CAREFUL NOT TO LOSE SIGHT OF THE PREY:

The Return Of The Peppered Moths (Paul Taylor, 9/19/07, CrossRhythms)

[Independent Science Editor Steve] Connor writes: "Creationists smelt blood. The story of the peppered moth became a story of how Darwinism itself was flawed - with its best known example being based on fiddled data." He reports Majerus as saying "The peppered moth story is easy to understand, because it involves things that we are familiar with: vision and predation and birds and moths and pollution and camouflage and lunch and death. That is why the anti-evolution lobby attacks the peppered moth story. They are frightened that too many people will be able to understand."

Answers in Genesis has featured information about the peppered moth saga before. This species of moth (biston betularia) exists in two forms-a light variety (typical) and a black variety (carbonaria). The account was that the light coloured variety could be seen more easily on the dark coloured bark of trees in heavily polluted areas. Therefore, birds would more easily eat the light coloured variety in such areas, causing a greater percentage of dark coloured moths. Similarly, in pollution free areas, the light coloured variety would predominate. There is some evidence that such population distributions do indeed occur.

What the Independent article fails to acknowledge is that criticism of the peppered moth experiments did not hinge on whether or not the population observations were correct. It was the experimental methodology and the conclusions that were criticised. If the population distribution evidences are correct, then this is no problem for creationists. After all, we have here an example of moths evolving into... er, moths. This involves a rearrangement of genetic information. It does not involve an increase in genetic information, of the kind that would be required for 'molecules-to-man' evolution.

The important thing here is that the Darwinists failed to understand both the unimportance of the original work -- which even with the fraud did not so much as allege speciation -- and the failure of the rehabilitation attempt to answer the objections -- indeed, it tends to prove them accurate. The continued faith of such folks is indeed dependent on just this sort of lack of understanding of their own ideology.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 19, 2007 12:00 AM