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So far, you have seen how this tale was mythologized in order to produce evidence for evolution, and how unscientific methods were resorted to in order to influence the public. The industrial melanism in moths has nothing whatsoever to do with the thesis of evolution. Even if, for a moment, we ignore everything we have learned so far and accept Kettlewell's tale at face value, it will still be no more than a supposed proof of so-called evolution.
Dark-colored moths of the species Biston betularia already existed in England years before the Industrial Revolution; light-colored individuals represented the majority of the population, and dark individuals were in the minority. As a result of the Industrial Revolution's increasing air pollution, this ratio was reversed, and darker forms came to constitute the majority. Following the introduction of anti-pollution laws in the 1950s and the consequent reduction in air pollution, the proportions reversed again: Lighter-colored moths again came to represent the majority of the population, as they had before the Industrial Revolution.
Obviously, the change involved not the moths' color, but their numbers; and this cannot be postulated as proof of evolution. There have been light and dark B. betularia moths since observations began, some 200 years ago. Different-colored individuals interbreed with one another. The gene pool of this population has contained combinations belonging to different colors right from the outset. In other words, no genetic information developed as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and no new genes emerged. The Biston betularia moth has remained the same species, and there is no question of it turning into any other.
Clearly, nothing in this phenomenon can be described as an instance of evolution. In any case, some adherents of Darwinism do accept this truth. Harrison Matthews, the well known British biologist and evolutionist, says in his foreword to the 1971 edition of Darwin's The Origin of Species:
The [peppered moth] experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection—or survival of the fittest—in action, but they do not show evolution in progress; for however the populations may alter in their content of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain, from beginning to end, Biston betularia.323
In short, the different colors of this species are examples of genetic variation. Changing environmental conditions did not create new genetic information and new characteristics in the moths. Light-colored moths were indeed better adapted to clean environments and darker ones to environments with heavier pollution, but this constitutes no scientific evidence of natural selection.
Therefore, even if the moths' melanism were proved to be linked to natural selection in some way, this would still change nothing. All natural selection can do is weed out deformed or weak individuals within a population, or those unable to adapt to environmental conditions. Natural selection has no evolutionary power.324
Rather than accounting for evolution in the manner Darwin imagined, the phenomena of variation and natural selection represent a magnificent example of a protective principle foreseen by God, Who has created every type of living thing with systems to permit its survival. The organism's genetic system has a function that regulates its features within specific bounds, according to changes going on around it. Were that not so, the slightest change in factors such as climate or food sources could mean the end for that species.