On the Attractions of Corporate Darwinist Pseudo Scholarship versus Veracity: We should perhaps seek to understand more and condemn less

The main aim of this short essay is to pose the telling question: "Why is it that Darwin's newly discovered greatest secret is a 100 per cent proven fact that career-Darwinists are so embarrassingly desperate to deny?"

I will begin with a truism that some of my critics, perhaps in their gang-rush to condemn, don't seem able to grasp as such. Namely, that what is published in the literature in books, websites and scholarly science journals, such as this one you are reading, is effectively 100 per cent proven to exist. If you doubt the truth of that in some philosophical sense, let us do a very simple experiment. Place your hand over this paragraph and then remove it. Do this 100 times. Write down how many time out of 100 the word proven remains in this sentence.

The above point was proven even more humorously, and with great irony when Mr Julian Derry, a self-proclaimed "visiting scientist" at Edinburgh University, author of a book on Darwin, and professional bronze Darwin monkey statue seller, who wrote from his Edinburgh University email address to the Scottish press, and to several of my friends and associates, (see Sutton 2016a) to claim:

 “Darwin and Wallace did not plagiarise Matthew, and were not tipped off to his discovery of natural selection by their circle of friends and colleagues. Or rather, if any of this did occur, it has not been shown to have done so by the data presented by Dr Sutton.

“Why I say this, like this, carefully and cautiously, is because as a scientist, I must be confident beyond any reasonable doubt that the data and its interpretation do prove that these events happened as claimed. This is quite a different philosophy to the one underlying Dr Sutton’s research.

“I have never heard a scientist in any discipline use the kind of language that he does to criticise others and qualify his findings, for example, “100% certainty”. Every scientist I know worth their salt doesn’t even have the phrase in their vocabulary.”

Apart from the fact that in his rush to bury disturbing the facts, Mr Derry misunderstands that the existence of the 100 per cent proven new discovery of several possible routes of knowledge contamination from Matthew to Darwin and Wallace does not mean that I claim it is 100 per cent proven that Darwin or Wallace were directly or indirectly influenced by Matthew, his own publications in social media very ironically further refute his claims. Because when it comes to the language scientists use to criticise others it is further 100 per cent proven by his published tweet, embedded in the Patrick Matthew blogsite, that his obscene language reveals how little salt he is probably worth to a respectable scientific community (see Sutton 2016a):

"Look here you supercilious cunt, I told you who I was immediately. Stuff ur haughty "Wasn't  that hard for you was it?" up ur arse."

There are other future historic classic examples of such rabid unscientific language used deployed in passionate Darwinist responses to the hard facts that painfully prove Darwin lied about who he knew had read Matthew's book. In response to the peer reviewed publication of my (Sutton 2014a) criminology paper "The hi-tech detection of Darwin’s and Wallace’s possible science fraud: Big data criminology re-writes the history of contested discovery."  Social media was once again used to abuse my work, this time with another, lesser taboo "c" word, when Professor Nathaniel Comfort (see Sutton 2015a), a science historian of John Hopkins University published the following New Year's day 2015  comment to the world:

"The paper's an ignorant piece of crap."

Why are Darwin scholars in such a desperate rush to deny that anything new has been discovered when the facts prove it so clearly has?

My book 'Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret' (Sutton 2014) originally revealed the main bombshell discovery from my research that, as opposed to the prior-knowledge belief (e.g de Beer, Mayr) that no naturalists, no biologists, no one at all, read the original ideas in it before Darwin and Wallace replicated them, that seven naturalists in fact did read Matthew's ideas because it is 200 per cent proven they actually cited his book in the published literature pre-1858; and that Darwin knew four of them personally, Wallace one and that three played major roles at the epicentre and facilitation of their work on natural selection. Furthermore, my book originally revealed that it is 100 per cent proven that Darwin (1860) lied when he wrote that no naturalists and (Darwin 1861) no one at all read Matthew's original ideas before Matthew brought them to his attention in 1860, because Matthew (1860) had prior informed him that at least two naturalists had read them.

My  new discovery  of the proven pre-1858 readership by naturalists of Matthew's original ideas was reported in the national press and also in the national press of the United Kingdom (Knapton 2014). When invited to comment upon the new discovery in my book that other naturalists, known to Darwin and Wallace, in fact had read Matthew's original ideas before 1858, the world renowned Darwnist biographer Professor James Moore, responded with the confident creation of a new Darwinist fallacy, formed from nought but unevidenced wishful thinking, which is currently published on the Patrick Matthew page of Wikipedia -  without even bothering himself to check the facts by reading the book containing them:

“I would be extremely surprised if there was any new evidence had not been already seen and interpreted in the opposite way.”

As a social scientist I find all of this desperate Darwinist behaviour quite fascinating. But how might we explain it?

Moore's fallacious dismissal (Cohen 2001, p.31) of the facts being anything new might - depending on his state of mind and intentions - be described as (a) 'a psychotic negation of manifest facts'; (b) a 'plugging of leaks' in the orthodox story by lying (Cohen 2001, p.31) (c) a refusal (state of denial by dually knowing and not knowing) refusal to believe it or an inability to 'take it in' (Cohen 2001, p.24.) because, if true, the facts seriously threaten his sense of personal and professional cultural identity.

My findings were published in this journal (Sutton 2016) , where - citing my book heavily - I took the implications of these discoveries forward with a dynamic typology of 'knowledge contamination' in order to develop our understanding of Darwin's and Wallace's culpability, along with that of their associates William Hooker, Joseph Hooker and John Lindley.

That article was informally commissioned by Grzegorz Malec, who invited me to write an article for peer review on the original findings in my book for submission to this journal. I sent the first draft to him personally on Sunday 15th November 2015. He wrote back to confirm receipt the following day. I am concerned, therefore that he wrote a review of my book that ignores its main findings regarding who we now know cited Matthews book pre 1858 and what they then went on to do, and instead presented my less important findings on who was apparently first to be second in print with apparently unique Matthewisms as its main findings. But even in that regard Mr Malec appears to been able to find only one out of the 30 tentative examples I found can be currently re-butted. I am most grateful for his excellent rebutting in this one regard, It shall most certainly be attributed to him in the second edition of my book. I know Malec has been trying hard to find others; although oddly he fails to mention that fact in his review. Instead, he, arguably, somewhat gives the impression that there are others that have been rebutted. Perhaps there are others he knows of? But if there are, he has not told us of them. How do I know Mr Malec has been working hard trying to find others besides the one out of 30 that he finally found? Because he contacted me, revealing inadvertantly, a mistake he made in thinking he had rebutted the fact originally reported in my book that, contrary to the Kentwood Wells's (1973) mockery of Loren Eiseley's etymological research on Matthew, all the evidence so far from my BigData hi-tech search among over 35 million publications suggests, most surprisingly, that Patrick Matthew does, in fact, at least appear to have coined the term and basic concept of the Peace Corps and that John F.Kennedy's policy wonks could well have got it by way of knowledge contamination during thie interviews with missionaries. What Mr Malec fails to add for balance in his criticism of my book can be found instead in the comments section of one of my blog posts (Sutton 2013), where writing in 2015 under what he later admitted by way of email is his pseudonym "GZEMAL" , he admits that Matthew does appear to be first to have coined the term and originated the basic concept of the modern US Peace Corps. So why not - for balance - add that into his review to let readers know that despite his mere rubbishing rhetoric that the facts show that the "first to be second hypothesis" is far from debunked. 

If Mr Malec can disconfirm more than just the one out of 30 examples in my book, on this theme, I have asked him to let us know. I even set up a competition to encourage others to disconfirm this troublesome hypothesis (Sutton 2016b).But even if all 30 examples are disconfirmed that does not do what Mr Malec thinks disconfirming just one example out of 30 does. Debunking the first to be second hypothesis would not mean "There is no Darwin's greatest Secret", despite what the dreadfully disingenuous title of Mr Malec's review of my book proclaims, because Darwin's greatest secret is the main theme of my book, which the same as the main theme of my (Sutton 2016) article in this journal. To necessarily repeat the point already made. Darwin's greatest secret is that it is newly 100 per cent proven that: 

Surpassing the failure of traditional Darwin scholar rubber thimble paper turning in the libraries of the world, the cutting edge high technology of the Google library project, of some 35 million searchable publications, enabled me to originally discover facts that 100 per cent  prove Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace fallaciously claimed that no one read Matthew's prior-published discovery and explanatory examples of natural selection before they replicated both. And the "New Facts" 100 per cent prove it, because the proof is in the previously undiscovered 19th century printed words in publications that absolutely prove Matthew's book, and the original ideas in it, were cited by influential naturalists known both to them and their influencers, before they replicated those same ideas - claiming they alighted upon them independently of Matthew's prior publication of the same. Darwin would  later fallaciously excuse himself from 1860 onward by claiming those ideas were unread before he and Wallace replicated them. Darwin is 100 per cent proven to have lied in that regard, because he wrote that lie after Matthew had informed him of two influential naturalists who read and understood his original ideas, and their significance, and that his book had been banned, because of those same bombshell ideas, by Perth Public Library in Scotland. 

In social media I have been accused of being a conspiracy theorist. I don't think I am. Indeed, if I was such a person, I think the easiest one to dream-up would be a tale that involved imaginings of a "Don't tell Darwin or Wallace" plan to explain why four people, who Darwin knew personally, and one who edited Wallace's Sarawak paper, who knew Darwin to be working on the problem of the origin of species, had read the one book in the world that they most needed to read, because it contained the full prior-published hypothesi of macroevolution by natural selection, but failed to tell them about it.

More rationally, I think the contrast between Neil deGrasse Tyson's definition of a conspiracy theory and Stanley Cohen's sociological 'state of denial' is a particularly useful way to assess the importance of what solid and independently verifiable evidence we do have. On April 7th 2011, Neil deGrasse Tyson published on Twitter a fabulously simple definition of conspiracy theories: 'Conspiracy theorists are those who claim coverups whenever insufficient data exists to support what they're sure is true.' 

By contrast, it is not strictly speaking an actual conspiracy of silence when a number of people, even millions as in Nazi Germany, and later in Chile and Argentina, and worldwide a few thousand Darwin Scholars today, see hard and independently verifiable evidence but choose not to engage with it. 

Cohen (2011, p. 1) tells us: 'A sociological "state of denial" exists when sufficient evidence is presented but dismissed: '...because the information registers well enough, but its implications - cognitive, emotional or moral - are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.
Moreover, Stanley Cohen. explains how we can determine culpability in states of denial:
'Except in the most obscure cases, we can reconstruct enough to determine who could have known, must have known or should have known what.' (Cohen 2011, p.126).


Avoiding the scholarly necessity to at least engage objectively with the facts of what has been newly discovered about the routes of knowledge contamination between Matthew and Darwin, the editors and peer reviewers of the Linnean Journal allowed Mike Weale (2015) to summarily dismiss them by writing simply that in his own mere opinion the evidence is weak that Matthew influenced Darwin. This is an example of how the corporate Darwin Industry misleads the pubic by hiding away from them the facts that Career Darwinists dare not face.

In 1860 Darwin lied about routes of prior knowledge contamination from the original ideas he replicated. Ever since, ambitiously credulous, blind-sighted Darwin Scholars have carved out lucrative careers and been rewarded, for example, by the Royal Society with Darwin Medals, for dressing-up those lies and presenting them as facts (see Sutton 2016).

Corporate Darwinism 

Just as the McDonald's hamburger chain insists that a junk-food burger and fries in any of their restaurants in Poland tastes exactly the same as in any England the similarly punterizing McDarwinisation of the history of discovery of natural selection seemingly insists that any book or article, or indeed any book review, containing a Mattthew and Darwin sandwich must do the same. 

Any ingredients (facts) that change the flavor of the tradition junk science are thereby rejected by the managers' (Darwin scholars) in the quality control department (editorial boards and expert peer reviewers). Any restaurants (journals) refusing to comply will be abandoned by managers (Darwin scholars) afraid for their careers. On which note, it cannot pass unremarked that the esteemed Darwinist historian Dr John van Wyhe either left the advisory board of this journal - Philosophical Aspects of Origin - as soon as my fact-led peer-reviewed article on Darwin's lying glory stealing science fraud (Sutton 2016) was published, or else it was an unfortunate coincidence. Wherever the truth lies, the journal, immediately after Dr van Wyhe's resignation, the Journal's editor Dariusz Sagan made the following statement to the Scottish press, via an email to the Journalist Michael Alexander of The Courier:

'It is true that Dr. John van Wyhe was the member of the Advisory Board of our journal and resigned from it shortly after Dr. Mike Sutton’s article had been published. However, he didn’t reveal his reasons. Obviously, Dr. van Wyhe was entitled to resign from the board at any point and we respect his decision. We are not especially eager to speculate on the topic of his resignation, but, of course, one of the possibilities is that it was related to the publication of the controversial article of Dr. Sutton. We had not explicitly stated earlier our editorial policy, as we believed it was clear to anyone who looked into the broad range of the articles published in the journal. As things stand now, our editorial policy has been published on our website in order to avoid misunderstanding.


Whether he intended it or not, by resigning from the journal's expert advisory board after its publication van Wyhe has effectively distanced himself from involvement with the uncomfortable facts in my article, which t make it an unwanted  different flavour from those sold by any journal that wishes to remain within in the MacDarwin Corporation of the so called  "Darwin Industry".

There are important messages here for those starting out in and wishing to remain in careers associated with biology and the history of discovery of natural selection. I can think of no other science journal than 'Philosophical Aspects of Origin', which would be prepared to publish the fact that Darwin lied about the pre-1858 readership of Matthew's ideas. Sending factual torpedoes to sink the myths keeping the Darwin industry armada of books, articles and associated memorabilia afloat is likely to get one labelled as an unwelcome, unprofitable, troublemaker. Relatedly, on the topic of the New Corporate Universities, it has been noted that:

 " Pandering to the intellectual tastes and preferences of journal editors may be the most effective means of career advancement, which rewards conformity rather than originality." West (2016)

I have been presented with many criticisms and asked many telling questions by Darwin scholars since the 2014 publication of my original discovery of the 'New Data' about who we now newly know really did read Matthew's ideas before 1858, because they cited his 1831 book in the literature. However, it has been more than 12 months since I have encountered any that are new. A long list of these criticisms, and associated questions and answers can be found on the PatrickMatthew.com on the 'Darwinist Defences Rebutted page (see Sutton 2015).

On which note, please note further that, in his review of my book, Mr Malec raises no original arguments against the New Data. Unfortunately this fact is not particularly discernable from the opinions he presents as his own criticisms in his review. By way of just one example that Malec makes a meal of, regarding earlier published criticisms of the work of he historian of science Loren Eiseley which is raised at length in my book with reference to the Darwin scholars, Gould and Wells, who first made them, But in his one-sided Corporate Darwin Industry flavoured cherry picking on this topic, Malec fails to provide the objective balance that I aim for when I present the actual research evidence, which absence of evidence in his best effort hatchet-job review suggests, none have yet been able to refute, that exposes Gould's (1983; 2002) confident assertions as a ludicrous "Frankfurtian bullshitting" etymological fallacy of his own when he claimed the term 'natural selection' was common currency in the literature credulously parroted by Darwin scholars since. Moreover, in keeping with such MacDarwinist scholarship

I have been asked many questions about my research by critics. A list of all the questions asked so far and all the criticisms raised so far

References

de Beer, G. (1962) “The Wilkins Lecture: The Origins of Darwin’s Ideas on Evolution and Natural Selection”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 155, no. 960, pp. 321-338

deGrasse Tyson, N. (2011) Twitter: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/56010861382336513


Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial.  Polity. Cambridge.

Gould, S. J (1983) Unorthodoxies in the First Formulation of Natural Selection. Evolution, Volume 37. No. 4.July.

Gould, S. J. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Harvard. Harvard University Press.

Knapton, S. (2014) Did Charles Darwin 'borrow' the theory of natural
selection? The Telegraph, 28 May. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10859281/Did-Charles-Darwin-borrow-the-theory-of-natural-selection.html



Mayr, E, (1982), The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 499.


Sutton, M. (2013) Good Grief! In 1839, A Remarkable Scotsman Appears to have Invented the Peace Corps - Not President Kennedy or any of his Associates.  
Dysology and Criminology: The Blog of Mike Sutton : https://www.bestthinking.com/thinkers/science/social_sciences/sociology/mike-sutton?tab=blog&blogpostid=21581

Sutton, M. (2014) Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret, Cary, NC. Thinker Books. Thinker Media Inc. 
Sutton, M. (2014a) "The hi-tech detection of Darwin’s and Wallace’s possible science fraud: Big data criminology re-writes the history of contested discovery.". Papers of the British Criminology Conference.  Vol. 14: 49-64 Panel Paper. pp. 1-16.

Sutton, M. (2015) Hard Facts and Rational Argument. Darwinist Defences Rebutted page. Patrick Matthew.com http://patrickmatthew.com/Darwinist%20Defences%20Examined.html

Sutton, M. (2015a) A Cordial and Gentlemanly Invitation to the Darwinist Assistant Prof. Nathaniel Comfort to Rationally Explain Himself. Dysology and Criminology, the blog of Mike Sutton. Best Thinking. https://www.bestthinking.com/thinkers/science/social_sciences/sociology/mike-sutton?tab=blog&blogpostid=22582

Sutton, M. (2016) On Knowledge Contamination: New Data Challenges Claims of Darwin’s and Wallace’s Independent Conceptions of Matthew’s Prior-Published
Hypothesis. Philosophical Aspects of Origin 2015, vol. 12. http://www.nauka-a-religia.uz.zgora.pl/images/FAG/2015.t.12/art.05.pdf


Sutton, M. (2016a) On Knowledge Contamination. March 21st. The Patrick Matthew Blogspot: http://patrickmathew.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/on-knowledge-contamination.html

Sutton,M.(2016b) Errors and Updates. Patrick Matthew.com  http://patrickmatthew.com/errata%2C%20errors%20and%20updates.html

Wells, K. D. (1973) The Historical Context of Natural Selection. The Case of Patrick Matthew. Journal of History of Biology. Vol. 6. No. 2. pp. 225-258.
West, D. (2016)  The Managerial University: A failed experiment. Demos. http://www.demosproject.net/the-managerial-university-a-failed-experiment/