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Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society
Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society 54(1), 2000, 38
Melanism: Evolution in Action, by Michael E.N. Majerus. 1998. Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K. xiii + 388 pp. Available from the publisher. Hardcover, ISBN: 0-19-854983-0. $105.00; Paper, ISBN: 0-19-854982-2. $45.00.
I once served briefly as Book Review Editor of Evolution. That journal publishes more frequently than Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society (JLS), but also faces a much broader range of potential re-viewables—from textbooks and semi-popular works to systematic monographs covering all the kingdoms. I found the job uncomfortable. Most of the "major" works of interest to most readers of Evolution had long since been reviewed in the weekly journals Science and Nature, and were old news. Even the Quarterly Review of Biology often "beat" us, and Trends in Evolution and Ecology routinely did. We had to ourselves the specialty monographs that eleven of our readers would care about. What was the point of reviewing at all?
I raise the issue because Melanism: Evolution in Action has been out for two years, and it seems rather late to review it. But if ever a late review was justified, this is the one. Aside from the fact that the book may still be news to many readers of JLS, a late review cannot help but profit from the excesses of some of the early reviewers and the controversy they engendered. This is a book best viewed with 20-20 hindsight.
One of the first reviews appeared in Nature. It was by the brilliant population geneticist Jerry Coyne (1998, Not black and white, Nature 396: 35-36), who concluded that the classic tale of industrial melanism in the peppered moth, Biston betularia, was so tainted that it should be expunged from the textbooks. This review inspired a long, densely-argued counter-review by Bruce Grant (1999, Fine-tuning the peppered moth paradigm, Evolution 53: 980-984). Meanwhile, both the book and its notices had been picked up by creationists, who predictably used them as proof of the bankruptcy of neo-Darwinism. What Coyne treated as sloppiness on the part of H. B. D. Kettlewell, they denounced as fraud. Clearly, a close reading of the peppered moth part of this book is in order. [Plenty of people knew about problems with the Kettlewell story well before the book appeared. In the United States, Ted Sargent has been a consistent critic (see Sargent et al. 1998, The 'classical' explanation of industrial melanism, Evolutionary Biology 30: 299-322). In Europe, Kauri Mikkola had sounded the alarm in print as early as 1984; he and I had a conversation about this at the "Biology of Butterflies" meeting at the The Natural History Museum (London) in September 1981. For the creationists, the continued appearance of the story in texts after questions had been raised constitutes fraud.]
I should be "up front" with my own involvement in all this, since I work on butterflies and my bona fides to review the book are not obvious. In my salad days I collected moths too, and in 1964 published a paper on industrial melanism in eastern Pennsylvania (J. Res. Lepid. 3(1): 19-24). In 35-year retrospect this is a piece of rank juvenilia, but, as it happened, so astonishingly little on the phenomenon had been published in the United States that it was actually important. History moves in strange ways. There was to be a meeting on "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution" at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in April 1966. Kettlewell was coming and wanted to know about the local melanics. Charles Remington steered him to me. One of my professors got me a false credential to get me into the symposium—my first, and in many ways a turning point in my academic career. Kettlewell and I hit it off, and he invited me to come work for/with him at Oxford, which I did in the summer of 1969. The first half of the visit I was posted to the Orkney Islands to trap non-industrial
melanic Oak Eggars (Lasiocampa quercus). There weren't any. The second half I spent in KettlewelFs lab at Parks Road, except for time censusing the famous Cothill population of the Scarlet Tiger (Panaxia dominula—part of the 1969 data on p. 87 of Majerus' book are mine). So I got to know him, his methods and operation well. I have plenty of Kettlewell stories, some E.B. Ford stories, and a fond remembrance of Bernard Kettlewell as a friend, a mentor, and a fine specimen of an English type rapidly approaching extinction. He was an enthusiast, but not a fraud. His experimenta] designs were flawed—to the extent they were largely due to, or at least vetted by Ford, he must share any blame, but he was not a bungler. He did about as well as anyone could be expected to do in those days, and the important thing is that he did it. Nobody else did. And to our shame, no one did anything at all similar in America, despite ample opportunities.
If there is to be breast-beating, it should be by those of our profession who were content to coast on his work. The story was so pretty that there was little temptation to dig deeper. It could be understood easily by the layman, by school kids—what more was there to do or say? Creationists are sometimes outright intellectually dishonest, but perhaps their belief that natural selection rises or falls on the tale of the peppered moth is at least a little justified by how proud most of us were of that tale.
That said, I will not review the flaws in KettlewelFs work here; read the book. (By and large, I agree with Grant's review.) Most of the reviews have talked about the peppered moth and little or nothing else. But there is more to this book. It was explicitly intended as an update of Kettlewell's 1973 book The Evolution of Melanism: A Recurring Necessity (Clarendon Press, Oxford). This book, HBDK's magnum opus, is described on Majerus' book jacket as a "classic," but it wasn't. It was not a success because it ranged far beyond HBDK's competence: "melanism" covered altogether too many very different phenomena—it was, if you will, a polyphyletic concept. Majerus tries to cover this very broad field (both taxonomically and phenomenologically) and is at least marginally better at it. The effect of both books is to impress the reader that there is no overarching single explanation for "melanism," and that the industrial case, despite all its ambiguities, is probably the best-defined one. Perhaps that, after all, is the intended message. Understand that we know much more about industrial melanism than we know about the function of "melanism" in our own species, where it is charged with historical baggage and racial mythology and is so much more important. The human ease is the one conspicuous case that Majerus explicitly declines to analyze in any depth.
Specialists will find minor errors in the book (e.g., the reference to "Pieris protodice ssp. occidentalis" on p. 161, when Kingsolver and Wiernasz, who are referenced, gave the name correctly as P. occidentalis—it's generally Pontia now). These things are no big deal. The quality of the photographs is variable, and both the decision to have color plates at all and the selection of photographs to use in them are debatable—without them, the book might have been appreciably cheaper. Nonetheless, the book is absolutely required reading for evolutionary biologists, laypeople interested in evolution, melanism, or moths (and, in the tradition of E. B. Ford's books, Majerus gives a basic course in transmission genetics early on) and, interestingly, historians, philosophers and sociologists of science who study how science is actually done. Its bibliography alone is worth the price (at least of the paperback), even if it does omit my 1964 juvenilia. And Majerus does not libel Kettlewell, and I thank him for that.
Arthur M. Shapiro, Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616 USA.