Intimidation of scientists, a new creationist weapon in the war on science?
Posted by 3Dsound at Sunday, August 03, 2008 4:05 PM and is filed under RationalWiki,Andrew Schlafly,Evolution,Conservapedia,Richard Lenski,christian fundamentalism,war on science,Creationism 
Peer-review science (updates published in reverse chronological order; bumped up from 01-Jul-08)
Conservative politics: •Z.D. Blount, C.Z. Borland, and R.E. Lenski (2008), Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli [full text available by subscription, or at Richard Lenski's website [PDF file] at Michigan State University (https:
•Conservapedia contributors, "Richard Lenski", Conservapedia, online at conservapedia
UPDATE, Sunday, September 14, 2008: The editor of PNAS has rejected Schlafly's letter criticizing the statistics used in Richard Lenski's paper.
To commemorate this event, Schlafly has published a Conservapedia entry reproducing the anonymous PNAS review and a Talk page discussing it.
The PNAS review strikes me as a model of professionalism. It takes Schlafly's letter and criticisms seriously and explains where Schlafly errs. Then the review points Schlafly in the proper direction for redressing his perceived grievances. The review engages Schlafly, responds to him, upbraids him for saying Lenski is withholding data, yet offers Schlafly advice on a possible next step. The review is one from which anyone can learn.
True to form, however, the merits of the review are lost on Schlafly and his colleagues at the Conservapedia, as evidenced by their discussion on the Talk page. Schlafly writes, "The next step is to criticize the taxpayer funding of this junk science. When the authors and the publishing organization will not even address statistical errors in the work, then it's time to pull the public funding"
Note to students and other readers: If a journal of international stature like PNAS rejects your submission, accept the journal's decision with grace; submit your paper elsewhere; and don't ever act like Andrew Schlafly.
UPDATE, Monday, August 11, 2008: Andrew Schlafly reports that on August 9th he submitted a modified version of the letter described below to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
UPDATE, Sunday, August 3, 2008: Andrew Schlafly has ratcheted up his campaign of intimidation against Richard Lenski.
The Conservapedia now includes an entry entitled Letter to PNAS, where Schlafly and his followers are in the process of drafting a letter for submission to the PNAS journal, which originally published the Lenski paper that Schlafly takes issue with.
A draft of a letter might seem like an odd entry to include in an encyclopedia. However – notwithstanding the Conservapedia's claim to be a "clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth" – the Conservapedia functions less like an encyclopedia and more like Andrew Schlafly's blog (notably on the Main Page) and his all-purpose platform for publishing right-wing views – a context in which the PNAS letter makes complete sense.
I've reproduced, below, the current draft of Schlafly's letter. You'll note that someone at the Conservapedia (it wasn't Schlafly) has finally gotten around to articulating a set of supposed deficiencies in Lenski's research, which – according to the letter – "negate [the] claim that E. coli bacteria underwent an evolutionary beneficial mutation."
The letter's critique suffers from not being familiar with routine procedures for handling microbial cultures (the letter's "flaw" 4); a misunderstanding on the experiment's methods and their graphical representation ("flaw" 1); and a lack of knowledge of nonparametric statistics ("flaws" 2, 3 and 5). See the RationalWiki for a detailed rejoinder to the letter's critique (Conservapedia: Schlafly's alleged Flaws in Lenski's Study).
Schlafly has yet to grasp that Lenski's thoroughly vetted Long-Term Evolution Experiment and the Cit+ cultures, which resulted from it, verify the development of an evolutionarily beneficial mutation in E. coli.
Any advanced student in the biological sciences would be embarrassed to submit Schlafly's critique. Why? Because Schlafly ignores the very "problem" that he has hounded Lenski on and has incessantly – and publicly – claimed to be paramount. That is, the inability to perform a critical review of Lenski's experimental results because, supposedly, Lenski withholds data from public scrutiny.
The "flaws" that Schlafly outlines are not refuted by reference to the data (published or otherwise) but by reference to general information about microbiology, nonparametric statistics and the experiment itself. Schlafly's critique only shows he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
But, Schlafly's ignorance is hardly the issue, let alone Lenski's vindication.
Schlafly is sending copies of his letter to a Congressional Representative and to the conservative activist group Judicial Watch. Clearly, Schlafly hopes to escalate his intimidation of Lenski by fomenting a political response – with the threat of litigation hanging in the air, since litigation is what Judicial Watch is known for. This corresponds to the intimidation process I described in my original article (see highlighting below).
Identification of Flaws in the Following Paper Published in PNAS: Blount ZD, Borland CZ, andLenski RE, "Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli,"105 PNAS 23, pp.7899–7906 (June10, 2008)
The following flaws in this PNAS paper negate its claim that E. coli bacteria underwent an evolutionary beneficialmutation.[1]
1. Figure 3 depicts an "historical contingency" hypothesis around the 31,000th generation, but the abstract states that mutations "arose by 20,000 generations." The paper fails to admit that the Third Experiment disproved the hypothesis depicted in Figure 3.
2. Both hypotheses propose fixed mutation rates, but the failure of mutations to increase with sample size disproves this. If the authors claim that it is inappropriate to compare the Second and Third experiments to the First for scale, then it was an error to treat them similarly statistically.
3. The paper incorrectly applied a Monte Carlo resampling test to exclude the null hypothesis for rarely occurring events. The Third Experiment results are consistent with the null hypothesis.
4. It was error to include generations of the E. coli already known to contain trace Cit+ variants, and the otherwise highly improbable occurrence of four Cit+ variants from the 32,000 generation in the Second Experiment suggests an origin from undetected pre-existing Cit+ variants.
5. The Third Experiment was erroneously combined with the other two experiments based on outcome rather than sample size, thereby yielding a false claim of overall statistical significance.
The underlying data for this publicly (NSF) funded research have not been publicly released, despite requests to do so and despite NSF policy that "data collected with public funds belong in the publicdomain."[2]
Andrew Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D.
www.conservapedia.com, teacher of precollege students
cc: Randy Schekman, Editor-in-Chief, PNAS, University of California at Berkeley (by email and postal mail)
New Scientist (by fax - 0171 261 6464)
Rep. Brian Baird, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology (by postal mail)
Judicial Watch (by email)
References: 1. Detail is at http://www.conservapedia.com and its talk page./Flaws _in _Richard _Lenski _Study
2. http://www.nsf .gov /sbe /ses /common /archive .jsp
The foregoing letter is to be sent by postal mail, return receipt requested, to PNAS, 500 Fifth Street, NW,NAS 340, Washington,DC 20001, by email to pnas@nas .edu, and by posting it in its feedback form at http://www .pnas ..org /feedback
UPDATE, Tuesday, July 8, 2008: Schlafly's motivation in the Lenski affair appears to be focused on intimidating a leading scientist. I've described how I anticipate an escalation in the affair through the involvement of elected officials who are sympathetic to right-wing causes (see original article below, published 01-Jul-08). The effect of such intimidation on the scientist and his work (I believe Schlafly and his followers hope) will be to chill the pursuit of research and scientific inquiries that right-wingers find objectionable. It looks to me like only a short step between Schlafly's threatening a legal suit (see update below, published 05-Jul-08) and recruiting a sympathetic politician.
That's all well and good... but Martin writing at the Lay Scientist (The Lenski "debate": Missing Schlafly's point, published July 6, 2008) offers a more compelling interpretation of Schlafly's intent.
Martin points out something that we've all noticed: Schlafly is loath to articulate the ways in which Lenski's paper might be flawed and the ways in which accessing Lenski's unpublished data might address those flaws and permit new analyses to verify or refute the paper's conclusions. All of that represents a systematic accountability, Martin argues, that's beside the point, in Schlafly's motivation for pursuing the affair. Schlafly's not interested in the relationship between data and conclusions (else he'd talk about it!). Schlafly's intent, Martin implies, is to create an impression of impropriety where none exists.
Martin astutely explains Schlafly's bad-faith engagement with Lenski: "[W]hat Schlafly is trying to do is to create and spread the meme that scientists conceal data, and can't be trusted. He's not attacking science, but faith in science." It's a strategy we've seen right-wingers deploy many times.
Will Schlafly succeed? Of course he will.
The Dover verdict in Pennsylvania has not dissuaded right-wing politicians from attempting to introduce creationism into the classroom. Far from it; their efforts remain constantly in the news. The bad moviemaking in Exiled has not prevented it from becoming a touchstone among creationists who are now infatuated with Ben Stein as a champion of their cause. The historic remoteness of the hoax of the Piltdown Man did not prevent a Conservapedia contributor from citing it as a justification for doubting Lenski's integrity.
The Lenski affair has now entered the creationist battery of non-fact and irrelevancy, to be deployed as needed forevermore. Lenski's name will always be dirt among those who hold creationist belief.
UPDATE, Saturday, July 5, 2008: The intimidation of Richard Lenski continues.
On July 3, 2008 (according to the Conservapedia's wiki "history" page), Andrew Schlafly added the following news item to the Conservapedia's main page, where the item generates discussion, which you can read on the associated "talk" page:
"Conservapedia challenge: Who will be first to figure out a legal means for obtaining public disclosure of Lenski's underlying federally funded data?"
Thus far, Schlafly's bullying remains in stage 2 of the intimidation process that I outlined below.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE, Tuesday, July 1, 2008: A remarkable attack on science is unfolding at the Conservapedia.
On June 2nd, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PANS) published a paper reporting on evolution in the bacterium Escherichia coli, which was authored by a group of microbiologists led by Richard Lenski at Michigan State University. I've cited the paper above. The importance of the paper is discussed by science writer Carl Zimmer at his blog The Loom (A new step in evolution, 02-
The paper peeved the creationist community (although I have yet to read a coherent summary authored by a creationist that identifies the deficiencies or problems in the paper [OK, I've now read the Amazon blog article authored by Michael Behe, where he interprets Lenski's paper in the discredited terms of irreducibility]).
The creationist founder and lead editor of the Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly, wrote to Richard Lenski on June 13 and said, "Please post the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it, and note where in the data you find justification for your conclusions." Schlafly justified his request by referencing the PANS publication guidelines and the fact that the research was supported by publicly funded grants ("funded by taxpayers").
Schlafly admits that he hadn't read Lenski's paper before he demanded access to the raw data.
Overviews of the affair have been published in many places, including The Loom (Of bacteria and throw pillows, 24-
Meanwhile, the correspondence between Schlafly and Lenski continues... and has become more pointed. So far, there have been two exchanges between them, which are
Schlafly blithely contends that Lenski's findings are suspect and probably fraudulent. And that Lenski must comply with Schlafly's demands for data, so that the data can be reviewed by... "creationary" experts? Schlafly has never outlined how he and his colleagues at the Conservapedia plan to review Lenski's data, and there is scant reason to think that Schlafly and his colleagues possess the analytic tools or knowledge needed to perform a meaningful review. Lenski, for his part, is forced to defend the integrity of his research.
Furthermore, the Conservapedia now contains the following entry for Lenski (citation given above):
Lenski is best known for his questionable claim to have observed the theory of evolution in practice, saying that E. coli bacteria made minor changes in a long-term laboratory study, and insisting that it was not due to contamination. His 2008 paper asserting his claims was peer reviewed in a mere 14 days, sparking obvious questions about the thoroughness of the review. When challenged, Lenski displayed several examples of irrational behavior, thrice referring to the challenges as slander, yet has filed no lawsuit charging that (or libel). Truth offers total legal protection from accusations of libel. He has also displayed annoyance, arrogance, and elitism when asked to release the information. When Lenski received a public request for the data underlying for his published claims, he did not provide the actual data even though his study was taxpayer-funded. Undisclosed data from the central claims in Lenski's 2008 paper are noted below...
Science and the expansion of knowledge proceeds through the independent replication of experimental results, which is the reason for an open exchange of data and experimental materials. But Schlafly’s aim is not the expansion of knowledge. Schlafly is intimidating a leading scientist – one who has made a breakthrough discovery in evolution – a discovery that disproves creationist dogma and demonstrates, yet again, why creationism lacks standing in the classroom.
Do Schlafly's actions represent a new strategy in the right-wing war on science? It's not hard to imagine the following scenario:
1. Contact the author of a paper you don't like.
2. Demand the author's data.
3. When the author fails to kowtow to your every request, contact your local right-wing politician and demand an inquiry into how public funds are being abused.
Others have also recognized this potential for intimidation, and my friend Pam at Tales From The Microbial Laboratory gives a working scientist's view of the problem.
Also see my second – and probably last, I think – article in this series: Creationism, homeschooling and the expansion of ignorance (with an extended prefatory riff on the Conservapedia-Lenski affair).
This is really chilling, the more I read it - the more crazy it seems. I can't imagine getting contacted like this, say on some of our data related to a temperature-dependent coral pathogen (a study that of course links itself to the whole global warming thing) and having someone say, for example, that they want to see our raw 2d-LC-MS/MS data to verify the proteins we are seeing. I mean, anyone could request it. It would be chaos - and yes, intimidation.
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Thanks for the shout out and the compliments. I completely agree about the success, and in a way I'm a little bit frustrated with the attitude of a lot of my fellow science bloggers on the issue. Many on the science side don't seem to understand that winning the scientific argument doesn't mean you've won the debate. I hope they don't have a rude awakening.
Excellent site you have here btw.
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