The wise man mocks the mocker. The mocker mocks the man.

From the third edition of the Origin of Species onward Charles Darwin (1861) admitted that Patrick Matthew (1831) had published the full hypothesis of natural selection 27 years before he and Wallace (Darwin and Wallace 1858. Darwin 1859) replicated Matthew's original discovery (without citing Matthew).

Darwin wrote in his the historical sketch in the Origin (Darwin 1861):

" The differences of Mr. Matthew's view from mine are not of much importance: he seems to consider that the world was nearly depopulated at successive periods, and then re-stocked; and he gives, as an alternative, that new forms may be generated "without the presence of any mould or germ of former aggregates."

Here Darwin does two things. Both show us his enormously sly and mockingly disingenuous dishonest character, which he deployed to hoodwink his credulous deifying "Darwinist" groupies for 155 years. Firstly, knowing full well that he was promoting, at Matthew's expense, the then fashionable (but since thoroughly debunked - see Rampino) Uniformitarian principles promoted by his mentor Charles Lyel, that geological and meteorological catastrophic events never occurred, Darwin was slyly mocking Matthew by implying he was an ignorant and out of touch biblical (e.g. Noah's  flood) catastrophist. And secondly, Darwin implies that Matthew was muddled because he seemed to believe equally in both the process of natural selection leading to the origin of new species and the alternative possibility that a God did it all.

Here is what Matthew (1831, page 384) actually wrote:

Moreover, elsewhere in his 1831 book (In Note F of the Appendix) , Matthew makes it profoundly clear that he has just handed "God" his redundancy papers as an interfering creator of new and extinguisher of old species: 'We are therefore led to admit either of a repeated miraculous creation; or of a power of change, under a change of circumstances, to belong to living organized matter, or rather to the congeries of inferior life, which appears to form superior. The derangements and changes in organized existence, induced by a change of circumstance from the interference of man, affording us proof of the plastic quality of superior life, and the likelihood that circumstances have been very different in the different epochs, though steady in each tend strongly to heighten the probability of the latter theory. ' Darwin's deliberate and self-serving dishonest portrayal of Matthew as someone less scientific than himself is highlighted by how his own words are more supplicating to the notion of a miraculous "God" existing and first creating species than the man whose prior-published ideas he replicated and claimed as his own Darwin, p.525 The Origin of Species: 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.' Actually reading what Matthew wrote, as opposed to what Darwin mockingly implied, reveals the dishonest depths to which the great replicating, and hypocritical, wriggler burrowed in order to portray the true Originator, Matthew, as an unscientific crank, so that he, Darwin, could achieve priority over the true originator of the full hypothesis of natural selection.

Veracious historical analysis reveals, therefore, that an old saying has evolved into a new species. Namely: The wise man mocks the mocker. The mocker mocks the man.

On: The wisdom of mockery

The wise man mocks the mocker,
The mocker mocks the man,
The mocked man mocks the mocker,

Visit the Patrick Matthew website: PatrickMatthew.com for more information about the true biological father of the complete hypothesis of natural selection