“Ham on Nye” Debate, Follow-up #1

Many of you saw the “debate” last night on evolution versus creation between Bill Nye, aka The Science Guy, and Ken Ham, from Answers in Genesis.

I was shocked to see our long-term evolution experiment with E. coli cited as support for the young-Earth creationist side.  But maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked, given Ham’s proclivity to change definitions, distort evidence, and ignore reality.

In fact, the results of our experiment fully support and strengthen evolutionary theory.  Of course, all the other existing evidence for evolution – from fossils to DNA, and everything in between – is already so overwhelmingly strong that our work serves mostly to illuminate some details of the evolutionary process that are often hard to see.

During the debate, my image and some text appeared in a slide that Ham showed in his presentation.  The good people at W. W. Norton & Company have given me permission to post below the full document associated with that slide.  It’s from an interview in which Prof. Joan L. Slonczewski (Kenyon College) asked me some questions about my career and research.  The interview appears in the 3^rd edition of the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science, authored by Prof. Slonczewski and Prof. John W. Foster (University of South Alabama).

Interview with Richard Lenski in Microbiology: An Evolving Science

[Added Feb. 8, 2014:  And see Dr. Zachary Blount’s in-depth reply here.]

 

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