July 2008 Archives

That's the headline in The Economist about this paper in the 18 July issue of Science. James Evans from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago studied a database including over 34 million citations to articles from 1945 to 2005. He studied the relationship between citation patterns and the availability of journals online. You'd expect citations to increase both in frequency and in breadth of coverage as journals came online.¹ But that's not what he found.

• The longer a journal has been available online, the younger the average age of its articles that are cited.
• As more articles became available online, fewer were cited.

Evans concludes that

These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work--what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim.

The Economist puts it differently:

As a wag once put it, an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing. It would be ironic if that is the sort of expertise that the world wide web is creating.

If there weren't protesters and civil disobedience.

UC Berkeley is planning to build a new athletic center. It released an environmental impact statement in October 2006. In response to a lawsuit opposing the plans, Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller issued an injunction preventing the university from proceeding with its plans.

On Tuesday, however, Judge Miller said the university had "submitted competent evidence" that the center would "not result in safety risks."

The injunction will now expire next Tuesday. But of course, it won't stop there. Opponents of the project have been living in a grove of oak trees at the site. The University erected a 10-foot high fence to prevent others from joining them in 2007. But yesterday
 

[T]he tree sitters managed to connect a new support cable between their perch and a tree about 200 feet away, allowing supplies and new protesters to reach the oak grove. On Wednesday afternoon protesters climbed across the new cable, dangling some 50 feet in the air as Berkeley police officers blocked access to the tree outside the fence.

If all has gone well, I'm in the air somewhere between Hartford and Chicago right now on my way to Vancouver for Botany 2008.¹ This meeting is going to be busier with business for me than usual. I'm attending as President-elect-elect of the Botanical Society of America.² I'm giving a talk in a symposium on "Demand for Botanists on Public Lands: Challenges and Solutions". I'll also be able to make it to a couple of the other scientific sessions, but between various society and committee commitments, I'll be spending more time talking about BSA business than science. But making sure our professional societies function well is important to me, so I'm glad to do it.

And, unlike Evolution 2008, where I didn't hear my student Rachel Prunier present her talk. I'll get to hear her in Vancouver. We've been working hard on her talk, and I think it will be very interesting. So if you're in Vancouver, stop by 212/SUB at 9:15am on Tuesday morning to hear Rachel's talk on "Pelargonium community assembly in South Africa: The influence of phylogeny, morphology, and climate". I think you'll find the results intriguing.

When Larry Summers¹ suggested three and a half years ago that "innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers"² I argued that "there are good reasons to think that the paucity of women in tenured math and science positions is not related to innate ability."

In today's issue of Science we read

Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills, consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis. There is evidence of slightly greater male variability in scores, although the causes remain unexplained. Gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some STEM fields.

I'm pleased to see that my suspicion turned out to be correct, but that's not why I'm writing.

OK. I'll admit it. I don't think about parasites much. In fact, I probably wouldn't think about them at all if it weren't for my friend and colleague, Janine Caira, who right now is in Borneo collecting tapeworms from sharks, skates, and rays and who just received a grant from the NSF Planetary Biodiversity Inventories program for a survey of worldwide tapeworm biodiversity. Why do I mention this? Because I suspect I'm pretty typical. We all know that most plants and animals have parasites, but we tend to forget about them. When we do think about them we tend to think that they don't matter that much (so that we can go on ignoring them). Well, I don't think I'll be able to do that any more.

One of Janine's students, Maria Pickering, is a co-author on a paper that just appeared in Nature. The authors found that "parasite biomass exceeded that of top predators". They show that parasites matter and that they matter a lot.

53% Geek Girl Scientist scored 78%, and Greg Laden scored 90%. Maybe I'm not quite as geeky as I thought.¹

Christopher Hitchens has a "Eureka!" moment.

But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?

Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty.

Hitchens is right that the presence of vestigial organs is compelling evidence for evolution. As Dawkins put it, "Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes?" But natural selection may not be the mechanism responsible for the change.

On 8 March 2007 a documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" premiered on Britain's Channel 4.

The film takes a strongly sceptical view of current scientific thinking on climate change. It argues that the consensus on climate change is the product of "a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media". (from Wikipedia, 22 July 2008, 7:05am EDT)

Showing of the documentary prompted an outcry from many scientists. Yesterday Ofcom¹ found it in breach of three rules in the broadcasting code: (1) avoiding unjust or unfair treatment of individuals or organizations, (2) preserving "due impartiality", and (3) including "an appropriately wide range of significant views" and giving them due weight.

Here's what Robert Watson, a former chair of the IPCC, had to say about Ofcom's decision:

Sceptics who disseminate misinformation and argue that there is no need to address this urgent issue are placing the planet at risk, threatening the livelihoods of not only the present generation, but even more future generations - our children and grandchildren.

Watson is right of course, but...

Wow! Coturnix has an excellent post on communicating science. I won't try to summarize it here. Go read the whole thing carefully if you care about communicating science. But here's a key insight:

When interviewed by the media professionals, scientists tend not to remember that they are indirectly communicating to the general populace. They are focused on communicating to that guy with a microphone. And the two of them are already, a priori, biased about each other!

I won't say any more. Go read the whole thing. It's worth the effort.

High gas prices are one reason to think about living someplace where you can walk to the grocery store, a park, school, or work. Reducing your carbon footprint is another. If you're looking for a place to live, you might want to stop by Walkscore.com to compare different cities, towns, and neighborhoods. Unfortunately, my home gets a walk score of 0 out of 100. That's not a surprise when you live anywhere near the University of Connecticut. A colleague of mine who lives very close to campus manages only 12 out of 100. To do any better around here, you'd have to live in Willimantic. Picking an address close to downtown would give you a walkability score of 89 out of 100.

Chris Bertram calls it "outright gibberish". Intellectual quackery is how I'd describe it. Describe what you ask? Intelligent design creationism. And calling it quackery isn't my idea. Read Steven Poole's review of "Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge To Darwinism". Here's the paragraph that Bertram quotes:

... Fuller happily adopts ID's rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists' "faith"; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn't available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the "vicissitudes" of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.

In case you don't remember who Steve Fuller is, he's a sociologist who specializes in science and technology studies at the University of Warwick. He appeared as a witness in the Dover trial tying to defend the iindefensible, i.e., trying to convince Judge Jones that intelligent design creationism is a legitimate scientific hypothesis.¹ According to Poole, he embarrassed many of his colleagues in science and technology studies.

His amazingly bad new book is not likely to reassure them.

 

Emma Marris didn't much like "Sizzle"

Ultimately, one is left wondering what the film aims to do. Does it argue that climate change is real, or discuss how we might convince people that it is? At the end of the film, Olson heads off to the editing studio to make a coherent story out of his footage. If only we had got to see that version.

That's similar to the reaction many of the folks at Scienceblogs.com who reviewed it on Tuesday. Not all. Sheril Kirshenbaum had this to say:

There are many layers to Sizzle. While at times I laughed out loud (especially when climate change skeptic and cameraman Marion was on screen), other moments are quite thought provoking, encouraging us to reexamine who has been educating society about climate change and how.

After reading some of the reviews, Chris Mooney wrote:

In my view, what's so great about Sizzle is the way it asks us to look hard at the insularity of our pro-science community--and the disconnect between the science world and other walks of life, other parts of American culture. In this context, doesn't the fact that many science bloggers are slamming it--and misunderstanding it--simply validate the film's central point?

Orac's response to Mooney's post (he hasn't seen the movie yet) was included this:

I don't know if Sizzle was a good story or not because I haven't seen it yet, but I do know that whenever I see someone dismiss criticism as people "not getting it" or being humorless putzes who can't relate it strikes me as lazy and defensive. From many of the reviews I read, my fellow ScienceBloggers were bending over backward to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and to try to understand its message. Several of them just didn't think it was all that funny.

My take?

In "Sizzle" Randy Olson asks three questions: (1) Has the earth warmed over the last century and a half? (2) Are human activities responsible for a large part of that warming? (3) Can we do anything to stop it? Anyone who's read the IPCC reports will answer "Yes" to all three questions. Now read this and guess where it comes from.

Once considered a problem mainly for the future, climate change is now upon us. People are at the heart of this problem: we are causing it, and we are being affected by it. The rapid onset of many aspects of climate change highlights the urgency of confronting this challenge without further delay. The choices that we make now will influence current and future emissions of heat-trapping gases, and can help to reduce future warming. Likewise, our decisions on whether and how to adapt to the degree of warming that is already inevitable can help us reduce the impacts of future warming.

Many projects designed to reduce carbon emissions focus on reducing the rate of deforestation or on replanting of forests that were harvested in the past. In yesterday's PLoS Biology Jack ("Francis") Putz and his colleagues point out that following improved forest practices can also have a very large effectt. Specifically, by adopting practices associated with reduced impact logging in tropical forests (planning of log landings, planning of roads, construction of bridges and water culverts, planning of skid trails, marking of future crop trees, directional felling, and liana cutting) the authors estimate that carbon emissions could be reduced by 0.16 gigatons per year.

To put that in perspective, total CO₂ emissions in 2005 were 28.2 gigatons. A reduction of 0.16 gigatons per year would make that an even 28 gigatons, a reduction of about about 0.7%. That may not sound like a lot, but consider this. During the 1990s ttopical deforestation was responsible for about 1.5 gigatons of CO₂ emissions annually (source). A reduction of 0.16 gigatons would represent about 10% of the total emissions associated with tropical deforestation. Suppose we could reduce deforestation rates by 50% by 2050, the annual reduction in CO₂ emissions would be about 0.5 gigatons.¹ Now reduced impact logging is looking very promising. It would eliminate almost 1/3 as much CO₂ as an ambitious program to reduce deforestation. Better yet, if we combined a 50% reduction in deforestation with reduced impact logging, the total annual savings would climb to 2/3 of a gigaton, or over 15% of the total reduction in CO₂ emissions necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at 450ppm.²

In the interest of sharing good news when there is some, here's an item from Toronto's Globe & Mail:

One half of Ontario's vast boreal forest will be permanently protected from mining and other resource development projects as part of a sweeping plan unveiled by Premier Dalton McGuinty to combat climate change.

The government will protect at least 225,000 square kilometres from development, representing one half of the boreal region in the far north and an area 1.5 times greater in size than all the Maritime provinces combined, Mr. McGuinty said Monday at a news conference. This land will be off limits to any resource projects and restricted to tourism and traditional aboriginal uses, such as hunting and fishing, he said.

The region constitutes about 40% of Ontarios land area. Or to look at it in a way that may be easier for those of us in the U.S. to relate to, 225,000 square kilometers is an area roughly the size of the entire state of Minnesota. That's a lot of forest protected from resource development. The area will continue to be available for tourism and for traditional uses by first nations and Métis, like hunting and fishing.

If you're interested in other reviews of Sizzle, there's a long list of them (some good, some not so good) at ScienceBlogs.com.

Two years ago Randy Olson brought us Flock of Dodos, which examined the debate between those who think intelligent design creationism should be included in school science curricula and those who don't.¹ The film makes a powerful case that we, i.e. evolutionists, are part of the reason that intelligent design creationism has been so successful. Proponents of ID connect with people in ways that we don't. Sizzle argues that scientists are part of the reason that that climate skeptics have been so successful.

Let me clear. By "successful" I don't mean "successful in raising challenges that affect the overwhelming scientific consensus." I mean "successful in raising challenges that allow non-scientists to think that there are credible reasons to doubt the consensus." Proponents of ID and climate skeptics seem like nice, ordinary people. They talk in language that other ordinary people can understand. We talk like scientists, because we are.

After a production meeting in which Randy proposes a PowerPoint presentation for the movie because his cameraman kept interrupting and ruining the interviews,¹ his mother (Muffy Moose) sneaks out of the meeting with his cameraman and soundman for a night on the town. They tell her that Randy's movie is in trouble, and she tells Randy that he needs to listen to them. Soon they're off to New Orleans and the lower 9th ward to see how the richest country in the world recovers from a disaster.

Randy has a Ph.D. in marine biology. He's smart enough to know that (a) the connection between any single weather event and climate change is very indirect and tenuous and (b) there is (so far as I can tell) still legitimate debate about the extent to which climate change will increase the frequency and severity of hurricanes.² But the visit to the lower 9th ward is the most powerful part of the movie. It brings home the impact that global climate change could have on us, particularly when I read on Sunday yet another sign of Katrina fatigue: a memorial planned for the victims of Katrina is stalled. Colorful maps like the one to the left persuade me that we have a problem, but even though I'm a science geek,³ I find film from the lower 9th ward more emotionally compelling.

Remember that "academic freedom" bill that passed in Louisiana? Remember what that famously liberal newspaper the Wall Street Journal had to say about such bills in May? Carl Zimmer has the lastest over at The Loom.

We're all for open and objective discussions of scientific theories, right? Who wouldn't be? If your kids are taking physics in high school, you want them to read critiques of gravity, right? After all, shouldn't they know that there are some serious weaknesses in the theory of gravity? Right? For instance, the theory of gravity says that gravity makes things fall down. But planets don't fall into the sun. They go around it. So which is it-down or around? Clearly the theory of gravity is deficient. Right?

Wrong, of course. You don't teach critical thinking with patent nonsense.

Absolutely. And patent nonsense is exactly what our friends at the Discovery Institute are peddling.

TEN kilometres above the earth, the Pope delivered a message to the people of Sydney: the world is God's creation and humanity needs to safeguard it against the ravages of climate change.

His message, unexpected and delivered in Italian, called for a spiritual response to the environmental crisis and asked Catholics to find "a way of living, a style of life that eases the problems caused to the environment". ("Pontiff's plea to youth: go green," The Age, 14 July 2008)

The Vatican is installing solar cells to produce renewable energy, and it's working with a carbon offset company to establish a forest in Hungary large enough to offset its carbon footprint. The Evangelical Environmental Network is a group of evangelical protestants preaching the same gospel. Nick Matzke nailed it in his review of The Creation:

If conservationists are serious about making their case to evangelicals, they should have the goal of getting biodiversity on the front cover of Christianity Today, the leading evangelical newsmagazine. ... The key is convincing evangelicals that extinction is a moral outrage, something at least as senseless and horrible as book burning. Extinction should be viewed as stealing from future generations.

My copy of Conservation arrived a couple of days ago.The cover story is "The problem of what to eat" - and it is a problem. Natasha Loder points out that eating locally doesn't do much to reduce your carbon footprint. Over 80% of the carbon footprint associated with food consumption is associated with producing the food, not transporting it. Citing results from a study by Weber et al.,¹ she points out that "foregoing red meat and dairy use one day a week achieves more greenhouse gas reductions than eating an entire week's worth of locally sourced foods."

So if you're concerned about what your eating habits are doing to the climate, eat less red meat and dairy.

RealClimate.org is the best site I've found for solid information on the global climate. It's written by a group of real climate scientists who know what they're talking about. Sometimes the posts are a little technical, but they're always well-written. Any time I've really cared about the details, I've been able to figure them out. ¹ I just learned this morning that they've put together a page with a list of books that various combinations of them have published since 1995. I haven't read any of them, but if they're anything like RealClimate, they're sure to be well-written and authoritative. The forthcoming Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming sounds like a book I'll have to buy.

It's available for $16.50 from Amazon.com (list price $25), and it will be released on 21 July.

If you read this site regularly, you probably heard about the report NOAA released on Monday concluding that half of the coral reef systems in the United States are in decline (news report from The Associated Press).This morning there's some good news.

Off the Brazilian coast, where the narrow continental shelf widens far out into the Atlantic Ocean, marine scientists have discovered reefs that they believe double the size of Brazil's largest and richest reef system, the Abrolhos Bank.

...

"Due to their relative inaccessibility and depth, the newly discovered reefs are teeming with life, in some places harboring 30 times the density of marine life than the known, shallower reefs," says Guilherme Dutra, Conservation International's director of marine programs in Brazil.

"That's the good news," he said. "The bad news is that only a small percentage of marine habitats in the Abrolhos are protected, despite mounting localized and global threats." (news report from Environmental News Service).

Conservation International and other groups will ask the Brazilian government to extend protection to the newly discovered reefs. Here's hoping that they are successful.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a New York Times article in which senior E.P.A. officials claimed that the White House told "agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document [describing E.P.A's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants] would not be opened". Today, there's this from the Times:

Vice President Dick Cheney's office was involved in removing statements on health risks posed by global warming from a draft of a health official's Senate testimony last year, a former senior government environmental official said on Tuesday.

The former official making the accusations, Jason K. Burnett, is a life-long Democrat, but he served as associate deputy director of the E.P.A. until he resigned in May.

In the letter, while declining to name individuals, Mr. Burnett said the offices of Mr. Cheney and the White House Council on Environmental Quality "were seeking deletions" of sections of draft testimony describing health risks from warming. The testimony was prepared by Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for a hearing last October before [Senator Barbara] Boxer's committee.

,,,

Marc Morano, a spokesman for James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and the ranking minority member on the Senate environment committee, ... said the criticism was unjustified.

Editing testimony is one thing. Distorting it is another. I'd say that removing "any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change" is distortion, not editing

The TimesOnline describes it as inching forward, and that sounds about right.

A joint statement issued this morning by the heads of the world's leading industrialised nations, who are meeting in Japan, agreed to work towards a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent by the year 2050.

But

European leaders, including Gordon Brown, had been pushing for much more ambitious interim cuts to be implemented by 2020. These were blocked by the United States, Japan and Canada.

Even Japanese organisers of the summit admitted that the statement represented only minor progress on the road to a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which began at the UN conference in Bali last December.

A statement from the WWF says that the "WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."

From RealClimate

The fact of the matter is that most of what goes on in the sciences is completely (and usually correctly) well below the radar of the public at large. But when there are discoveries and issues that do have public policy ramifications, getting the public to pay attention often requires finding just these kinds of resonances.

Sounds a little like framing, don't you think?

Andrew Sullivan, among others, links to a report from the Guardian claiming that "Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%"

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

In contrast, Environmental Capital (at the Wall Street Journal) has this to say:

Bob Davis of the WSJ spoke with Donald Mitchell, the author of the draft report--which wasn't secret at all, but a working paper. And like all working papers, it doesn't reflect the official position of the World Bank.

The report was meant to contribute to a World Bank position paper on rising food prices, which was released at the Bank's spring meeting in mid-April.

The final April report didn't include his specific calculation. But, Mr. Mitchell says, "I never saw that as political." Instead, he says he believes the changes were made because of "editing." He said that he has been encouraged by World Bank management to explore the issue of biofuels and the overall rise in food prices. "I had input" into the final report that was released at the spring meeting, he said.

Apparently, we will know more later this week.

Mr. Mitchell said that because of the publicity engendered by the Guardian piece, the World Bank is trying to put out a polished version of his report by the end of this week.

Over at DailyKos DarkSyde reports on the results of a poll released by Scientists and Engineers for America. All the more reason that John McCain and Barack Obama should heed the call to answer 14 questions put to them by by the ScienceDebate2008 team. Here are a few key findings from the poll.¹

• Voters place a significant amount of importance on public policy decisions that are based on science and technology to solve problems we face today, like global warming, energy, public education, and health care. Roughly seven in ten voters (72%) rate this between 8-10 on a 10-point scale (where 0 is not at all important and 10 is extremely important). 43% of voters give this statement a rating of 10.
• Majorities of voters say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is committed to advancing science and technology on a range of issues.
• Majorities across partisan lines say they would be more likely to support a candidate who is committed to these issues.

The 14 questions concern innovation, climate change, energy, education, national security, pandemics and biosecurity, genetics research, stem cells, ocean health, water, space, scientific integrity, research, and health. I look forward to seeing the candidates responses.

Last year the Institute for Species exploration brought us Planet Bob, a video explaining that "Taxonomy is only important if you live on this planet." A little over a month ago the Institute released its State of Observed Species (SOS) report, which "reports the discovery of 16,969 new species." An international committee of scientists, headed by my friend and colleague Janine Caira, chose ten of them as the Top 10 New Species described 2007.

This morning I noticed that C|Net News.com had picked up the story. That's even better news for those of us who care about biodiversity than a story in the Hartford Courant about fairy shrimp.

OK. So it's not an ivory-billed woodpecker, but Eric Lazo-Wasem rediscovered Eubranchipus holmanii in a freshwater pond in Groton, CT. It's the first time the species has been seen in Connecticut for 50 years. What's Eubranchipus holmanii you ask? A fairy shrimp.What's a fairy shrimp?

Well, fairy shrimp are small crustaceans that often occur in vernal pools and other ephemeral pools. They belong to the order Anostraca, which also includes brine shrimp. As their name suggests, brine shrimp occur in salty bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea, but they don't occur in the ocean. You can learn more about them at Wikipedia.

Why does any of this matter, other than it being pretty cool that a species that hasn't been seen for 50 years has been found again? Because I learned about it on the front page of yesterday's Hartford Courant¹. I'm delighted to see that a story like this appear on the front page of a paper. It reminds all of us that there's a tremendous amount of biodiversity in our own back yard and that there's still a lot we don't know about it.

As we all know by now, neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidates for their respective party's nominations accepted invitations to participate in ScienceDebate2008. But that doesn't mean the idea's dead. Far from it. Today the ScienceDebate2008 team released Innovation 2008: 14 Questions the candidates for President should answer about Science & America's Future.

On behalf of the American science and innovation community (see who here), we have submitted these questions to the candidates for President and asked them to do two simple things: A) provide a written response, which we will publish here, and B) discuss these questions in a nationally televised forum.

The 14 questions asked of presidential candidates include the 7 questions asked of congressional candidates. You can find out how your representatives, senators, and their challengers answered the questions by entering your zip code in the Innovation 2008 box at the bottom of the page.

David Goldston had doubts about earlier incarnations of ScienceDebate2008, and his doubts caused me some doubts of my own. But after looking at the 14 questions that have been posted, I am really looking forward to the answers. They will tell us a lot about our next president.¹

Readers of this blog have probably already heard about the spat between Rich Lenski and Conservapaedia in which Rich gives Conservapaedia a good lesson in how science works.¹ What you may not know is that Andrew Sullivan, author of "The Conservative Soul" among other books, had this to say about it at the Daily Dish:

More evidence of the rotting of the right's brain. Conservapedia objects to the finding that a bacteria strain evolved the ability to better utilize sugar over 20 years.

"Rotting of the right's brain", or if not the whole right, at least those who run Conservapaedia. Writing at ArsTechnica John Timmer notes

Problems with group think and incendiary discussions are common complaints about what happens behind the scenes at Wikipedia. The irony here is that Conservapedia was ostensibly founded as a response to precisely that behavior. It appears that the victims may now be trying the role of oppressors on for size.