Remember the story of the peppered moths? In the mid nineteenth century, peppered moths in the North of England grew darker, as the Industrial Revolution took hold. In a well-known series of experiments in the 1950s, naturalist Bernard Kettlewell demonstrated that this was an example of natural selection at work: the lighter moths, previously well camouflaged against tree trunks, became more visible to predatory birds as the soot from the factories darkened the landscape. The darker or melanic variety came to predominate.
If you know about that, you’ll probably also remember that this was all supposedly debunked a few years back, in Judith Hooper’s book “Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale“, which told a story of scientific fraud and Darwinian zealotry.
Well, now we’re back where we started, as Matt Young at The Panda’s Thumb takes a fresh look at Kettlewell’s data:
Hooper’s claims are moonshine; they are based on a lack of understanding of Kettlewell’s experiments in particular and experimental science in general…. Hooper should have performed a careful analysis before she presumptuously insinuated fraud. […]
The peppered moth properly remains a valid paradigm — no, an icon — of evolution.
Leave a Reply