Another Creationist Myth Bites the Dust
We’ve all heard about the peppered moths of England: how soot from the Industrial Revolution turned English trees dark, and how as a result, peppered moths went from being mostly light-colored to being mostly dark.
One argument in creationsts’ bag of misinformation is that peppered moths don’t rest on tree trunks. Therefore, a textbook that showed said moths resting on tree trunks, in order to illustrate camouflage, was fraudulent. Therefore, the original study was fraudulent as well. Therefore, the entire theory of evolution comes tumbling down. (AKA creationist claim CB601.1.)
So anyway, here’s a picture of a visitor to my back yard back in May:
Also, if these people are so upset at pedagogical inaccuracies in textbooks (or, as they might say, “lies”), why aren’t they up in arms over diagrams of the circulatory system that show blue blood? Or illustrations of the earth’s structure that show a gigantic wedge cut out of the planet, exposing the magma and core beneath?
Update: fixed link.
And damn, but the scale on that solar system pic is totally fucked up!
(I am, in fact, semi-serious about that: standard iconography fails to convey just how small all those bodies are, compared to the distances between them. Also, the relative sizes look wrong, as do the relative orbit radii. However, there isn’t much that can be done about it given the size limitations of the printed page)
Not to mention the limitations of the human eye. If you try to make a scale representation of the solar system that shows both the sun and Neptune (or worse, Pluto, ‘cos everyone loves Pluto), the rocky planets will be so small as to be invisible.
Of course, that’s what makes the Total Perspective Vortex such a horrifying device.