Secular liberalism is a religion and evolution (or Darwinism) is just one of its articles of blind faith

The Peppered Moth fraud shows just how far some of Charles Darwin devotees are prepared to go to defend the creation myth of their religion

Essay by Graham Moorhouse (with alnowledgement to Ann Coulter)

If you really wanted hard evidence for evolution, the smoking gun was, according to the devotees of the secular liberal faith, the peppered moth.  When industrial pollution in the middle of the nineteenth century started to turn the trunks of trees black, the peppered moth of Darwinic folk legend, once pale, started to turn black, the better to avoid predators, or so it was hypothesized by Darwinic arch-druids.  As evidence for evolution goes it wasn’t quite earth worms turning into elephants, but at least it was something.  It had “evolved” (or at least changed a little bit) exactly as Darwin had predicted.

It wasn’t quite the stuff to set the heart racing; they were still peppered moths.  The secular miracle of natural selection had nevertheless produced a minor variation within the species.    A destitute man can get excited over a few coppers and up to that point the Darwiniacs had been pretty skint for hard evidence.  Here at last they had a grey moth that had morphed in front of their very eyes into a radically new life form - a slightly darker grey moth.  The secular liberals ecstatically announced that “real science” had proved evolution true yet again and went back to their favourite pastime of calling infidels religious nutters.

One of my grandchildren also goes noticeably darker every summer and one of my daughters-in-law regularly goes from fat to skinny and back again.  Not exactly the sort of metamorphosis that could turn a midge into a moose, nevertheless, perhaps I could make a bob or two selling the story of my grandson’s amazing ability to change his colour with the seasons to the New Scientist.

In the fifties an Oxford biologist, E.B. Ford, had spent two happy years transporting dark grey moths from the inner city to the countryside and light grey moths from the countryside to the inner city.  After which Ford triumphantly announced that his research had proved that birds could easily spot the dark grey moth on light trees and light grey moths on dark trees.  Voilà - evolution had been proved yet again!

Over the next fifty years the peppered moth’s legend became sacred to Darwinics - a sort of Fatima for atheists.  It became the snow covered peak of that “mountain of evidence” that science journals keep telling us about.  Every school child in the west, before learning how to put a condom on a cucumber, was staring at pictures of a light peppered moth clearly visible on a black tree trunk next to a dark moth that was somewhat less visible.

It was all so reasonable … and yet all so phony.  Some decades later some researchers (who one must presume had been living on another planet and were thus unaware that questioning evolution was a capital offense on planet earth) raised a few trivial issues.  Ted Sargent, an American lepidopterist (the branch of zoology dealing with butterflies and moths) then risked life-long incarceration by bravely pointing out that peppered moths don’t actually alight on tree trunks!  Further, they are nocturnal and fly around at night when birds, apart from owls, are having their forty winks.

It transpired that Ford had rigged his experiments by physically placing moths on tree trunks, somewhere the little critter would never have alighted had they been left to their own devices.  It that wasn’t bad enough, it also become apparent that the famous photos of peppered moths, which regularly show up in Darwinic propaganda even to this day, had been staged: dead moths had been literally stuck to tree trunks!  The “proof” for evolution had suddenly morphed into a sort of Monty Python dead-parrot sketch.  This experiment had been the equivalent of tying the legs of a mouse together and throwing it to a hungry cat, and then exclaiming, “See - this confirms mice evolved legs to escape predators - evolution is proved yet again!”

In her book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter amusingly quipped to the effect that this exposé brought to an abrupt end the secular liberals one and only recorded love-affair with air pollution.

And how did the Darwinacs respond to this exposure? - you know the ones who keep telling us they are devoted to the scientific method.  Well, to be fair, a couple had the integrity to publicly admit that the game was up, but the rest set about the science of demonising Sargent and ruining his career - Sargent was the zoologist who had played a central part in exposing the fraud.

Others devotees just ploughed on regardless, hoping no one had noticed that their “statue of the Weeping Virgin” wasn’t kosher.  The New Scientist as recently as 9th July 2005 confidently stated, “Evolutionary biologists have long known that the process can happen rapidly - Charles Darwin himself pointed out the observable changes wrought by pigeon fanciers and dog breeders.  A century later biologists showed that peppered moths in England’s industrial heartland had evolved darker colours to camouflage themselves against soot-blackened trees.”  It came as a surprise to many that selective breeding by humans had belonged in the “blind chance mutations of nature” column all along.

In 2005 - three years after it had finally acknowledged that the peppered moths were a fraud - the New York Times carried an article by a biologist, Professor H. Allen Orr, treating the peppered moth scam as an open question “Did the peppered moths evolve dark colour as a defence against birds or for other reasons?  And what role, if any, did the empty cans of superglue and black spray paint found at the scene play in the moth’s evolution.”  Okay - I made up the last sentence.

Orr concluded by called the darkening of the moths a “minor squabble” among biologists that had been inflated by sceptics of evolution.  It was as if the Church was to describe the Galileo affair as a storm in a teacup triggered by a “fanatical pro-elliptical orbist”!   Peppered moths fly are night (when birds are having a kip) and don’t alight on tree trunks - aren’t these what old-school scientists used to call facts?

Is there anything funnier than secular liberals? - they engineer comical frauds in defence of their religious dogmas and then accuse sceptics of being driven by religious zeal, and then constantly talk as if you are an idiot for being just a tad uncertain that your great-grandfather was a frog!