PLEASE NOTE Copyright for the images on this blog post belongs to Soula Dempster (all UK, USA and international rights reserved).
W. J. - (William James) "Jim" Dempster wrote three books on the history of discovery of natural selection. You can read more about his life and work in science, medicine and surgery here.
The subject of this blog post is Dempster's unpublished draft paper, in the form of an 11 page essay entitled: "The Consequences of Punctuated Equilibrium" . The paper bears no date, However, it was definitely written after the 1996 publication of his second book on Matthew (Dempster, W. J 1996 Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh. The Pentland Press. Because it references that book.
The essay appears to be a possible draft forerunner to Chapter 6, which is called The Consequences of Punctuated Equilibria, of Dempster's third book on the topic of the history of the discovery of natural selection: Dempster, W. J. (2005) The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins. Sussex. Book Guild Publishing.' Alternatively, it may be a later - "improved" - version of the same. Consequently, at the time of writing, we have no idea whether this paper was intended for publication as a paper or book chapter, or merely written as a private essay. However, it is described as an "article" in Dempster's letter 5 to Ian Hardie in the "Wavertree Letters" on this blogsite.
Readers should bear in mind that what they are looking at when reading the scanned pages of Dempster's essay is that the work may have been "in progress", for private circulation among peers for comments, or else merely intended for private scholarship purposes. The fact that the last sentence of the first of two pages attached to this essay says: "Now read chapter 7 of my book" suggests that Dempster's text in this blog post is an expanded version of his 2005 published Chapter 6. Moreover, unlike the 2005 Chapter Six, from which it appears to have evolved, this essay refers to "Darwinists", which is not a tone that is characteristic of Dempster's published work, Furthermore, it harshly notes the bias and ignorance of Darwinists about Matthew's and Darwin's work in this precise area. Most importantly, Dempster's essay deals with the fact that Darwin (1859), but not Matthew (1831), included and embraced the notion of a "creator" at work in the natural process of selection. I am delighted to learn that Dempster noted this fact - ignored by Biased Darwin scholars - because it is one that I emphasise in my book (Sutton 2014).
The following two typed pages were attached to the draft article.
- Dempster's Unpublished Essay -
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