Peppered Moth

Phillip Johnson reports on the scandal concerning the peppered moth in the December 2003 issue of Touchstone . It’s a pretty grim story, recently told by Judith Hooper in Of Moths and Men . What Johnson calls the “juiciest” scandal “is that the moths, which are nocturnal, do not rest on tree trunks during the day but prefer to fly up into the branches. The textbook photographs were staged, often by pinning and gluing dead moths in place.” The situation is bad enough that a reviewer of a book by Michael Majerus, a moth expert, wrote in Nature that it was time to put the peppered moth evidence to bed, remove it from the textbooks, and explain the scandal.

Another sign that Darwinists are increasingly on the defensive. It’s SO much fun to watch.