Filling in the knowledge gaps with myths about the discovery of natural selection

According to my dentist, over the past year I have been excessively grinding my teeth more than usual. I know what the cause is, it’s that darn Darwin’s science fraud.

The problem is that I have spent the last 12 months or so sitting for hours on end, day in and day out, concentrating so hard on my research that I've been wearing my teeth out with my formidable overbite.

Humans are not supposed to sit for up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, sifting through 19th century published data about what naturalists really did with the knowledge in Patrick Matthew’s (1831) discovery of natural selection throughout the 27 years before Saint Wallace’s and Saint Darwin’s miraculous independent conception and replication of it. Moreover, its only been in the past 13,000 years or so that modern humans have developed an overbite that allows us to grind our teeth to pieces. Overbites such as mine appear to have occurred, at least in part, as consequence of our modern diet (See Gibbons 2012   ).

Consequently, a scan and series of x-rays of my root canal filing reveal that it has gone horribly wrong and needs to be re-done. I was called back in to see my dentist yesterday, because the x-ray showed that there is a piece of metal in the root canal filling, which really should not be there. The dentist wanted to be sure, because if metal was in the root then my tooth could probably not be saved. Two more doses of radiation later and the problem was solved. The modern low-dose radiation x-ray, being unable to penetrate the root canal filling material, could not produce an image and so the software had just made the data up with its own version of what was in there.

In effect, I had a mythical piece of metal in the root canal filling that the modern x-ray machine and its program had made up in order to fill a ‘knowledge gap’. Another x-ray at a higher radioactive dose of potentially DNA damaging radiation filled in the image of my tooth root with real data – there is no metal in the root canal filling.

It seems that some scientists no more like knowledge gaps than modern x-ray machines. Filling in the knowledge gap with myths about what naturalists really did with Matthew’s prior discovery is exactly what scientists, who otherwise promote themselves as great and objective scientists, have been doing for years. Consider the following from Richard Dawkins (2010, p.107):

‘I singled out Darwin and Wallace as the two nineteenth-century naturalists who independently solved the riddle of life. But claims of priority have been made on behalf of at least two other nineteenth-century writers, Patrick Matthew and Edward Blyth. If those claims are upheld, it should be a matter of some national pride that all four independent discoverers of natural selection were British.'

What Dawkins does, as you can observe, is to reinforce the existing myth of Blyth, Darwin and Wallace all independently discovering natural selection years after it was first discovered and then fully explained by Matthew in 1831, who in that year published it with major Edinburgh and London publishers. To do otherwise than perpetuate existing myths about those so called 'independent' discoverers, Dawkins would have to admit that there is a knowledge gap about whether or not Matthew's prior-publication influenced Blyth, Darwin and Wallace. Incidentally, because Darwin and Wallace claimed to have had zero prior knowledge of Matthew’s discovery (see Sutton 2014), admitting such a knowledge gap would be tantamount to serous Darwinian heresy of the kind to have your multi-million pound best selling Darwinian science career well and truly halted.

This year, that knowledge gap has been somewhat, if not completely, filled. The discovery of new data means we now know for sure that neither Blyth’s, Wallace’s nor Darwin’s published work on evolution were ‘independent discoveries’, because all three men were most definitely influenced, pre-1858, by other naturalists who cited Matthew’s (1831) book (see Sutton 2014).

Filling in knowledge gaps with myths is not a benign exercise. I received an otherwise unnecessary extra dose of radiation yesterday due to this phenomenon. And for the past 155 years the myths of Darwin’s and Wallace’s immaculate conception and replication of natural selection has robbed Patrick Matthew and Scotland of the rightful celebration and scholarship of the works, ideas and understanding of the process of discovery of a genuine immortal great thinker of science. Worse, knowledge-gap-filling myth-making has created an embarrassing Darwin industry that has produced millions of books, worldwide, that are riddled with pseudo-scholarly mythical history-of-biology claptrap.

I'm hoping that my root canal filling can be fixed. So too, I hope, can the history of science. Surely, now that we at last have new solid data about what did happen to Matthew’s ideas between 1831 and 1858, it’s time to re-write the history books by taking out the myths that Darwinists have used to fill in the knowledge gaps. Perhaps then I will stop grinding my teeth so much. There again I can feel my jaw clenching as I wonder what the solution is to the problem of powerful interest groups dominating all areas of scholarship so that dysology    thrives. I think I'm going to need to invest in one of those ridiculous bite guards.

References

Dawkins, R. 2010. Darwin’s Five Bridges: The Way to Natural Selection. In Bryson, B. (ed.)Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. London Harper Collins.

Gibbons, A (2012). An Evolutionary Theory of Dentistry. WWW.ScienceMag.org   

Matthew, P. 1831. On Naval Timber and Arboriculture: With a critical note on authors who have recently treated the subject of planting. Edinburgh. Adam Black. London. Longman and Co

Sutton, M. (2014) Internet Dating with Darwin: New Discovery that Darwin and Wallace were Influenced by Matthew's Prior-Discovery. Best Thinking.com.

NOTE: 
This blog post was first published on Best Thinking on 1 April 2014