For sev­eral weeks I have been meaning to read up on Lenski et al’s 20-​​year test tube exper­i­ment, in which they observed the rise of novel, ben­e­fi­cial traits in pop­u­la­tions of bac­teria they stored in a closet. It’s inter­esting to me because (if I read the sum­maries right) only some of the test tubes evolved the traits, which sug­gests an inter­esting con­tin­gency in evo­lu­tion. I love ragged ass evo­lu­tion.

The research is inter­esting to the folks at Conservapedia because they don’t like any­thing that pur­ports to demon­strate evo­lu­tion. Because they are intel­li­gent design sup­porters. Or, as this nuclear mag­netic res­o­nance spec­troscopy researcher puts it, an “army of home­schooled numb­nuts”. Now now. So they sent some let­ters demanding to see the data. The cor­re­spon­dence is well doc­u­mented else­where, but I wanted to draw atten­tion to this par­tic­ular ref­er­ence from Lenski, made after some goading from the con­ser­va­pedia crowd:

(Read the whole damn thing on con­ser­va­pedia itself if you want)

“It is my impres­sion that you seem to think we have only paper and elec­tronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have sug­gested – you might assert that our records are them­selves untrust­worthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But per­haps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or per­haps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to under­stand that we have the actual, living bac­teria that exhibit the prop­er­ties reported in our paper, including both the ances­tral strain used to start this long-​​term exper­i­ment and its evolved citrate-​​using descen­dants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a uni­corn in the garden” – we have a whole pop­u­la­tion of them living in my lab! And lest you accuse me fur­ther of fraud, I do not lit­er­ally mean that we have uni­corns in the lab. Rather, I am making a lit­erary allusion.”