Difference between revisions of "Letter to PNAS"

Revision as of 20:29, July 22, 2008

Draft of PNAS Letters Response from Conservapedia

Apologies for the delay in following up on this - I've spent the past few days attending to family priorities, and this is my first CP-related priority now that I have time at my PC again.

Since the guidelines for submitting PNAS Letters restricts the submissions to 250 words, the following is the draft submission I'd like to send pending Andy Schlafly's approval:

Title:

Identification of procedural and statistical flaws in the paper "Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli".

Author:

Andrew Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D.

Author Affiliations:

www.conservapedia.com

Text:

An analysis of the paper and the supporting information on Professor Lenski's website has led to the identification of significant flaws which, if not refuted, negate the claim that E. Coli bacteria underwent an evolutionary beneficial mutation in the experiment.

The full description of these flaws exceeds the submission length allowed for PNAS Letters, but can be found at http://www.conservapedia.com/Flaws_in_Richard_Lenski_Study. In summary, the flaws are:

- The "historical contingency" hypothesis depicted in Figure 3 is contradicted by the abstract and by the data presented in the Third Experiment in Table 1 of his paper.

- Lenski incorrectly included generations of the E. coli already known to contain Cit+ variants in his experiments and had no means to exclude their presence in the samples.

- Lenski's Third Experiment failed to support his hypothesis with statistical significance, even with the incorrect inclusion of the Cit+ variant generations.

- Lenski's two alternative hypotheses suggest a fixed mutation rate, but the failure of the mutations in his experiments to increase based on scale tends to disprove both hypotheses.

- The lag time between the potentiating mutation in the largest experiment disproves Lenski's implicit assumption that it likely occurred in proximity with the occurrence of the Cit+ variant.

- Lenski has not disclosed key portions of his data, such as how thoroughly the samples were screened for pre-existing Cit⁺ variants.

I am requesting that the authors of the paper respond to each of the flaws in this forum and explain the withholding of the data, and submit a revision or retraction of their paper if any are held valid.

Mr. Schlafly, please let me know if this is acceptable, and apply any revisions as you see fit, thanks. --DinsdaleP 10:38, 21 July 2008 (EDT)