips - it all went directly to Lenski!

• Richard Lenski: Despite being an article on Lenski, it lists none of his achievements. Instead it begins by questioning his credentials and his recent work with E. coli. The article quickly devolves into a rant about the short sharp "dialogue" between Lenski and Schlafly.

The side-by-side template has been stolen from us without attribution to help in the attack, despite there not being anything to fill it in with. Only recently, Andy's responses consisted of a half dozen words written in all-capitals.

• Lenski: Redirect to "Richard Lenski" - convenient for Schlafly's "broken news" rants.

• MacArthur Fellowship: Conservapedia didn't have an article on this until it was created on the 11th of June 2008. This appears to be an attempt to smear Lenski by proxy, the article goes on about the award going to liberals for politically correct research and the award recipients doing nothing after getting it. This underlines Andy's misconceptions about academia. It is only late in your career you start to receive recognition, by which point lectures (both courses and invitational), student supervision, book writing, paper reviewing, journal editing (as you become the single biggest expert in the field), and finally, the dreaded administrative work, all get in the way of actual research.

• Flaws in Lenski Study: Andy's points out the flaws in Lenski paper. He repeatedly uses the phrase “statistical significance” without giving one of the following; a confidence interval, the z-score or the p-value of the data. Another fine example of Schlafly Statistics.

• Letter to PNAS: A draft letter Andy is considering sending to PNAS. Despite the fact that he claims to have been involved in peer review before, he seems to treat concerns about the letter's style as an attempt to censor him.

• PNAS Response to Letter: PNAS' response to Andy's above letter in which they tell him that he doesn't understand elementary statistics. The most fun can be had on the talk page where Andy is trialling a new rule that talk page edit have to be "substantial comments" or they are removed. Substantial comments are defined here as telling Andy that he was right and PNAS is censoring him.

• Significance of E. Coli Evolution Experiments: Despite the huge amount of research done on E. Coli evolution this page deals exclusively with Blout et al. (2008). Here Andy tries his hand a statistics again, trying to prove the results are not statistically significant. One the talkpage he dismisses arguments about Mote Carlo simulations and chi-squared tests with comments about ideological censoring on Wikipedia.

• Category:Conservapedia Dealings with PNAS and Lenski: Conservapedia's record of their truth expositions on this topic.

The following are pre-existing articles that have been edited to include Lenski-hate:

• Professor values: "When challenged to provide data, professors who support evolution evade the question", cited to cp talk:Lenski dialog.

• Template:Mainpageright: Where Schlafly blogs almost daily about how he is so totally owning Dr. Lenski, evilutionist. Tracking the diffs is the only way to appreciate it. The history of the page has been destroyed.

On RationalWiki

In the interest of fairness we have our own problems getting past this event and have some rather half-baked articles — so here are ours for the mocking:

• Lenski affair: A copy of each of Andy's and Lenski's letters in case they were memory-holed at Conservapedia with some lite commentary. It is now one of our random featured articles.

• Conservapedia:Articles related to the Lenski affair: A list articles with some alleged funny comments, like this one.

• Analysis of the Lenski Paper: An explanation of the paper at the center of this controversy, with some analogies to help the reader understand this significant research paper.

• Conservapedia:Censoring Lenski's RW ref: The talk page about the link to RationalWiki that Andy had "cut" by his "spam filter" which we have saved from the memory hole.

• Essay:Andrew's long-term plan: A commentary off a blog.

• Conservapedia:Call me, I'll sue, Andy Schlafly: Another commentary, mostly scamming off a blog. Serious junk that should be deleted. DELETED

• Conservapedia:Open Letter to Andrew Schlafly: A parody of Andy's letter that since been removed, only leaving the signatories. DELETED

• Lenski results challenge creationism: Another examination of Lenski's paper -- this time, not on why it is important to evolution research, but why it dismisses a lot of creation "research".

• Richard Lenski: We didn't have an article on him either until now.

• Conservapedia:Schlafly's alleged Flaws in Lenski's Study: This side-by-side rebuttal puts us in mind of the Monty Python skit where two guys went hunting mosquitoes with machine guns and rocket launchers.

The following are pre-existing articles that have been edited to include laughing at Andy over Lenski:

• Conservapedia:What is going on at CP?: Our usual CP taunting ground.