Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 8]

Wavertree 26.8.97

Dear Ian …

I am beginning to think that Darwinists are people who do not know much about Darwin’s writings. I wrote Ernst Mayr of Harvard (sent him a copy of the book as well) and asked him why he had used an essay by Kentwood Wells (see pages 162-69) rather than Darwin’s statement dealing with Patrick Matthew. He replied in a nice letter and admitted he had never seen Darwin’s statement. That essay of Kentwood Wells is now the received wisdom in England. Poor Norman Simmonds’ essay was turned down by the editor of Biologist because his essay did not conform to that of Kentwood Wells.

We can’t win.

Admittedly Mayr only took a few points from that essay (see page 168).

I have got together an essay on punctuated equilibrium which shows that neither Gould nor Eldredge are aware of what Darwin has in the Origin.

Natural Selection as an Algorithmic process is all the rage now together with self replicating genes! …

The concepts do not seem to me to take us much further in explaining the mystery of speciation or life itself.

 Best wishes,

 Jim

~~~

Notes and Comments by Mike Sutton

(Mayr 1982 The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance p.499):

'The person who has the soundest claim for priority in establishing a theory or evolution by natural selection is Patrick Matthew (1790-1874). He was a wealthy landowner in Scotland, very well read and well traveled (Wells 1974). His views on evolution and natural selection were published in a number of notes in an appendix to his work On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (1831). These notes have virtually no relation to the subject matter of the book, and it is therefore not surprising that neither Darwin nor any other biologist had ever encountered them until Matthew brought forward his claims in an article in 1860 in the Gardener's Chronicle.''

The Royal Society Darwin Medal winning Ernst Mayr was completely wrong, and easily discoverable to be so, when he wrote those words. Because naturalists are by definition biologists. And Matthew told Darwin - indeed told us all - of John Loudon's review of his ideas in the Gardener's Chronicle in 1860. And Loudon was a noted botanist - a naturalist - so by default a biologist.

The statement to which Dempster refers is most likely that by Darwin (1860) in the Gardeners Chronicle where he lied by writing the opposite to what Matthew had prior-informed him. The lie was that no naturalists had read Matthew's original ideas pre-1858. 

It is interesting that despite receiving a copy of Dempster's book, which revealed just how dishonest Darwin was, Mayr never corrected the palpable ignorant and pseudo-scholarly nonsense he had written about Matthew.

My recent article on this topic (Sutton 2016) - published in a peer-reviewed science journal - reveals Darwin's sly lying very clearly, step-by-step. The renowned Darwinist historian, John van Wyhe, resigned from the journal's Expert Advisory Board as soon as my article was published.

The article by Kentwood Wells is very ill informed, poorly researched, and contains errors of fact. It is beloved by Darwin scholars simply because it agrees with their mythology. My book, "Nullius" sets the record straight on Well's ludicrously poor scholarship and shameless "Darwin Lobby" anti-Matthew propagandising.

History will not be kind to biased career-Darwin scholars