More on William James Dempster

A very useful brief biography of Jim Dempster Here (archived here)

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 7]

Wavertree 17.2.97

Dear Ian

Thank you very much for all the information you have sent me.

….

I have been in a long correspondence with a retired prof. of genetics N W Simmonds, … He is also a PM fan. I helped him write a brief biography for the Biologist; he is a fellow of the Institute. That journal occasionally publish about some distinguished people who have been pushed off the scientific stage. So there is a brief biography of PM awaiting approval for publication. Perhaps he might go to Dundee for the Robert Smith meeting. Who was Robert Smith?

Errol Jones wrote to say she was expecting Min to visit her. I also received the documents you got and which I now return. I sent copies of the books to people recommended by Errol. If all PM’s family had been as loyal one would have much more information about PM.

I am sending you a short essay I got together for my data file on Punctuated Equilibrium. Darwin comes out quite well because Gould and Eldredge, like most academic Darwinists, have no idea about what is in the Origin of Species. All the same I support punctuated equilibrium which is old hat.

 I am also sending you evidence how dishonest Gould can be. I sent him detailed documents about PM but see what he has written. Is dishonest too strong a word?

I mention in my book that Lamarck has been written out of English text books. 1942 Julian Huxley’s Evolution the Modern Synthesis. No mention of Lamarck. Cuvier gets half a sentence. The evidence is that Darwin was a covert Larmarckian and that is why he refused to give his sources in every edition of the Origin. After Lyell’s strong letter to Darwin in 1863 Darwin became a bit more honest as I have indicated in the essay. It is not Darwin’s fault entirely that PM was written out of English text books.

Some time before Christmas an American phoned – W G McCutchin. He had noticed the advert in the New Scientist and bought a copy of the book. Very interested in PM and spent two long phone calls talking about him and the book. He wanted a copy of Naval Timber so I sent him my photocopy. He has now gone back to the States and I have not heard form him since. I hope I hear form him again. Errol Jones sent me her copy of Naval Timber which I photocopied and returned her copy.

So that is the briefing up to date. I feel very guilty encroaching on your time but very grateful for all your kind assistance. Best wishes to all.

Jim

PS I am really worried about Iain Robb. He was a great distributor of the 1st edition and I would like to send him some copies of the 2nd. Would he be in the telephone directory?

Notes and Comments by Mike Sutton

Norman (N.W.) Simmonds was a very well liked botanist, plant breeder and geneticist who was particularly well known for his expert work on bananas.  His biography is here.

Errol Jones is Matthews great granddaughter. She is part of the New Zealand branch of the family. Her book "Shadows on my Wall" provides much family oral history and photographs about Matthew and his sons. 

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 5]

Wavertree 8.11.95

 Dear Ian …

I have finished correcting the final proofs. The indexing is a tedious job. One has to be so accurate otherwise the critics spot is deficiencies. The book is 360 pages long.

There is a crisis in Darwinism caused by the fact that he would have nothing to do with catastrophes and mass extinction. Since there has been great interest in the catastrophe of 70 million years ago that destroyed the dinosaurs catastrophes are back. They never went away so far as PM was concerned. It was, however, scientifically incorrect at the time and Darwin delivered the coup de grâce, “he seems to consider the world was nearly depopulated on successive occasions and then restocked”. That is what it is all about today. The Americans who have resurrected the catastrophe business are ignorant of the fact that PM has it down in black and white!

…

All the best and regards to Min Hunter

Sincerely,

Jim

Notes and Commentary by Mike Sutton

In this fifth letter from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie (one of the three trustees for the Patrick Matthew Trust) Ian is informed that the final drafts are completed of Jim's second book on the story of Matthew and Darwin and the discovery of natural selection  Dempster (1996)" Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century: Natural selection and Patrick Matthew". The production of the book was substantially funded by the Patrick Mathew Trust. This book was vanity published because Dempster was unable to find a professional publishing house willing to publish a book on Matthew (I experienced the exact same difficulty when I tried. Fortunately, the new American publishing house ThinkerMedia published my book on Matthew and Darwin as an e-book, but they were not around in Dempster's time). All of the funds for the Patrick Matthew trust came from the estate of John Matthew, the last living direct Scottish descendant of Patrick Matthew to bear the surname.

John Matthew was the last surviving direct descendant of Patrick Matthew
in Scotland to bear the surname Matthew

Notes supplied by Ian Hardie on the Patrick Matthew Trust

• Ian Hardie together with Min Hunter were the two principal trustees of the Patrick Matthew Trust backed by a third being a solicitor from the Edinburgh law firm Robson McLean.
• The second Jim Dempster book was “substantially funded” by the Patrick Matthew Trust
• All of the funds for the PM Trust came from the Estate of John Matthew.
• Ian Hardie and Min Hunter were jointly appointed as co-executors of the John Matthew estate
• Ian Hardie approached Dempster.  Ian does not  recall Jim Dempster ever writing to Min Hunter.
• The PM Trust was formed sometime after first contact / discussion with Jim Dempster – once it was determined that with financial help Jim Dempster was possibly persuadable to write the second book.

Dempster's first book
on Matthew

Ian Hardie was appointed to assist in the execution of John's estate. Ian has informed me in writing recently that among John's papers they found Dempster's first book (Dempster 1983) on Matthew - "Patrick Matthew and Natural Selection". With it were original letters from Darwin to Matthew, the contents of which were not then in the public domain. Dempster's first publisher went bankrupt shortly after publication of this, his first book on this topic, (details here). Realising what they had stumbled upon,  Ian Hardie approached Jim Dempster to see if the executors of John's will, might commission him to re-visit the topic of the discovery of natural selection in a second book. Once Dempster appeared possibly willing, they set up The Patrick Matthew Trust. At one point - as chapter drafts were presented to them to show progress -  Ian Hardie and Min Hunter sought to advise Jim against being too critically confrontational, because they wanted the facts to be fully embraced by "The Darwin Lobby"  (see my notes on an earlier letter - here), but Jim was having none of that - so they backed-off and gave him free academic rein.

John Matthew and Min Hunter

In this fifth letter to Ian Hardie, Jim Dempster again makes it clear that he has identified that Matthew got extinction events right in his original conception of macroevolution by natural selection and that Darwin (being a Lyell loyal uniformitarian) got it completely wrong and mocked Matthew in his "Historical Sketch" in the Origin of Species (from the third edition of 1861 onwards), implying Matthew was some kind of biblical flood believing crank, because at the time Matthew's view was not "the majority view" held by scientists. Dempster notes that the Americans are aware that meteorological events appear to explain species extinctions, but that they are unaware of Matthew's earlier work on the topic. See my notes on Letter No. 2 regarding Dempster being way ahead of the American Professor Rampino on this issue (here).

Dempster's second book on Matthew,

This book that was substantially funded by the Patrick Mathew Trust. 

The funds of the Trust, coming from the estate of 

John Matthew, establishes a neat line of enabling descent from 

Patrick Matthew to Jim Dempster's book about him. 

John Matthew's House in Scotland

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ian Hardie and Min Hunter for having the imagination, ethical wherewithal, intellectual curiosity and forward-thinking gumption to approach Jim Dempster to write a second book on Matthew and Darwin.  Dempster's  first book was very good, but it wasn't detailed enough to enable me to grasp the field adequately to understand and appreciate the significance and nuanced context of my own discoveries about the pre-1859 -readership of Matthew's book.  I absolutely needed that second Dempster book in order to know how and what I needed to know in order to write my own (Sutton 2104) to build upon existing knowledge.


Further Photographs of Robert Matthew, who was John Matthew's father

Robert Matthew the lower left picture is dated 1925

Seeing Further with William James Dempster: Pioneering Surgeon, Leading Scientist and Researcher in the Field of the World's Greatest Science Fraud

On William James – W.J. – ‘Jim’ Dempster: Pioneer Surgeon, World Leading Research Scientist and Genuinely Great Skeptical Scientific Scholar on the Origin of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Jim DempsterAttribution

Dempster's Three Excellent Books on The History of the Discovery of Natural Selection

Thinker Media IncUsed only with express written permission

Nullius in Verba

With the hi-tech discovery in 2014 of a wealth of new data, Jim Dempster's ground-breaking work is taken further in my book to argue two things (1) Patrick Matthew can now be the only independent discoverer of natural selection (2) Darwin and Wallace plagiarised Matthew and committed the world's greatest science fraud.Click here to find out more.

On Dempster

William James Dempster, known to his friends and associates as Jim, died aged 92 years in 2008.

The name W.J. Dempster has gone down in the annals of both the history of transplant surgery and the history of the discovery of natural selection.

Born on the island of Ibo, north of Madagascar, on 15 March 1918, Dempster was a pioneer kidney transplant surgeon and researcher (Reader) at Queen Mary’s Hospital, London.

William James Dempster

Soon after initial breakthrough success in Boston USA, transplant surgery progress started in the UK. The first deceased donor transplant was unsuccessfully performed in the UK in 1955, at St Marys Hospital by Charles Rob (1913-2001) and Jim Dempster (See Joekes, et al 1957   ). At that time, it was Dempster who led the World in detailed research in kidney transplant surgery (see Dempster 1957; Hamilton 2012, p.195). Hopewell (2009) wrote of Dempster:

‘His contribution to the nature of the rejection reaction in canine renal allografts can rightly be called unique. He published more than a 100 reviews and papers on the subject between 1951 and 1957, gaining him worldwide recognition as a pioneer. His macro- and microscopic observations confirmed that rejection was an example of immune response, mediated by serum antibodies.’

Most people have heard of Dr Christian Barnard - who is acclaimed with performing the world's first heart transplant - but few of Dempster. That is a travesty because all of Bernard's supposedly successful transplant forays failed (see Grant 2007, p. 5), exactly as Dempster warned. Dempster knew that the science of tissue rejection was not yet ready. 

In addition to his leading scholarship in human organ transplant surgery, following decades of research, Dempster unearthed many examples of Charles Darwin’s poor scholarship, lack of integrity and unwarranted, yet self-serving, denigration of Patrick Matthew - the little known true originator of the theory of natural selection.

Dempster (1996), was not anti-Darwinism because he totally accepted the veracity of the theory of natural selection as the best explanation for organic life forms. However, despite never coming right out and saying so in print, he appears to have been quite convinced that Darwin had, despite his own claims to the contrary, read Matthew’s (1831) prior publication of his unique discovery of natural selection. Moreover, Dempster finally concluded that evolutionary biologists were suppressing many facts about the origin of the Origin of Species (Dempster 2005, p. 10):

‘The suppression of the work of Patrick Matthew since 1831 raises doubts about the so-called intellectual integrity of many scientists.’

In the acknowledgements section of his 2005 ‘The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins’, a book that Dempster seemingly had no choice but to vanity publish with the Book Guild, it is most telling that such an admired, highly published in the leading science journals, pioneering researcher of international reputation, and highly praised skillful surgeon, such as Dempster felt the need to thank vanity publishers for: ‘…their cooperation and courage in publishing a book with a more balanced appreciation of Charles Darwin’.

© Soula Dempster. All rights reserved.Used only with express written permission

Jim Dempster and his wife Cherry. Picture taken in mid 1960's. Dempster in his mid-40's.

In the introduction to that excellent book, Dempster wrote so honestly and forcefully of the Darwinist-led ‘Patrick Matthew Burial Project’, that it is not difficult to see why the innumerable evolutionary biologists, who sit, effectively, as biased gatekeepers of the orthodox scientific press on the subject of evolution, engaged in petty, cowardly and devious brute censorship of his important findings and rational fact-based conclusions, that we can see clues regarding what might have led Dempster to resort to the use and then praise of vanity publishers; acts that might otherwise be disingenuously portrayed as pathetic. Dempster (2005, p. 1) wrote:

‘The twentieth century not only introduced the new ideas of Einstein and his colleagues to the attention of an awed public, but also an old subject – natural selection – was, at last, accepted by most of the influential biologists, 100 years after Patrick Matthew introduced the principle in 1831. Not only was natural selection accepted, but also Charles Darwin was ‘reinstated’ in the 1940’s, while Patrick Matthew was marginalised. Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr and several other distinguished biologists were responsible for this turn of affairs. What these biologists were now determined to do was to establish Charles Darwin as the only important initiator of evolution by natural selection. From 1942, when Julian Huxley published “Evolution, The Modern Synthesis”, the glorification of Darwin to the exclusion of everybody else began.’

In his 2005 book, knocking to pieces the fragile mythology spun around one great plaster saint of Darwinism, Dempster who had contracted malaria as a child, wrote that he thought it ludicrous that Alfred Russel Wallace had the impudence to claim that he had discovered the process of natural selection while suffering from the same incredibly serious illness (see Dempster 2005 ). Dempster’s first-hand experience of the ravages of malaria on his own then fevered brain, knew better. And he knew better from both research and experience, than to credulously believe the daft knowledge gap filling mythology of Darwinists that a trinity of amazingly ‘independent discovery’ of natural selection had been made first by Matthew (1831), who prominently published it, and then by Wallace (1855) and Darwin (1837, 1842, 1844,1858, 1859) who miraculously conceived the exact same idea, same name for it, and same explanatory examples of it, because they failed to read the one book in the world that others had read but not told them about.

For the most part the Darwinists sought to bury Dempster in oblivion by way of the silent treatment, but on rare occasion Dempster’s books did attract scorn from Darwinists. One particular scholar of the history of science reveals his own bias in a laughable example of desperate muddled thinking and failure to understand the importance of questing for veracity in history:

Bowler (1983 p.158):

‘One writer has even gone so far as to hail Matthew as the originator of the modern evolution theory (Dempster 1996). Such efforts to denigrate Darwin misunderstand the whole point of the history of science: Matthew did suggest a basic idea of selection, but he did nothing to develop it; and he published it in an appendix to a book on the raising of trees for ship building. No one took him seriously, and he played no role in the emergence of Darwinism. Simple priority is not enough to earn a thinker a place in the history of science: one has to develop the idea and convince others of its value to make a real contribution. Darwin’s notebooks confirm that he drew no inspiration from Matthew or any of the other alleged precursors.’

For my own part, ignoring Bowler’s dreadful bulldogging dysology, inspired and greatly tutored by Dempster’s published research, my research efforts revealed (Sutton 2014) that Matthew did indeed influence three naturalists (Loudon, Selby and Chambers) who first cited Matthew’s 1831 book and then went on to most significantly influence and facilitate both Wallace’s and Darwin’s published work on natural selection.

Like Matthew and Darwin, Dempster studied at Edinburgh University. Of the three, only Dempster graduated. Matthew left, aged 17 to run his deceased father’s estate, business interests and orchards, and Darwin left, supposedly because he disliked anatomy classes, but also under a cloud of condemnation, after unethically presenting a paper on his furtive researches into his tutor’s unpublished discoveries. Darwin went on to take up a new degree course at Cambridge.

Dempster’s keen scientific scepticism was no doubt fuelled in part by his research work in the 1950’s, alongside Sir Arthur Keith, the famous anatomist and anthropologist who was involved in vouchsafing the remains of Piltdown Man as genuine. For some, that great error is enough to implicate him as a suspect in the great Piltdown Man science fraud.

Whilst I claim that Darwin and Wallace committed the World’s greatest science fraud, I suspect that some will argue that the Piltdown Man hoax remains the title holder. And that means that Dempster was, in one way or another, quite closely associated with what are arguably the two greatest science frauds of all time (see Info.com 2014).

The Piltdown Man is a counterfeit combination of a pre-historic fossilized modern-man human skull and fossilized ape-like jaw discovered in an English gravel pit in Sussex in 1912. An anonymous hoaxer had cleverly combined an ape jaw with skull fragments of a modern man. The effect was to create the impression that modern humans may have branched from a common ancestor and developed a larger brain before becoming more humanoid. The Piltdown skull was the only such example of its kind. All other specimens that had been discovered suggested increased brain size followed other evolutionary development towards modern human appearance. In other words, apart from the Piltdown fossil, earlier human ancestors were found to have smaller craniums and smaller and more delicate human jawbones. The 'missing link' fraud was so good that scientists argued over the veracity and meaning of the skull for some 40 years. The teeth in the ape jaw had been filed to give them the appearance of a human wear pattern. In the end, chemical investigations in the 1950s at last proved that the cranium and jaw were of different ages.

Dempster’s mentor, Keith (1886 – 1955) studied medicine at Marrischal College, Aberdeen where, among his achievements as an anatomist, he was awarded a copy of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. Between 1928 and 1955 Keith wrote the introduction to various printings of the Origin.

As well as being a renowned anatomist and anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith was also Director of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. We might guess that Sir Arthur nurtured Dempster’s (2005) interest in the venerable John Hunter, since it was Sir Arthur Keith who set up the experimental Buxton Browne Farm to emulate the philosophy and scientific practice behind Hunter’s famous botanical research establishment at Earls Court (Dempster et al 1963). And it was on Buxton Browne Farm that Dempster played a major role in pioneering transplant research (Hopewell 2014):

‘W.J. Dempster had trained in Edinburgh medical school, where he was a contemporary of (Professor Dame) Sheila Sherlock. On leaving the RAF after the war he sought further surgical training, as did so many of his contemporaries. Sheila, now working at Hammersmith, suggested he apply there. He did so successfully, and Prof. Ian Aird set him the task of investigating the fate of canine renal allografts, which later he wryly described as the worst job in the hospital. His animal work was carried out at the Buckston Browne Farm, the animal laboratory of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and he published over a hundred papers and reviews between 1953 and 1977. These included observations on the histological features of the rejection reaction; confirmation that it was an immune response mediated by serum antibodies; demonstration of the effect of irradiation; tolerance; the graft versus host reaction, and graft preservation. His work brought him worldwide recognition among fellow workers in the field although his contributions tend to have been overlooked, partly as the result of his warning against clinical transplantation just as it was due to take off.’

And:

‘…Jim Dempster’s warning against clinical transplantation in the late 1950s was justified. I say no more than that he had a feeling that the stage was not yet set for safe transplantation, and in that view he was correct, before the introduction of maintenance dialysis and chemotherapy for rejection. It was not until these provisions were met that patient survival from transplantation could be regarded as completely acceptable.’

Most intriguingly, Dempster, the professional scientific skeptic, had connections to Darwin that go deeper than his youthful association with Arthur Keith. Because, during the late 1940’s he spent six months at ‘Downe’, Charles’s Darwin’s house, which is today a shrine to Darwin, in the village of Downe in Bromley, Kent, at the time it was owned by the Royal college of Surgeons. Joekes (1997) explains why:

‘In 1948-9, I remember having lunch with one of the surgical assistants of the Chair of the Pathology unit there, James Dempster, with Ian Aird who was the Professor of Surgery. At that stage there were some rumors that somebody in South America, and I can't remember who it was, was treating people with acute renal failure by implanting on their radial arteries an ox kidney. And Ian Aird said to me, "Now why aren't we doing that?" And I said to him, "Well nothing at the moment would persuade me to have a foreign kidney put into my circulation. If I was bleeding, if I had acute nephritis, which was not my idea of how to set about it."

"Well," he said, "Why don't you and James go down to Downe and solve this problem? I'll give you 6 months," he said. "Go down and solve the problem of transplantation.

…Downe House was Charles Darwin's house, where he lived for many years before he died, and this had been bought by the Royal College of Surgeons and it had as a member one of these surgical urologists who was extremely crafty at passing a catheter on all the gentlemen with obstruction. And he made a large sum of money from this, which he gave to the College with a view that it should be altered to, Downe House and made a research laboratory....

….We started looking at what was considered to be the only way to getting a transplanted kidney - in the neck. We published a paper showing that these kidneys didn't work normally. There had been some previous work in the mid 30's in which somebody had tied a non-elastic ligature around the ureter, partially obstructing it and the kidney behaved, so far as you could interpret the older data, exactly the same way these kidneys in the neck. So we decided that the right thing to do was to implant the kidney, not in the neck with the ureter coming to the outside and stenosing, but it should be put into the iliac fossa with the ureter implanted into the bladder so you wouldn’t run up against this stenotic problem of the ureter. This proved to be so and this kidney, these kidneys worked perfectly normally. And it was largely James Dempster's really beautiful surgical techniques that made all this work possible. I was really there only looking after the functional and electrolytic point of view to see what was happening. We wrote two papers on this. One on the neck kidney, and then the kidney in the RIF [right iliac fossa] and tried to publish it in this country, but none of the journals would accept it. They said that transplantation was not for the likes of us, and that kidney transplantation was not I think, as I suggested, not quite… British. So we had to send it to the Acta Medica Scandinavica where the papers were published eventually. I think a lot of people thought for a time that this work was being done in Scandinavia.’

It seems this was not to be the only time that Dempster’s ground-breaking research would be rejected. because so too, apparently, were Dempster’s three ground breaking books (Dempster 1983; 1996, 2005), on the topic of Matthew’s discovery of natural selection. Dempster's important books, it seems, were destined to be shelved unless vanity-published.

Paul Harris Publishing, the company that published his first book on Matthew went in receivership two years later (Glasgow herald 1985). Eleven years later Dempster (1996) re-published, with the much maligned vanity publisher ‘Pentland Press’ what was essentially the same book, quite expanded, clarified and edited to remove some of the unnecessary repetition of the first. This seminal work is the world’s first and most comprehensive account of Matthew’s (1831) work. Unfortunately, Pentland Press also collapsed with unpaid debts in 2002 (see Mirror 2002).

Dempster’s (1996), ‘Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century’ is essential reading for anyone interested in seeing further than the fallacious pens of biased Darwinists who, never having read a word of Matthew’s original book, insist on parroting Darwin’s snaky lie that Matthew merely buried his ideas in one or two scattered passages in the book’s Appendix, when in fact Darwin knew full well - not least because Matthew informed him and Darwin admitted as much to his friend Joseph Hooker - that Matthew’s (1831) ideas on natural selection run throughout the entire book. By way of just three fact-based examples, it is in the main body of his book that Matthew uniquely named his breakthrough the 'natural process of selection', it is where he used the analogy of artificial selection as a heuristic device to explain natural selection, and it is where he called upon naturalists to conduct experiment to test his hypothesis.

What Dempster failed to discover, however, in all three of his books on the topic, is that Darwin (1859) uniquely four word shuffled the unique term that Matthew (1831) coined in the main body of On Naval Timber and Arboriculture to name his great discovery.

As said, Matthew named his breakthrough the ‘natural process of selection’. That fact is most important, because Darwin, who deployed the self-serving Appendix Myth, used the same four words to coin their only grammatically correct equivalent: the ‘process of natural selection’.

Darwin (1859) used that shuffled term – nine times in the Origin of Species, where he repeatedly referred to 'natural selection' as "my theory". Then, only a year later, he claimed to have had no prior-knowledge of the Matthew's book (see Sutton 2014) or the unique ideas within it. Small wonder Darwin was so keen to spread his Appendix Myth. Once Matthew went into the press in 1860 in the Gardener's Chronicle to lay claim to his misappropriated discovery, Darwin must have feared exposure if too many people were to read in detail anything other than the appendix to Matthew's book. (see Sutton 2014).

Dempster (1985) reasoned with a multitude of his own evidence that Matthew should be hailed as the true discoverer of natural selection, simply because he most certainly did more than merely enunciate it, he worked it out and published it in detail as a complex and fully comprehensive law of nature. Moreover, Matthew got it right and Darwin wrong when it came to comprehending the impact of geological disasters on species extinction and emergence. Yet, from the third edition of the Origin onwards, Darwin (1861), a follower of Lyell’s erroneous uniformitarianism, jumped at the chance to denigrate Matthew by referring to him as a catastrophist. Dempster (1996) made this injustice abundantly clear, but if you can find a Darwinist, or any other biologist, admitting as much and citing Dempster then you've found one more than I have. Punctuated equilibrium – essentially Matthew’s discovery - is accepted science today but, as Dempster (1996; 2005) noted, its Darwinist purveyors sought to keep the originator of that theory buried in footnote oblivion. Rampino (2011) explains some of the detail.

Dempster wrote that there is no need to accuse Darwin of plagiarising the work of Patrick Matthew because it is already well established that he acted badly in not citing his influencers in the first edition and other editions of the Origin of Species (Dempster, 1983 p. 64):

‘Patrick Matthew and Robert Chambers carried out their great tasks single- handed. Without the help on the one hand of his great wealth and on the other of Hooker, Lyell, Lubbock, Blyth, Wallace and many others, it is doubtful whether Darwin, single-handed, could have avoided making a botch of his theory or even whether he could have, had the Origin published. Even so, in spite of all the outside help, he retreated more and more towards Lamarckism.

There is no need to charge Darwin with plagiarism. His scholarship and integrity were at fault in not providing all his references in the Origin: he had after 1859 another twenty years in which to do so. What one can say is that denigration of Patrick Matthew was unwarrantable and inexcusable.’

But if those last three sentences do not, in fact, say that Darwin had seen Matthew’s work, replicated it, and then perpetrated a long-running science fraud by never admitting he had prior-knowledge of Matthew’s discovery, what do they say?

However, as Dempster made clear, Matthew also accepted at face value, in print at least, Darwin’s excuse that he had arrived at the theory independently. Consequently, despite Dempster’s able championing of Matthew, Darwinists retained their solution to the problem of Matthew’s prior discovery by affixing him with their mutually approved status of obscure curiosity. Refusing to give the originator of natural selection his due credit for discovering it – no matter how good and complete his hypothesis - Darwinists stuck to their guns – in the teeth of Dempster’s superb scholarship - by claiming that there was no evidence that Matthew had influenced a single person with his discovery.

Filling in the knowledge gaps as to what really happened to Matthew’s ideas between their publication in 1831 and Wallace’s, (1855), Darwin’s and Wallace’s (1858) and Darwin’s (1859) replication, Darwinists simply parroted Darwin’s Appendix Myth, Scattered Passages Myth and Mere Enunciation Myth as plausible devices to enable them to accept Darwin’s fallacious tale that Matthew’s ideas went unread by natural scientists until Matthew drew Darwin’s attention to them in 1860.

All three of the above myths are uniquely bust in my own BestThinking article (Sutton 2014), which, incidentally, was flat rejected, without a word of reason, by the Journal for the History of Biology within 24 hours of it being submitted. Here then is a little circumstantial evidence, which might just possibly explain why Dempster’s superb scholarship on the story of the origin of Darwin’s Origin of Species had to be vanity published. Because it seems, in light of the evidence, possible that evolutionary biologists perhaps wish to play no part in the release of (a) unique and new hard-evidence discoveries that Darwin told deliberate self-serving lies about the location, depth, extent and early publication publicity surrounding Matthew’s explanation of his discovery (b) that Darwin created deliberate myths about Matthew in order to achieve primacy over the Originator, (c) the fact that Darwinists have for over a century been credulously parroting those same myths, rather than investigating Darwin's incredible claims of 'independent' discovery, and, most importantly of all, (d) the unique and new bombshell discovery that - contrary to current 'knowledge' Matthew actually did influence Darwin and Wallace via three prominent naturalists who cited Matthew's book pre-Origin and then went on to significantly influence and facilitate Darwin and Wallace in their published work on natural selection.

Following the flat refusal of the Journal for the History of Biology to even so much as send my ground-breaking article out for peer review, and following the refusal of dozens of mainstream scientific text book publishers to publish my forthcoming book on Matthew's newly discovered 100 per cent proven, verifiable, influence on Darwin and Wallace, without the BestThnking site, without 'PatrickMatthew.com   ', and without various other websites and blogs that I publish, you would not now know that Robert Chambers - author of the hugely influential 'Vestiges of Creation' - and friend, correspondent and geological collaborator with Darwin - cited Matthew’s book in 1832, that Darwin's Royal Society colleague and co-committee member Prideaux John Selby (friend of Darwin's father) - cited Matthew’s book many times pre-Origin, commented on his natural selection notion of ‘power of occupancy', and then went on to edit and publish Wallace's (1855) Sarawak paper on evolution, and that John Loudon (1832) reviewed Matthew's book, commented upon its originality on the very topic of what he called 'the origin of species' and then edited and published Blyth's hugely influential, pre-Origin papers on natural selection – Blyth being Darwin’s most prolific informant on the subject of species and varieties (see Sutton 2014).

Why in the world would the scientific press, which is controlled on the precise topic of natural selection by known expert Darwinists - not wish to publish such a irrefutable, verifiable in the literature, bombshell of a discovery? Surely my manuscripts hailing this breakthrough in knowledge were not both flat rejected because they contain new and unique discoveries that blast to smithereens 154 years worth of Darwinian-led knowledge gap-filling mythology? It appears so - otherwise my arm should have, most surely, been taken off to the shoulder by objective scientists wishing to reveal this valuable brand-new and unique information that turns on its head, with hard facts, current rhetorical Darwinist explanations for the origin of Darwin's Origin of Species. And, by association, it seems rather likely that, having experienced self-serving Darwinian brute censorship, that the respected scientist Jim Dempster was forced to resort to the vanity press as the only way to publish his superbly informative scientific books in an age before platform-levelling e-books took off.

In his third book on Matthew, Dempster (2005) told some of the story of the naturalist John Hunter, but that book is really little more than a vehicle to once again explain just how much original material Matthew (1832) wrote on the subject of organic evolution. In it, Dempster explains how Matthew improved on the ideas of Buffon, Curvier, Lamarck and Decondolle.

One can only assume that, to their eternal shame, multiple rejections from mainstream publishers – too dim to properly assess important, sound and groundbreaking scholarship – or else too afraid to publish the heresy of a Darwin critic – meant that Dempster’s (2005) final book, published just four years before his death, was vanity published with the Book Guild. It’s a crying shame too that only after Dempster's death did biologists such as Dawkins (2010) and Bowler (2013), respectively, cite and treat more fairly Dempster’s classic ground-breaking work on Matthew's unique contribution to knowledge.

Dempster’s informed reasoning that Matthew should be duly recognised and celebrated as an immortal great of science, with full priority over Darwin and Wallace, is now confirmed by the newly disproven arguments of leading Darwinists such as Mayr (1982), Gould (2002), Shermer (2002), Hamilton (2001) and, most recently, Dawkins (2010). Because their biased Matthew denial opinions have their roots in Darwin’s, newly debunked, self-serving myths and lies (see Sutton 2014).

Most crucially, Dempster’s stalwart scholarship and excellent books on Matthew’s significant contribution to knowledge played a priceless role in helping me to finally set the historical record straight by proving that Darwin and Wallace were enormously influenced by Matthew’s prior-discovery of the natural process of selection before each replicated it while claiming to have discovered it independently.

By so by ably championing Matthew, against all odds, Dempster's stalwart scholarship rescues those who read it from the unquestioning mythical stories told by Darwinists desperate to keep their namesake from veracious scholarly dissection.

As Matthew (1831, p. vii) so presciently wrote:

'...the man who pursues science for its own sake, and not for the pride of possession, will feel more gratitude towards the surgeon, who dislodges a cataract from the mind's eye, than towards the one who repairs the defect of the bodily organ.'

Today, we can, if we so choose, read Dempster in light of the newly discovered facts about what really happened to the ideas in Matthew's book pre-Origin (Sutton 2014). By so doing , we can at last see further than the end of Darwin's fallacious pen, and further than the lingering Victorian smog of faux-skepticism born of adoring Darwinist propaganda. Thanks to the work of a great pioneering surgeon, a truly great and original skeptical scientist, and thanks to Google's amazing library of 30 million+ searchable publications, we finally know the truth about the origin of Darwin's replication of Matthew's bombshell discovery.

Dempster's little-known books paved the way to the 2014 discovery of the real, shamefully fraudulent, origin of Darwin's Origin of Species. 'Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret' is dedicated to the man I never met beyond his written words   . It begins:

'This book is dedicated to the scholarship of the pioneering surgeon, transplant scientist and organic evolution expert William James Dempster, without whose three superb seminal books I would not have known either how or where to begin. I read each through twice before starting and a third time before ending. Soon I will read them again.

Dr. Mike Sutton April 24th, 2014'.

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Sutton, M. (2014) Internet Dating with Darwin: New Discovery that Darwin and Wallace were Influenced by Matthew's Prior-Discovery. BestThinking.com: http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/biology_and_nature/genetics_and_molecular_biology/internet-dating-with-darwin-new-discovery-that-darwin-and-wallace-were-influenced-by-matthew-s-prior-discovery

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