E. B. Ford, who went by the name of Henry, had one thing in common with the other Henry Ford. The auto-builder, declared you can have any color you like, as long as it black. Oxford Henry, declared you can have any evolutionary theory you like as long as it is the one I champion.
With his cutting sarcasm, disdain for religion of any type, intellectual superiority, proper education, and position within a prestigious university, he prevailed long after his theories no longer held water. Dr. Ford represents much of what is wrong with the educational establishment in rewarding those who with a sharp razor slashes an adversary, who doesn't know his throat's been cut until he tries to turn his head. You can excuse Ford for his efforts to prove evolutionary theory by tying observations of changes within a species to an environmental issue. It seemed so pat, and many of today's scientist are following the same cookbook approach to association of mutant varieties of frogs, &c., with water and air pollution.
Ford needed a patsy to carry out his evolutionary mishmash, and he found it in a fellow named Bernard Kettlewell, a medical doctor who liked the good life and chased creatures of the night (moths and ladies). To his credit Kettlewell was an accomplished entomologist who far better understood the ways of insects than he did scientific methods. With Ford leading his servant; Kettlewell found what Ford was looking for, and if he didn't perhaps he changed the game so that the object was found nevertheless.
With the industrial revolution, people left the countryside and crowded into the cities. The picture's of plants bellowing smoke is for the most part wrong, as the individual home fires burning peat and coal were mostly the culprits. But people have to eat and keep warm, and a generation of chimney sweeps came into being and with their occupation, discovered testicular cancer. As the chimneys smoked and heavy black smoke covered the countryside, in a short while, some varieties of plant life seems to have been either extinguished or at any rate diminished.
At about this same time, a black sport of a common moth, the peppered variety named biston betularia, was observed to appear and increase in number not only where first observed but, in other areas of Great Britain, and throughout the world. An easy link between the two events was drawn, and to the naturalist, it seemed that for one variety to increase in number while others appeared to be in decline, the suggested tie with pollution was not enough, you needed a reason for the changing ratios. While, one could speculate that the two varieties were competing for the same limited foodstuff might be a possible explanation, it was fanaticized by Ford that the reason was that birds would prey on the one that stood out most against its background.
So Dr. Kettlewell pinned a few moths on tree trunks of different background hues and sure enough birds, came to his feeder and consumed the moths. He didn't question whether birds, being the lazy creatures they are, would take the easiest prey, and were trainable, so much so that he had to limit his experiments because they expected his generosity to continue.
Eureka exclaimed Dr. Ford, evolutionary theory is proven; birds eat the easily seen moths and the black survive, it's survival of the fittest! When the numbers didn't quite add up, Dr. Kettlewell seemed to always find those that did. This love fest between Ford and Kettlewell of course has made it into all the textbooks, but with the beginning of understanding of genetics and the genetic code, questions have been raised and finally the theory collapsed.
Others have raised the specter of impropriety in design of experiments and understanding of statistics to interpret results, questions that have been well addressed, but none have provided an answer as to how or for that matter why, the black moth came into being if not by survival of the fittest
So here I make a modest proposal. It is well known that the many thousand varieties of moths carry pretty much the same germ plasma, and can easily be cross bred, not unlike how we breed fruit flies, cattle or hogs or chickens for that matter. When matings are made, some obvious phenotypes emerge. Perhaps it didn't require hand mating practiced by Kettlewell and others to be successful. After all, a moth's got to do what a moth'a got to do.
Since black in moths is the dominant gene, it wouldn't take many generations to see a marked change in the distribution of what appears to be two varieties emerging from the same gene pool.
Long before Ford came on the scene, the Huxley clan was pushing evolutionary claims. Yet they never seemed to have bought on the E. B. Fords' theory. Mark one up for Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells for overlooking this part of the evolutionary puzzle.
Perhaps the best conclusion of all is that Darwin was right, it is survival of the fittest In the case of the moth, cross breeding is an easy answer, which means survival, but doesn't provide information on how a higher organism might come into being.
And in the case of man, Henry Ford left no descendants, he didn't favor female companionship, which certainly led to extinction of his germ pool.
Judith Hooper writes an interesting narrative, Of Moths and Men which provides a chronology of the events and the sociopaths who ignored truth in favor of political (at the educational level) gain.
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Judith Hooper, Of Moths and Men, Norton, 2002. Joe Wortham Home Page , About Joe Wortham , Directory
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