It is very important for biology to get beyond, especially in the teaching of it, of the peppered moth and finches. By reading Provine biography of Sewall Wright one can get the impression why it is that these two taxa are not merely the exemplar that Mayr asserts is foreign to his own grown biological thought but the very reason that molecular approaches continue to fall on organcist's deaf ears.
It is still the case that the departments may be divided into 60s schooled organim centered biologists and some shools such as UCF in Orlando Fla are housed mostly with the "older" type of biologist to which crowd my grandfather could also be classed even if his firefly student Jim Loyd would not or rather would in the face of the newer grad students of protenomics and genomics post-Kimura.
The point that binds both the moth and bird here is, adaptation. On the one hand Lack and Mayr agreed to not disagree or simply were not concerned enough with the variation in these birds with respect to what is acutally (as far as any one could know)adapative and non-adaptive and though the moth work is largely even read as targeted to disprove drift even in the sense admitted in some Russian BIOlogy it could more profitably be writ again more narrowly and for the betterment of both disseminating biological change and not the growth of biological thought in terms of the specific question that Fisher posed to Wright about if he had "overlooked" something adaptive in Wrights agreement in certain limited cases with respect to NUMBERS in population genetics. Fisher eventually came to belive that he had not and only went so far as to tell Wright that he was completely "wrong" while Wright maintained till the end. It seems only a theortical development that can handles both taxagenies is needed to bring the teaching up to the social reality that the non-biologist experiences with respect to creation and evolution and thus making the learning experience more meaninful but at least on Provine's history he could not seperate the exportation of Japanese science with the difference of plants and animals which need not show its face in this more limited discussion abstractly on the the shifting of a curve to line up points under a common mutation rate whether a little too slow or a little too fast.
My own feeling then is that the molecular level is even MORE and not less ambiguous than the whole organism one but is even more practical because any social baggage is even more terminated from the discussion. I could not do this with Provine even in extending the reasoning to electric fish plain and simple. So also some change in the the teachers and not the biology is also called for for the learners whether general biology class participants or majors.
In conclusion pracitcality is not the measure of acutal truth in this subject which was for me more strictly "natural history".
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