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The Modern 's Factory System

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At the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘modern’ factory system appeared in England (More, 2014). The effects of the system were so quickly felt that it has been compared to a revolution. Few revolutions, however, have had such sweeping consequences as the Industrial Revolution – smokestacks, steam engines, capitalism and even, natural selection.
The advent of the Industrial Revolution saw a number of habitats blackened by industrial soot, as well as changes in animal populations. In particular, in the nineteenth century, British collectors and professional biologists alike recognized changes in the wing colouration of moths – with the darker forms, or melanics, becoming more frequent. This came to be known as the evolutionary phenomenon of Industrial Melanism and has since received a great deal of interest, particularly as it is commonly thought to be an excellent example of natural selection in action.
This idea was first presented by Ford (1940) , who hypothesised that melanism might arise in a population as a result of a mutation and, in polluted areas, was adaptive. As such, individuals with melanism gained a selective, cryptic advantage and so, through natural selection, melanics rapidly spread throughout the population, and typical forms declined.
In 1952, Henry Kettlewell was awarded a fellowship to research Industrial Melanism with Ford (Hagen, 1993), and, while a number of other examples of Industrial Melanism had been identified (Kettlewell H. B., The

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