Of Moths And Men

Of Moths and Men

A search for Darwin's "missing evidence" chronicles the jealousies, rivalries, and emotional turmoil behind the twentieth-century's most famous evolutionary biology experiment.

Of Moths and Men

The tale of a flagrant scientific fraud, its cover-up and the scientific incompetence behind the most important paradigm in evolutionary biology: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The fraud began in 1953, with H.B.D. Kettlewell, an amateur but charismatic lepidoptorist attached to Oxford University. Using studies of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) he showed the process of natural selection at work over a period of months rather than millennia. The naturally light-coloured moth was found, in Kettlewell's experiments, to have mutated to a darker variety (Biston carbonaria) in industrial areas where the darker colour would prove a more effective camouflage against predator birds. The conclusive evidence was drawn from the rate at which light and dark moths appeared on the trunks of an industrially influenced forest and the rate at which the lighter, poorly camouflaged moths were consumed by birds. There were only two problems: no one was sure that birds naturally ate the pepper moth, and the reason they were consumed in such apparently conclusive numbers was that they had been glued to the trees by Kettlewell.

Of Moths and Men