Page 202 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism

Once Upon a Time
There Was Darwinism

ments, Mikola, Grant and Sargent, among others, re-
peated what Kettlewell did and got results contrary to his. "I
am careful not to call Kettlewell a fraud," says Bruce Grant after
a discreet pause. "He was just a very careless scientist." 148
Other evidence that the evolutionist story of the peppered
moths is completely wrong lies in North America's population of
Biston betularia. The evolutionist thesis is that during the Industrial

Revolution, air pollution turned the moth population black.
Kettlewell's experiments and observations done in England were
regarded as evidence of this. However, the same moth lives in
North America, where no melanism has been observed despite the
Industrial Revolution and the air pollution. Hooper explains this
situation referring to the findings of Theodore David Sargent, an
American scientist who studied the question:

[Evolutionists] . . . also ignored the studies on the North American
continent that raised legitimate questions about the classical story
of dark backgrounds, lichens, air pollution, and so on. Melanics are
equally common in Maine, southern Canada, Pittsburgh, and
around New York City . . . and in Sargent's view, the North
American data falsify the classical industrial melanism hypothesis.
This hypothesis predicts a strong positive correlation between in-
dustry (air pollution, darkened backgrounds) and the incidence of
melanism. "But this was not true," Sargent points out, "in Denis
Owen's original surveys—which showed the same extent of
melanism wherever sampled, whether city or rural area—and has-
n't been found by anyone since. 149

With the discovery of all these facts, it came to light
that the story of peppered moths was a giant hoax. For
decades people all over the world were misled by
photographs of dead moths pinned to a tree

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