Of Moths and Men is a book by journalist Judith Hooper about the Oxford University ecological genetics school led by E.B. Ford. The book specifically concerns Bernard Kettlewell's experiments on the peppered moth which were intended as experimental validation of evolution. She highlights supposed problems with the methodology of Kettlewell's experiments and suggests that these issues could invalidate the results obtained, ignoring or disparaging evidence supporting natural selection while repeatedly implying that Kettlewell and his colleagues committed fraud or made careless errors.<!-- but severely criticised in scientific publications.
The historian of biology David Rudge has carefully reexamined the records upon which Hooper's argument is based. He concluded that her historical research had been poor, and that she had shown fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of science.
Writing in Nature in 2002, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne attacked Hooper's "flimsy conspiracy theory [of] ambitious scientists who will ignore the truth for the sake of fame and recognition [by which] she unfairly smears a brilliant naturalist".
In Science, Bruce S. Grant, also writing in 2002, critically summarised the book's content. In his view it had failed to distinguish evidence (showing that natural selection occurs) from mechanism (how it operates). He stated that there was an enormous amount of evidence for "changes in allele frequency in peppered moth populations" for which natural selection was the only explanation.
The geneticist Bryan Clarke, who had worked alongside Bernard Kettlewell at Oxford, described Hooper's book as "a treasury of insinuations worthy of an unscrupulous newspaper".
The entomologist and expert on peppered moth evolution Michael Majerus described the book as "littered with errors, misrepresentations, misinterpretations and falsehoods". He spent the last 7 years of his life on research, systematically refuting Hooper's claims. Much of the work was published posthumously, the data being reviewed by a team of evolutionary biologists, leading to a vindication of Kettlewell's findings, the re-establishment of his reputation, and the restoration of the peppered moth as an exemplar of Darwinian evolution.