I appreciate the time you took to analyze my suggestions, but unfortunately your conclusions for the most part are flawed. Let me try to explain why.
"Finch beaks are an interesting case, but not very instructive because the process cannot be observed, so we can only imagine what must be responsible. This would be a poor substitute for the Peppered moths."
In point of fact the phenomenon I am referring to was observed during the last El Nino event and is the subject of the book _The Beak of the Finch_. The researchers watched as the birds responded to the climatic conditions by producing small narrow beak when the rains were plentiful, to make it easier to eat the lush soft food, then changed to broad large beaks to handle their normal diet of seeds and hard-shell insects when the rains went away and the normal arid conditions returned. So not only is the process ongoing, we could in fact do experiments on it. They are the perfect substitute for peppered moths (except that peppered moths don't need to be replaced).
"Drosophila adaptation experiments is far too general a category to be of much use, although I am sure there must be some specific cases that would be useful."
Inspired by the peppered moth study, researchers started doing the same thing to Drosophila under controlled laboratory conditions and saw what the peppered moth study originally claimed to see: adaptation to changing environments through natural selection of specific traits.
"Bacterial antibiotic resistance falsifies the prediction of evolution, and this would surely not be a good example to use."
Please explain.
"Plant heavy metal tolerance I am happy to plead ignorance on. Could you be more specific?"
Studies have been done on the ability of plants to adapt to soil heavily contaminated with cadmium, lead, mercury, plutonium and other heavy metal toxins. (You were expecting maybe KISS?) Most plants die or unable to germinate, but those who have certain alleles can survive and reproduce in an environment that kills everything else off. What it interesting is that if you return these plants to uncontaminated soils, they are unable to compete with their wild type cousins and so are crowded out. Apparently the alleles that allow them to survive where nothing else can debilitates them in some way compared to wild type. Only if they acquire a mutation that compensates for that debilitation can they again successfully compete with wild type.
"Bacterial adaptation to whatever. If these are good illustrations, why, when we have known the problems with the peppered moth story for years, have they not already been substituted in the textbooks?"
Writers and editors of high school textbooks are not usually scientists, so they would not be aware of the problems, especially if no scientist told them because no scientist considered the problems to contradict the evolutionary message the moths were teaching us. Editors also tend to hang onto a good story rather than look into it, retelling it in book after book. These are the people who create dogma, not scientists. College textbooks -- especially graduate school texts -- on the other hand do report these bacterial experiments as verifiers of the basic evolutionary lesson revealed by the moths.
Besides, what has this to do with the scientific merit of the examples used?
Kevin L. O'Brien