Page 791 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

Harun Yahya

14. The peppered moth claim is a deception

th
Tree bark in the mid-19 Century during the early part of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain
was light in color. For that reason, dark colored variants of the moth species (melanic moths) Biston be-
tularia could easily be seen and caught by birds. Fifty years later, however, lichens, a kind of algae, had

died out around the trees as a result of industrial pollution, and the trees had become darker in color.
At this time, it was now the lighter colored moths that were more visible on the trees and that were
caught more often by birds. As a result, the number of light colored moths declined, while the darker

melanic moths increased in number, since these were less easily caught.
Evolutionists eagerly seized on this state of affairs as significant evidence for their claims of evolu-
tion by way of natural selection. Using the same deceptive techniques, as always, they then set about
trying to mislead people into thinking that light-colored moths evolved into darker ones. This claim was
heralded with the so-called phrase “evolution in action.” But the facts were very different, since these

moths in fact underwent no evolutionary change at all, the only thing present being a huge Darwinist
deception.
In 1953, H.B.D. Kettlewell, a Darwinist doctor of medicine and also an amateur biologist, decided to

perform an experiment to observe the phenomenon. He carried out experiments and observations in
rural parts of England where these moths were living. As a result of his experiments, Kettlewell deter-
mined that dark moths on lighter lichen were caught in larger numbers. He then announced this in an
article titled “Darwin’s Missing Evidence” in Scientific American magazine, as if this were a giant dis-
covery in the name of Darwinism. By 1960, Kettlewell’s account had assumed its place in all school text

books.
In 1985, certain peculiarities began to be noticed. A young American biology teacher called Craig
Holdrege came across an interesting statement in the notes of Sir Cyril Clarke, a close friend of

Kettlewell and who took part in his experiments. Clarke said:

All we have observed is where the moths do not spend the day. In 25 years, we have only found two betu-
laria on the tree trunks or walls adjacent to our traps... 63

Holdrege had for a long time been showing his students photographs of moths placed on tree trunks
and describing how birds would locate and catch the more visible ones. But now someone who had re-
searched these moths for 25 years was saying he had only seen moths on the tree trunks twice. A fierce
scientific debate erupted almost immediately. The debate led to the following conclusions: many stud-

ies performed after Kettlewell’s experiments showed that the moths landed on only one kind of tree
trunk, preferring the undersides of horizontal branches of all other kinds of tree. Since the 1980s, every-
one has been in agreement that moths land only very, very rarely on tree trunks. Many scientists, such

as Cyril Clarke and Rory Howlett, who conducted a 25-year study on the subject, as well as Michael
Majerus, Tony Liebert and Paul Brakefield have declared that “Kettlewell obliged the moths to behave
in an unnatural manner in his experiments, for which reason the results of the experiment are scientifi-
cally unacceptable.”
Researchers investigating Kettlewell’s experiment encountered an even more astonishing finding;

while there should have been more light-colored moths in unpolluted regions of England there were ac-
tually four times as many dark ones. In other words, contrary to what Kettlewell claimed, and what
had been reiterated in every evolutionist reference book, there was no correlation between tree bark

and the ratios in the moth population.
The American lepidopterist (an expert engaged in scientific study of butterflies and moths) Ted
Sargent and other researchers noted that the moths in question did not land on the tree trunks but hid
beneath the upper branches. In addition, the moths slept in the day and flew about at night; in other
words, when the birds were asleep! 64

The more the matter was investigated, the greater the scale of the scandal: the “moths on tree bark”
photographed by Kettlewell were actually dead. Since moths settle on the under sides of the branches

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