From: Sarah Berel-Harrop (sec@hal-pc.org)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 10:43:18 EDT
Josh,
Perhaps Michael is the better person to comment,
he having made the original comment about the Icons
section on peppered moths being flawed. There is
a great deal of information on the web, including
extensive discussion on this listserve about this, are
you willing to take the time to read it?
here's a decent start:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/iconob.html#moths
One thing with this page, Nic gets the posts from this
listserve involving the back-and-forth between Wells
and Majerus temporally backwards. That is a bit
confusing.
1st thing on your excerpt - moths choosing matching
backgrounds. Indeed, tested, falsified (are you reading
Walt?), discarded. That's how science works isn't it?
Bruce Grant discusses this, see page 5 of this doc
http://faculty.wm.edu/bsgran/melanism.pdf
Interestingly, Grant criticizes Majerus' book here for
continuing to speculate that the behavior exists, when
Grant clearly feels the subject has been put to bed.
Indeed, this is a nice overview of the peppered moth
work by a researcher in the field. Coyne is a fly guy
isn't he? That's not to say he can't understand what
is going on in peppered moth research, but to take
his book review of Majerus' book as an authoritative
pronouncement on the state of peppered moth
research, particularly when the actual peppered moth
researchers have different views, is IMV a little short-
sighted. That's my take on this quote. Read the articles
by Michael Majerus that were forwarded to this
listserve in 1999 & the extensive discussion on the
matter at that time.
http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199903/0312.html
http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199904/0103.html
Do you think Coyne has read all the primary papers? Do
you think that informs his view? And this is not
a trivial question. Here in Texas Glencoe made
changes to their textbooks referencing Coyne's
review. That's outrageous, that they would make
changes based on a book review. At least they
made one good change, they went back and looked
to some moth papers and added some information about
the decline of the melanic form after clean air legislation.
However do you think it's correct to incorporate information
from book reviews as opposed to primary research into
textbooks? I don't think that is a very good precedent,
personally.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Bembenek" <jbembe@hotmail.com>
To: <sec@hal-pc.org>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2003 8:44 AM
Subject: Re: Phillip Johnson (and Methodological Naturalism)
> Sara-
>
> I guess it was this thread where you asserted that criticisms of the
"Icons"
> were offtrack. What is your take of Jerry Coyne's review written in
Nature
> 1998 where he states:
>
> Finally, the results of Kettlewell's behavioural
> experiments were not replicated in
> later studies: moths have no tendency to
> choose matching backgrounds. Majerus
> finds many other flaws in the work, but they
> are too numerous to list here. I unearthed
> additional problems when, embarrassed
> at having taught the standard Biston story
> for years, I read Kettlewell's papers for the
> first time.
>
> ???
>
>
> Josh
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Instant message during games with MSN Messenger 6.0. Download it now FREE!
> http://msnmessenger-download.com
>
--- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.525 / Virus Database: 322 - Release Date: 10/09/2003
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Oct 13 2003 - 10:36:42 EDT