David Mills

“Let's look at one more quick example of modern evolution at
work. In the early 1800s, light-colored lichens covered many of
the trees in the English countryside. The peppered moth was a
light-colored insect that blended in unnoticeably with the lichens.
Predators had great difficulty distinguishing the peppered moth
from its background environment, so the moths easily survived
and reproduced.
Then the Industrial Revolution came to the English country-
side. Coal-burning factories turned the lichens a sooty black. The
light-colored peppered moth became clearly visible. Most of them
were eaten. But because of genetic variation and mutation, a few
peppered moths displayed a slightly darker color. These darker
moths were better able to blend in with the sooty lichens, and so
lived to produce other darker-colored moths. In little over a hun-
dred years, successive generations of peppered moths evolved
from almost completely white to completely black. Natural selec-
tion, rather than "random accident," guided the moth's evolution-
ary progress.”
― David Mills, Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism