Let us first recall what is actually said: According to this account,
around the onset of the Industrial Revolution in England, the color of tree
barks around Manchester was quite light. Because of this, dark-colored moths
resting on those trees could easily be noticed by the birds that fed on them,
and therefore they had very little chance of survival. Fifty years later, in
woodlands where industrial pollution has killed the lichens, the bark of the
trees had darkened, and now the light-colored moths became the most hunted,
since they were the most easily noticed. As a result, the proportion of
light-colored to dark-colored moths decreased. Evolutionists believe this to be
a great piece of evidence for their theory. They take refuge and solace in
window-dressing, showing how light-colored moths "evolved" into dark-colored
ones.
The top picture shows trees with moths on them before the Industrial
Revolution, and the bottom picture shows them at a later date. Because the trees
had grown darker, birds were able catch light-colored moths more easily and
their numbers decreased. However, this is not an example of "evolution," because
no new species emerged; all that happened was that the ratio of the two already
existing types in an already existing species
changed.
|
However,
although we believe these facts to be correct, it should be quite clear that
they can in no way be used as evidence for the theory of evolution, since no new
form arose that had not existed before. Dark colored moths had existed in the
moth population before the Industrial Revolution. Only the relative proportions
of the existing moth varieties in the population changed. The moths had not
acquired a new trait or organ, which would cause "speciation."13 In order for one moth species to turn into
another living species, a bird for example, new additions would have had to be
made to its genes. That is, an entirely separate genetic program would have had
to be loaded so as to include information about the physical traits of the
bird.
This is the answer to be given to the evolutionist story of Industrial
Melanism. However, there is a more interesting side to the story: Not just its
interpretation, but the story itself is flawed. As molecular biologist Jonathan
Wells explains in his book Icons of
Evolution, the story of the peppered moths, which is included in every
evolutionary biology book and has therefore, become an "icon" in this sense,
does not reflect the truth. Wells discusses in his book how Bernard Kettlewell's
experiment, which is known as the "experimental proof" of the story, is actually
a scientific scandal. Some basic elements of this scandal
are:
- Many
experiments conducted after Kettlewell's revealed that only one type of these
moths rested on tree trunks, and all other types preferred to rest beneath
small, horizontal branches. Since 1980 it has become clear that peppered moths
do not normally rest on tree trunks. In 25 years of fieldwork, many scientists
such as Cyril Clarke and Rory Howlett, Michael Majerus, Tony Liebert, and Paul
Brakefield concluded that in Kettlewell's experiment, moths were forced to act
atypically, therefore, the test results could not be accepted as
scientific.14
- Scientists who tested Kettlewell's conclusions came up with an even
more interesting result: Although the number of light moths would be expected to
be larger in the less polluted regions of England, the dark moths there numbered
four times as many as the light ones. This meant that there was no correlation
between the moth population and the tree trunks as claimed by Kettlewell and
repeated by almost all evolutionist sources.
- As the
research deepened, the scandal changed dimension: "The moths on tree trunks"
photographed by Kettlewell, were actually dead moths. Kettlewell used dead
specimens glued or pinned to tree trunks and then photographed them. In truth,
there was little chance of taking such a picture as the moths rested not on tree
trunks but underneath the leaves.15
These facts were uncovered by the scientific community only in the late
1990s. The collapse of the myth of Industrial Melanism, which had been one of
the most treasured subjects in "Introduction to Evolution" courses in
universities for decades, greatly disappointed evolutionists. One of them, Jerry
Coyne, remarked:
My own reaction resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.16
Thus, "the most famous example of natural selection" was relegated to the
trash-heap of history as a scientific scandal-which was inevitable, because
natural selection is not an "evolutionary mechanism," contrary to what
evolutionists claim.
In short, natural selection is capable neither of adding a new organ to a
living organism, nor of removing one, nor of changing an organism of one species
into that of another. The "greatest" evidence put forward since Darwin has been
able to go no further than the "industrial melanism" of moths in
England.
DarwinismRefuted.com
