Bernard Kettlewell
Henry David Bernard Kettlewell ( born February 24, 1907 in Howden, Yorkshire, England; † May 11, 1979 ) was a British geneticist and entomologist who dealt particularly with issues such as industrial melanism and ecological genetics, and above all a well-known lepidopterist was.
Life
Studies and professional activities
After attending Charterhouse School and a school in Paris Kettlewell studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge and completed his medical internship after 1929 at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. After 1935 began working as a country doctor in Cranleigh as well as an anesthetist at St Luke's Hospital in Guildford, he was employed during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 in the emergency service of the hospital in Woking.
After a stay abroad to research in South Africa from 1949 to 1952 he was 1952 employees of the Zoological Department of the University of Oxford, where in particular the Department of Genetics.
Research in the field of Industrial and critique of research
Among his most famous research exploring the industrial melanism of the peppered moth ( Biston betularia ) belonged to the early 1950s. This type of the order of the butterflies develops a dark color in areas where industry and cause a dense population to air pollution by carbon. In his research, he took the value of this dark coloring for the survival of this species in industrial regions, in contrast to the original bright coloring in rural areas, resulting in the efficacy of natural selection has been shown because of an evolutionary process.
Especially after his death, the criticism grew this research. In 1998, Michael Majerus, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, pointed out that these experiments were not convincing proof of the natural processes that had led to a shift in the ratio of light to dark individuals: The ecological relationships are ( the lodging places of the moths ) does not sufficiently observed and been promoted inappropriately by an oversupply of moths that prey behavior of the birds.
Majerus ' critique of Kettlewell's approach was sharpened in 2002 by a journalist in a popular science book: You threw Kettlewell scientific fraud. The evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne ( University of Chicago) dismissed the insinuation in the journal Nature while back immediately, but Majerus ' professional criticism and the popular science book by creationists as evidence for a major evolutionary dizziness was used.
Publications
- Your book of butterflies and moths, 1963
- The evolution of melanism, 1973
Bibliographies
- Una McGovern (Ed.): Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Chambers, Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2, p 848