English countryside Quote by David Mills

““Let's look at one more quick example of modern evolution at work. In the early 1800s, light-colored lichens covered many of the trees in the English countryside. The peppered moth was a light-colored insect that blended in unnoticeably with the lichens. Predators had great difficulty distinguishing the peppered moth from its background environment, so the moths easily survived and reproduced. Then the Industrial Revolution came to the English country- side. Coal-burning factories turned the lichens a sooty black. The light-colored peppered moth became clearly visible. Most of them were eaten. But because of genetic variation and mutation, a few peppered moths displayed a slightly darker color. These darker moths were better able to blend in with the sooty lichens, and so lived to produce other darker-colored moths. In little over a hun- dred years, successive generations of peppered moths evolved from almost completely white to completely black. Natural selec- tion, rather than "random accident," guided the moth's evolution- ary progress.””

— David Mills