While you were in school and still naive, your biology science textbook probably showed you the tale of two biston betularia, or peppered moths. One moth was dark and was difficult to see on the dark tree trunk and the other was light and easily seen. Maybe they also showed you the reverse with a light tree trunk.Then you read in the textbook that the light tree trunks were common before the industrial revolution and made the light-coloured moths difficult to see. Thus the birds that prey on the moths ate more of the dark moths than the light moths and so the light moths became dominant.
Then came the nasty industrial revolution and the trees became black with soot from the industrial smoke, which made the light moths easily visible to birds and the dark moths hard to see. Bird predation led to the dominance of dark moths. Then environment reversed again and restored the dominance of the light-coloured bark and the light-coloured moths prevailed again. Evolution was proved NOT!
There are boundaries to natural selection and they were known from
before the time
of Darwin. Breeders in his day choose the visible traits of dogs, cats
and horses, to decide which animals to mate. This produced collies and
chihuahuas, Persians and Siamese, pintos and quarter horses but never
did it produce a new kind of animal. Only if you delete the requirement to produce new species can this be called evolution. However, in this case you fail to explain the origin of species and that was the point of Darwin's book!
A leading British zoologist, L. Harrison Matthews, in the Introduction to the 1971 reprint to Darwin's Origin of Species, said: "The peppered moth experiments beautifully
demonstrate natural selection—or survival of the fittest—in action, but
they do not show evolution in progress, for . . . all the moths remain
from beginning to end Biston betularia." The
only change that has taken place is a change in the frequency of the
dark and light genes in the gene pool. Merely reshuffling pre-existing genes is not evolution in the Darwinian sense. Using the peppered moth and "industrial melanism" as an example of evolution is intellectually dishonest.
The evolutionist's argument of the peppered moth commits the "Hey Diddle Diddle" fallacy.
If I can train a cow to jump over a fence post a feet off the ground
does not mean that I can make a cow jump over the
moon. This is a feat of a different dimension entirely. Changing the gene frequency is different than changing the species genome. It is a different kind of change that cannot be achieved by selection alone.
Judith Hooper wrote the story about the fall of the iconic moth in a book entitled, Of Moths and Men. She noted in her prologue that she was
not
a creationist [1]. She had to say this
to be taken seriously. Any comfort for the Creationists would be treason! She wrote, "Behind the story, like a
monster lurking under a
five-year-old's bed, is the bogeyman of creationism.[ibid]"
Well, just what was so bad that
Hooper called it a scandal? Well the field worker for all this
research, Dr. Kettleworth, never did see a biston betularia on the
bark of any tree. The moth apparently changed without the help of camoflage on tree trunks. The pictures you saw in your biology
textbook were taken using dead moths pinned to the trees. The moths have
never been seen on these trees by anyone. The whole story of natural selection of peppered moths by predator birds is a fanciful myth of evolutionists. If the evolutionists have the truth why do they need to invent myths to support their faith? The reason they invented this myth is that they did not have any real science that was better. That's what science teachers ought to put in biology science textbooks.
Alan Montgomery
[1] Judith Hooper, 2002. Of Moths and Men, New York: W. W.
Norton and Co. p. xix
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