Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale: The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth Paperback – January 17, 2004

We are donating our personal libraries to the New York City Library on York Avenue, which has an all volunteer bookstore in the basement, and which raises a million dollars a year for the library system. This soft cover book will sell for a dollar or two there, and every penny helps.

Positive reviews led me to buy this book, sadly before I read the many excellent negative reviews here on Amazon. I am persuaded that Hooper has written a hatchet job, and not a very well written one at that -- careless editing, run on sentences, fragmentary and misleading quotations.

I hope the next owner is more discerning -- I am almost embarrassed to donate the book.

Robert C. Ross
September 2018

Judith Hooper (born 1949) is an American journalist, who has written/co-written other books such as The 3-Pound Universe,Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman?: A Catalogue of Revolutionary Tools for Higher Consciousness, etc.

She wrote in the Prologue to this 2002 book, "In Darwinian language, natural selection favoured the black appearance in the grimy mill towns and the light one in rural, unpolluted woodlands... For fifty years, this interpretation... was only a theory, until Kettlewell ventured out into the English countryside to prove it in 1953... these twin demonstrations became the most celebrated experiment ever in evolutionary biology... It is the slam dunk of natural selection... the thundering left hook to the jaw of creationism. Craig Holdredge, a young American biology teacher... dug up H.B.D. Kettlewell's original journal articles... He was appalled... he began to realize that the standard theory of industrial melanism... was full of holes. As it turned out, Holdredge was not the only one to notice the cracks in the icon. Before long the peppered moth had kindled a smouldering scientific feud... away from the public eye... What was it about this one case that was so sacred? Perhaps it was a symbol of something... and that was why some people were defending it so tenaciously. This book grew out of those questions. Behind the story, like a monster lurking under a five-year-old's bed, is the bogeyman of creationism... For the record, I am not a creationist, but to be uncritical about science is to make it into a dogma." (Pg. xvii-xix)

Of the famous photos/film that ethologist Niko Tinbergen took with Kettlewell, she recounts, "In his paper, Kettlewell would admit to putting out huge concentrations of moths on these closely watched trees in order to get the photographs... Still more intoxicating, perhaps, was the realization that they were the first people on Earth to catch evolution in action---on film! What the biology textbooks would fail to mention, and what passed unnoticed by their peers for at least a decade, was that [Kettlewell] had done a little tweaking in this experiment, too, just as he had at the aviary and in Birmingham in 1953." (Pg. 136)

She notes, "In Caldy Common, which had birches, sycamores and oaks, Clarke and Sheppard performed a predation experiment similar to [Kettlewell's]. They wanted to confirm the two key elements of [Kettlewell's] work: that the color of the morphs really did provide crypsis, and that there was differential predation by birds. They avoided the inconvenience of getting moths to pupate at just the right moment by using dead, frozen moths... the light-coloured typical; morph should have had and ADVANTAGE of about 23 percent... but in their predation experiments typicals still had a selective DISADVANTAGE of about 20 per cent. It didn't add up... [Kettlewell] was prickly and defensive about his friends' experiment. The rough draft that Philip sent to him was returned riddled with marginal notes and long-winded, often irrelevant objections." (Pg. 192-193)

She points out, "There was an evident gap between the predictions founded on Kettlewell's model, based on bird predation and crypsis, and actual observations. `The discrepancy may indicate,' Jim Bishop and Laurence Cook reflected in a 1975 Scientific American article, `we are not correctly assessing the true nature of the resting sites of living moths when we are conducting experiments with dead ones. Alternatively, the assumption that natural selection is entirely due to selective predation by birds may be mistaken.' Even then some people knew that the stories and pictures in the textbooks were not quite true, yet it would be another two decades or more before the icon was seriously challenged." (Pg. 218)

She cites Ted Sargent who notes, "Unconscious bias, he says, could easily have tainted Kettlewell's background experiments... `The moth is a little too high, but you tell yourself, "Well, it's mainly on the black." If you have an idea in your mind it's very easy to eliminate what you don't want. Kettlewell always seemed to find what he expected to be true... So many subtle things could enter. You might put the black ones closer to the collecting area, or hide the black ones a little better, unconsciously...' He pauses, looks pained: `His stuff is too neat! A two-to-one ratio and then two-to-one the other way, and nobody else gets anything like that? It's suspicious... Kettlewell's colleagues didn't want to shoot him down because they loved the idea. It was an example of Darwinism.'" (Pg. 256)

She summarizes the critiques: "By the early 1990s, if not before, it was known to a small circle of scientists that what every textbook in the Darwinian universe said about industrial melanism was untrue. There were some fundamental discrepancies, not least that birds may not be the major predators. The question is... whether in nature birds are major predators of peppered moths. Equally damaging to the `authorized version' was the fact that moths do not normally rest on tree trunks... but in shaded areas under branches, where colour differences would be muted... Additionally, the experimental densities were too high... When [Kettlewell] and Tinbergen were making their historic film, they laid the spread on even thicker... Furthermore, the method of release was faulty. Peppered moths fly at night and settle into their daytime resting places at dawn. [Kettlewell] released his moths in daylight because if he had released them at night they would have made a beeline for the light traps... the bird predation purportedly demonstrated by Kettlewell could easily have been an artifact of the experiment... there was also the question of what [Kettlewell] put out. He mixed lab-bred and wild-caught specimens... the lab-bred moths were possibly `more vulnerable'..." (Pg. 265-267) She adds, "With all these defects, one might suppose that `Darwin's missing evidence' had lost a little of its lustre. On the contrary, the leading lights of the industrial melanism field still cling to it, even while admitting that there are all sorts of confounding factors." (Pg. 271)

She concludes, "The accumulation of fifty years' research has built a monument that researchers in the field are understandably loath to dismantle. The worst-case scenarios, such as the possibility that the rise of melanic peppered moths may not have demonstrated natural selection, are unthinkable... If the major predators should turn out to be bats or beetles, instead of birds hunting by sight, or alternatively if birds are picking the moths out of the air, the standard model is in trouble again. But almost no one really wants to re-examine the theory itself. Those few who do so are demonized." (Pg. 276-277)

She adds, "H.B.D. Kettlewell advanced his hypothesis and tested it, though perhaps not as rigorously as one might have wished, and it seemed fine for a time. Today new evidence, a rigorous examination of old evidence, and further tests of the hypothesis... have suggested that it may be incorrect... We could fill in the blanks: [Kettlewell's] desperate need to please E.B. Ford, Ford's fanatical belief in the power of adaptation, everybody's craving for merit badges... Then there were [Kettlewell's] family problems, his insecure finances, his craving for recognition at Oxford, the `turns' he suffered during his experiment, his exhaustion, sleep deprivation and mood swings, even the emotional aridity of his childhood... Traditionally, these human factors are deemed irrelevant to the scientific process, as if scientists were a race of hard-wired robots." (Pg. 298-299)

While Hooper's work is subject to criticism [e.g., geneticist Michael Majerus's paper, `Industrial Melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia'], this book contains a wealth of information not easily available elsewhere; it will be "must reading" for anyone studying the peppered moth experiments.

As I write this review, I understand that evolutionists will not accept any evidence that demonstrates some of the follies of evolutionary theory. This review is not intended to make non-scientist evolutionists rethink their beliefs. The primary purpose of this review is to praise a well written book that brings more support to those who are cognizant of the fact that much of evolutionary theory is based on speculation, conjecture, and consciously misleading information. There was Haeckel's embryos depicting drawings of human fetuses going through a fish stage, pig stage, and finally a human stage of development that was proved to be completely false with the advent of resonance imaging devices; there was the infamous Peking man that was supposed to finally reveal the link between the great apes and humans, which mysteriously and conveniently disappeared from the world's scene; and now we have proof of the silly extremes to which evolutionists will go to demonstrate natural selection or survival of the fittest by pointing to peppered moths. Judith Cooper has wonderfully revealed the fallacies and inaccuracies of the peppered moth weapon in the evolutionist's arsenal as just another Haeckel's embryos or Peking man myth. Engrossing, engaging, and factually detailed, "Of Moths and Men" is enlightening and yet another of many books that lay waste to many of the so-called pillars of the evolutionary argument.

Great find: the study of how a polluted environment changes genetic evolution

Geoffrey Norman, whose book review in the Wall Street Journal entitled "A Flight from the Truth" enticed me to purchase this text, wrote that "for some, the fall of the peppered moth was better than Christmas morning. Creationists have had a field day with the news, especially on the Web, where a lot [of] bare-knuckles brawling occurs these days. Anyone who thought that the truth of Darwin's theory was settled in Dayton, Tenn., by Clarence Darrow--or in Beacon Wood by Bernard Kettlewell--is sure to be disabused by Ms. Hooper's fascinating book. But of course the theory of evolution will survive the collapse of Kettlewell--though some biologists cling to him with the avidity of the true believer[.] "Of Moths and Men" is a wonderful reminder that science is done by human beings, who are as flawed as the ideas they sometimes possess." Well said. Note that although this work is not a science book, per se, as other reviewers have correctly noted, the narrative includes extensive details on moths that some readers may find annoying. But if these same readers enjoy the good human character development that is interspersed throughout these details, they can definitely handle this annoyance. And because, in my opinion, Part III of this book (comprising two chapters of 12), is written so well, it is worth the time of the average reader to get through the first 10 chapters of the narrative in order to understand the implications of the faulty science of the peppered moth. Although for some reason Hooper has chosen within her discussion to ignore the modern intelligent design movement, she does note that she is "not a creationist, but to be uncritical about science is to make it into a dogma". Very well said.