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Talk:Flaws in Richard Lenski Study (view source)
Revision as of 01:36, July 23, 2008
, 01:36, July 23, 2008no edit summary
::::::::: Stitch75 - you are too far inside the belly of the beast to understand what ASchalfly is talking about. You have probably spent your (young, naive?) life as a scientist, or inside the sciences, and as such you are blinded and cannot think with real, free logic. If you look at ASchlafly's arguments with an open mind, and not the blinkered mentality you seem to want to perpetrate, you'll see he's got many excellent points, and I'm convinced that the PNAS will ask Lenski to retract major conclusions of his obviously flawed study once ASchalfly submits this letter. Try to open your mind more to other ways of thinking and you'll see the truth for what it is. [[User:RobCross|RobCross]] 21:01, 22 July 2008 (EDT)
::::::::: Stitch75 - you are too far inside the belly of the beast to understand what ASchalfly is talking about. You have probably spent your (young, naive?) life as a scientist, or inside the sciences, and as such you are blinded and cannot think with real, free logic. If you look at ASchlafly's arguments with an open mind, and not the blinkered mentality you seem to want to perpetrate, you'll see he's got many excellent points, and I'm convinced that the PNAS will ask Lenski to retract major conclusions of his obviously flawed study once ASchalfly submits this letter. Try to open your mind more to other ways of thinking and you'll see the truth for what it is. [[User:RobCross|RobCross]] 21:01, 22 July 2008 (EDT)
::::::Stitch75 just went far out of his way to be helpful and yet you still continue to respond with hostility and a self-righteous attitude. You explicitly stated that now matter what response you get, you won't accept the conclusions of the paper. That is your prerogative, but you are directly stating that their replies, other than a retraction, will be irrelevant and/or wrong, despite the '''many decades''' of combined practical experience of the authors compared with your complete lack of such. So why is it again that you're even bothering? Several contributors to this forum and others related to it on this website have addressed your questions in great detail- repeatedly- and you continue make vague, unspecific accusations. As Stitch75 discussed, something like "table X is wrong because of figure Y" is nonproductive. Furthermore, if you want to have PNAS readers listen to you- your flaws should be real. For instance, even now your fifth "flaw" is that the statistical results of the third experiment are "obscured" and "not defin[ed]... in the traditional way". Well, the p-value for the third experiment is 0.0823. It took me literally four seconds of flipping through the PDF to find it. It's even in a nice table to make it easy to find. How is that obscure? (I might add that considering P<0.05 significant and P=0.0823 not statistically significant is '''completely arbitrary'''. If the observed pattern wasn't at all what was expected, the P value would be roughly around 0.8-1.0 or so. So 0.0823 ''does'' suggest that the underlying idea is correct in '''exactly''' the same way that P=0.05 would. That is a fundamental concept in basic statistics.) The final problem is that your arguments have drifted from your original concern- whether or not a new trait evolved- since only one of your listed "flaws" actually addresses this issue. The others are tangential and relate to interpretation and mechanisms. Even ''if'' 6 of your 7 flaws were so, the core finding of the paper- around which all else is based- would still hold: in earlier generations, there weren't Cit+ E. coli, in later generations, there were. The mathematical analyses and timeline of occurrence don't change this qualitative, directly observable fact.
::::::I do encourage you to refine the letter and submit it to PNAS- I really do- but Stitch75 is very correct in saying that if you submit it in its current shoddy form it will be laughed at and promptly ignored. You would do well to take the advice of people who actually work in the field when it comes to considering how something will be received. Also, your comment about peer review above indicates that your still have not learned anything at all about how it actually works despite the long discussions previously.
::::::As you said, the truth doesn't require admission. But it does require empirical support, which Lenski provided in ample quantities- but you still have yet to provide anything even beginning to resemble scientific rigor. That is why Stitch75 wrote that response- to ''help you'' improve your letter from that condition.[[User:Kallium|Kallium]] 21:36, 22 July 2008 (EDT)
I tend to agree with you Andy. I say we get this thing sent to PNAS and see what happens. If they refuse to answer it then we know what that means, and if they thumb their noses at you that's fine too. However I have a little more faith than you in the system and I hold out hope that they'll respond to our queries. Anyway lets get this thing sent. --[[User:DamianJohn|DamianJohn]] 15:50, 22 July 2008 (EDT)
I tend to agree with you Andy. I say we get this thing sent to PNAS and see what happens. If they refuse to answer it then we know what that means, and if they thumb their noses at you that's fine too. However I have a little more faith than you in the system and I hold out hope that they'll respond to our queries. Anyway lets get this thing sent. --[[User:DamianJohn|DamianJohn]] 15:50, 22 July 2008 (EDT)