Anyone heard of Conservapedia? It's the right-wing ideologue alternative to Wikipedia, where apparently you can let your ideology take precedence over pesky things like facts.
Anyway, there was a recent study that if you read the science section of the newspaper you might have seen, otherwise probably not. But the gist of it was that these biologists have been working on a strain of E Coli for the past 20 years, and it has evolved some pretty amazing abilities, namely to metabolize stuff that, not only could it not do before, but that by definition, E Coli could not do. It would be the equivalent of humans evolving the ability to eat and use for energy something that no human had ever successfully eaten before.
Bottom line: this is yet another example of irrefutable evidence not only for evolution, but for what the creationists like to call macro-evolution. Most have ceded the idea that minor tweaks in genetic makeup happen over time, but something on this scale is beyond what most creationists are willing to believe. So what happens? This douchebag at Conservapedia starts demanding to see "the data" that prodcued the study, and hilarity ensues. It ends with one of the sweetest smackdowns I've seen in a long time, on the part of Richard Lenski, the main researcher involved in the study:
“I tried to be polite, civil and respectful in my reply to
your first email, despite its rude tone and uninformed content. Given
the continued rudeness of your second email, and the willfully ignorant
and slanderous content on your website, my second response will be less
polite
First, it seems that reading might not be your strongest suit given your initial letter, which showed that you had not read our
paper……” If you have not even read the original paper, how do you have
any basis of understanding from which to question, much less criticize,
the data that are presented therein?
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!"
Man, I love science.
Read all the details here. A very interesting read, IMO. |
