Peppered Moths Re-examined | The Scientist

Peppered Moths Re-examined | The Scientist: To lay the matter to rest, a late evolutionary biologist from the University of Cambridge, Michael Majerus, carried out a 7-year study in a hamlet close to his home in Cambridge, England, the results of which were published yesterday (February 8) in Biology Letters.

“These data provide the most direct evidence yet to implicate camouflage and bird predation as the overriding explanation for the rise and fall of melanism in moths,” the authors wrote in the abstract.

According to Majerus, the controversy started back in the late 1990s, when Nature ran a review of his book Melanism: Evolution in Action suggesting that “the peppered moth case is fatally flawed as an example of Darwinian evolution,” he explained in a talk back in 2004. Newspapers and other media outlets picked up the review and further discredited the peppered moth story, providing fodder for evolution skeptics.

In Aperiomics R prey use deception, secrecy, camouflage, speed, faster breeding, etc to survive chaotically. Often this becomes a secretive war against Oy predators that use the same tactics, both sides innovate and mutate in these ways. In this aspect it would be more of a theory of  R revolution and oy counter revolution. Evolution occurs through randomness in horizontal levels of the evolutionary tree where a normal animal evolves with deviations from this being less successful. For these animals to understand this normality there needs to be less deception and more cooperation, the normal animals experience less competition because there develops a consensus among these animals of  what is a desirable characteristic that is to be protected and fine tuned.