More Salt in the Peppered Moth’s Wounds

The entire history of Kettlewell’s Peppered Moth experiment is littered with problems: doctored photographs, wrong assumptions and slim evidence, followed by genetic analysis revealing that the protein exons coding for color were not changed, but, rather, a transposon (non-random) was inserted in an intron (“junk DNA”).

And now there’s this paper. It seems that the “Caterpillars of the peppered moth perceive color through their skin.”

From the Abstract:

We previously reported that slow colourchange in twig-mimicking caterpillars of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is a response to achromatic and chromatic visual cues. Here we show that the perception of these cues, and the resulting phenotypic responses, does not require ocular vision. Caterpillars with completely obscured ocelli remained capable of enhancing their crypsis by changing colour and choosing to rest on colour-matching twigs. A suite of visual genes, expressed across the larval integument, likely plays a key role in the mechanism. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that extraocular colour sensing can mediate pigment-based colour change andbehaviour in an arthropod.

We now ask a simple question: if the caterpillar of the peppered moth can change its coloration independent of its eyes, can the adult form do this also?

One has to wonder: what is left of this “Icon of Evolution”?

Darwin’s finches hybridize, peppered moths can change coloration to match twig color, and the whole while there are Adriatic lizards that, in the lab—with its diet changed, grows cecal valves within two months.

Darwinism is on extremely thin ice.

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