Rebutting Brad Harrub: Kettlewell's Peppered Moths
Channel: C0nc0rdance
Date: 2012-09-28

I'm going to be very busy over the next few weeks as we finalize a major research outcome and prepare it for publication.  Very busy, very tired, very excited!

The best analysis of Kettlewell's results and the creationist furor around them is at Dr. Jerry Coyne's non-blog website, "Why Evolution is True".  Dr. Coyne is famously cited for his scientific criticisms of the peppered moth studies, but his real criticism has been misused to create the impression of scientific dishonesty.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-peppered-moth-story-is-solid/

Some links to Wikipedia to give some context:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettlewell%27s_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Kettlewell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_melanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Majerus

A critical examination of the urban legend:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16240545
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16549216
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14737825
The only actual criticism that has borne scrutiny is that Kettlewell failed to test hypotheses OTHER THAN predation and there were some artificiality in his experiments that did not mimic nature well:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21452690
For example, he sometimes collected moths from other countries to supplement wild-caught moths.  He released a very large number of moths, which could have artificially increased predation as the birds were presented with a bug buffet.  That's why Majerus, using more careful methods, wanted to re-design and repeat the original experiments.