Was evolutionary theory’s shining moment a fraud? From the Guardian:

In 1953, Bernard Kettlewell, ‘a loud, eager man’ who was invariably dressed in shorts and sandals, began an experiment that would transform the peppered moth into ‘evolution’s number one icon’. Camping in woods near Birmingham and sustained by a diet of gin and cigars, Kettlewell set out to prove that birds really did eat more pale moths in darkened, polluted woods. His results were striking. The black moths were twice as likely to survive in the polluted woods as lighter moths. It was one of those rare ‘eureka’ moments: Kettlewell’s experiment was what scientists had been waiting for, ‘living proof of Darwin’s theory of natural selection’.

In the 1970s, the American lepidopterist Ted Sargent highlighted serious problems with Kettlewell’s experiment. But no one wanted to know: his research was ignored by the scientific community and his career stymied. The peppered moth experiment was ‘sacred’; critics were ‘demonised’, their views dismissed as ‘heresy’. But the evidence grew and in 1998 a prominent biologist, reviewing it in Nature , said his shock at the extent of the doubts was like discovering as a child ‘that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas eve’.

In the immortal words of Lee Van Cleef, “If we can’t trust our lepidopterists, what’s left us?”

Or maybe it was Don Adams who said that.