Why do Darwinists Despise Patrick Matthew? Part 1: the Case of W. T. Calman

Among a host of biologists, and other scientists, William Thomas Calman agreed that Matthew was the first into print with the hypothesis of natural selection  see:

• Calman, W. T. (1912) Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) The Journal of Botany. British and Foreign. pp. 193-194.
• Calman, W. T. (1912a) Patrick Matthew of Gourdiehill, Naturalist. British Association, Dundee Meeting, 1912. Handbook. David Winter and Son. Dundee. P.451-457. CLICK HERE TO READ.

Yet we see that in the same year that he gave Matthew some of his due credit in published print, in a private letter dated 1908, the zoologist W. T.  Calman provides ample evidence that he appeared to despise Matthew. Why?

The image of the letter below was kindly supplied by the Dempster Family Private Archive.

The letter was written by Calman.

Jim Dempster (1996) has written that it was addressed to Professor D'Arcy Thompson: 

As you can see Calman - a Scot from Dundee - refers to Matthew as a bore in his letter to his mentor Professor D'arcy. But why would he do so?

For one thing, Calman was working at the heart of the English scientific establishment at the time - in the Natural History Museum, London, where he worked as Assistant Curator of Crustacea and Pycnogonida and Keeper of Zoology.  To be elected to the Royal Society, which he was nine years later, in 1921, Calman had to fit in with the prejudices of the so-called scientific establishment. Consequently, no matter what the facts, Calman would in no small part have felt obliged to be seen to conform to the Darwin (FRS) bias-against Matthew.

 I discuss the context of Calman's words - and how they reflect the rules of the so-called "establishment" in my book Nullius in Verba (Sutton 2014) :

Specifically writing about the treatment of Chambers’ Vestiges, Secord so superbly explains why heresy was given the silent treatment in the first half of the nineteenth century that I am obliged to quote some of his excellent scholarship at length:

‘Science in these circles was embedded in codes of gentility, which meant that claims to legislate over nature were unlikely to succeed. As long as the gentlemen of science expressed their views in the appropriate manner, which often meant sticking to their experience except when speaking in confidence, they could believe what they wished on religious and political issues. By regulating their talk and expressing certainty only for specific “facts” in their specific “departments,” men of science could be both polite and authoritative at the same time – something that was not always easy to do. Beyond that, they were no more than ordinary participants in the conversation that defined polite society. The modest social origins of many men of science meant that silence was the most effective way of exercising authority. They spoke to larger issues where consensus already existed. …Neutrality was necessary if science’s claims to absolute truth were not to conflict with the demands of civility. To say more would have been inappropriate and boring.’

For his massive breach of etiquette, those same gentlemen of science saw Matthew as just such a bore; a fact revealed in Dempster’s indispensable book on Matthew (Dempster 1996. p.5):

‘For the British Association[1] meeting at Dundee in 1912 Calman, a deputy director of the Natural History Museum, was given the duty of presenting some facts about Patrick Matthew. Calman’s contribution is largely a translation from the German essay by May (1911). It is clear from a letter sent, prior to the meeting, to D’Arcy Thompson that Calman had little regard for Matthew who is referred to as ‘an old bore’.

In the first half of the 19^th century especially, men of science were looking to become respected and professionalised, looking to carve out a niche in society for their discipline. As Yeo (1984, p.9) explains:

‘…close relationship between science and general cultural debate, together with the insecure status of the scientific community, made the authority of science a significant issue. Scientists had to establish the domain of natural knowledge as their own, and monitor the boundaries between science and religion.’

For that same reason, the rules of the Royal Society stated that its members should discuss nothing about God or politics. And news that was unconnected to the business of philosophy should be avoided at all costs (Gleick 2010).

Calman - like others in the story of Matthew and Darwin - simply never "followed the data" as a good scientist should!

Clearly, Matthew’s book broke every rule in the Royal Society’s unwritten one! Those 19th century rules would most surely have clung on to men such as Calman in the first two decades of the 20th century. That context provides one  possible explanation for why Matthew was treated the way he was. It explains why no one stood up and pointed out Darwin's obvious lies about the proven pre-Origin readership of Matthew's original ideas. And it explains why no one - not Calman, nor any other before I -  did as all scientists should do, which is to follow the data. 

My original findings (see Sutton 2016) proved that seven naturalists - as opposed to none, as the world's leading Darwinists, Darwin himself, Sir Gavin de Beer ad Ernst Mayr claimed - read and cited Matthews ideas - including the (in actual fact) naturalist polymath John Loudon (who Darwin learned in published print at least by 1860 had reviewed Matthew's book in 1832 - noting its originality on the topic of what he actually referred to then as "the origin of species") to Edward Blyth - whose two highly influential papers on organic evolution were published in a journal of which Loudon was the Editor (see my latest peer reviewed paper: 'On Knowledge Contamination: New Data Challenges Claims of Darwin’s and Wallace’s Independent Conceptions of Matthew’s Prior-Published Hypothesis' for all the hard "New Evidence", on this topic. My paper provides further hard evidence, which was arrived at by simply "following the data": Sutton 2016).  

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[1] The British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Notably 

• D'arcy Wentworth Thompson (FRS) received the Gold Medal of the the Linnean Society in 1938 and was awarded the Royal Society's  Darwin Medal in 1946.
• William Thomas Calman (FRS) was President of the Linnean Society from 1934 to 1937. He was awarded the Linnean Medal in 1946