Notes from Evil Bender

Over at UD, DaveScot is upset about Lenski’s takedown of Conservapaedia’s head wackaloon, Andy Schlafly. (The link goes to The Panda’s Thumb. As usual, I won’t be linking to the pathologically dishonest folks at UD.)

So what has DaveScot upset? It’s almost too funny for words:

I started reading Lenski’s full paper myself to see what raw data was provided and I got no farther than the first paragraph beyond the abstract when I encountered a bias error that a chance worshipper would never notice. My emphasis:

At its core, evolution involves a profound tension between random and deterministic processes. Natural selection works systematically to adapt populations to their prevailing environments. However, selection requires heritable variation generated by random mutation, and even beneficial mutations may be lost by random drift. Moreover, random and deterministic processes become intertwined over time such that future alternatives may be contingent on the prior history of an evolving population.

The bold portion is patently wrong. Selection operates on any heritable variation whether random or not. That the authors would use the language they did (random variation) and the peer reviewers didn’t notice it is testimony to the chance worshipper bias that pervades evolution research.

That’s right: Lenski ignored the possibility that an invisible superbeing snuck into the laboratory and fucked with his experiments. He ignored the possibility that said being looked into the future, saw that E. coli would be in the experiment, and “frontloaded” exactly one of the populations to produce a mutation.

The “bias” DaveScot is objecting to is a bias against unscientific, unverifiable nonsense. Good catch on that, Dave! In related news, I heard that Lenski categorically ruled out the idea that the E. coli were secretly replaced with identical-but-for-some-mutations E. coli placed their by sexy unicorns.

Strictly speaking, of course, variation directly introduced by scientists can be incorporated into the evolutionary process. But that’s not what DaveScot is talking about. Neither is he suggesting that a designer may have started the evolutionary process–he’s opposed to those theistic evolututionists, don’t you know.

Remember, behind all his obfuscation is the idea that science is unfairly biased against the patently unscientific idea that A Magic Man Done It, even though we can’t detect which things are attributable to this magic man, nor demonstrate his existence, nor suggest how we could tell his work from natural processes, nor explain why we need the magic man at all, given that science keeps providing natural explanations for things once attributed to said magic man.

And it gets worse:

The Scripps researchers, in a nutshell, discovered that E. coli, when stressed (such as running out of food as in Lenski’s experiment or in the presence of antibiotics in the Scripps experiment) selectively increases the mutation rate on certain genes. Thus the mutations in this case are not random but rather directed at a certain area in an attempt to solve a certain problem.

Of course, each mutation is still random: only the rate is increased. In some environments, changing rates of mutation can provide a selective advantage. Shocking! Of course, such a definition of “directed” (essentially “combines what’s already present with random mutations to survive”) strongly implies that any form of selection is “directed.” Congratulations, DaveScot! You’ve just demonstrated that a combination of selection and random chance can lead to change. Well done! Someone should really come up with a theory to articulate that concept.