Letter to PNAS

Draft of PNAS Letters Response from Conservapedia

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:

Flaws in this PNAS paper negate its claim that E. Coli bacteria underwent an evolutionary beneficial mutation, as discussed at http://www.conservapedia.com/Flaws_in_Richard_Lenski_Study and its talk page. The flaws include:

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 NSF-funded research have not been publicly released, despite NSF policy that "data collected with public funds belong in the public domain."

cc: Editor-in-Chief, PNAS

New Scientist

Selected Congressmen having oversight for research budgets

Selected watchdog groups

Current Word Count

249. (For the Text section, excluding the cc: list)