06.19.06

The Moth Saga

Posted in Evolution at 8:33 pm by nemo

PTrehashes the now standard evasive tactics on the great moths questions.
I am no defender of Coulter, nor of her garbled attack on Darwinism. But the question of the moths can get on one’s nerves. Darwinists have changed their story, and made it look like they have turned the tables on the critics (who are always labeled Creationists).
Note how the claim that this question of moths is one of ‘evolution’ (speciation?) has been split of, if not retracted, and we are focus on natural selection?
In effect, we are deprived of one of the classic critiques of straight Darwinism.
Clever shifting of one’s ground.

Typically, Coulter misrepresents the significance of the peppered moth experiments. She loudly proclaims that the moths remained just moths. This is a standard creationist statement, and may be found on a number of creationist web sites. The purpose of Kettlewell’s and others experiments was not to study speciation, it was to determine if the changes in peppered moth genotypes was due to natural selection. Her statement is bracketed by hyperbole, claiming that the changes in the peppered moth are “not the sort of metamorphosis that turns a mosquito into a German shepherd” (Chapter 9, Page 356). Now, again I know Coulter is trying to be outrageous and provocative, but that is a wildly ignorant misrepresentation of evolution (see an appropriate definition here, and the TO-FAQ’s on evolutionary biology are always a good starting point for people not familiar with biology). Again, Behe, Dembski, and Berlinski, who are Coulter’s tutors, should hang their heads in shame. Behe especially, because he actually knows this account is false. Organisms don’t metamorphose, but each successive generation will leave offspring that are slightly dissimilar to the parent generation [see note], and, slowly by our standards, their remote descendent are phenotypically distinct. It took nearly half a billion years for an Amphioxus-like invertebrate to evolve into a dog, so we don’t expect these level of changes to be seen in our experiments. But that doesn’t matter to Coulter.

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