Thursday, July 03, 2008

Conservapedia: Stubborn idiocy in action

Besides attributing anything bad in the world to liberalism by using tactics such as post hoc ergo propter hoc, lately Conservapedia's main page has been abuzz about their perceived insult that is biologist Richard Lenski.

Besides uncovering laboratory evidence of evolution with the E. coli bacterium, Lenski also has the privilege of being the first target of a "Conservapedia challenge." According to the page:

A Conservapedia challenge is an unsolved problem or task that offers the promise of bettering society when lawfully accomplished.


The challenge?

Who will be first to figure out a legal means for obtaining public disclosure of Lenski's underlying federally funded data?


I hope I will get that credit. So, here we go:

Paper 180 (Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli.): PDF Document
Paper 164 (Tests of parallel molecular evolution in a long-term
experiment with Escherichia coli): PDF and HTML/Frames Document
Paper 147 (Phenotypic and genomic evolution during a 20,000-generation experiment with the bacterium Escherichia coli.): PDF Document
Paper 142 (Rates of DNA sequence evolution in experimental populations of Escherichia coli during 20,000 generations.): PDF Document
Paper 140 (Parallel changes in gene expression after 20,000 generations of evolution in E. coli.): PDF Document

In fact, these and other papers related to Lenski's experiment are available at his website. Click on "Publications" in the left menu, then "Long-term evolution experiment with E.coli" in the right frame. There you go.

If you want hard copies of all information, you can acquire them from the University itself. Here is their page on directions and map of buildings. Please note: Harassing, stalking or otherwise causing problems with any staff or faculty of the University, or students and visitors to the University, is not legal!

If you cannot get to East Lansing, I have also included a list of Copying/Duplicating services in the area. Many offer mailing or shipping services. If you are willing to pay for hard copies and shipping, I'm sure one of these facilities would take you up on the production.

About the only thing not available from the experiment is the E. coli itself, for obvious reasons. Beyond that, all this information and methods of acquiring the data is 100% legal.

So credit me with the win of the first Conservapedia challenge. That would be "No Latitude".

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