Gavin de Beer was wrong

Gavin de Beer

Sir Gavin de Beer (FRS) wrote in the Wilkins Lecture for the Royal Society (de Beer 1962 on page 333):

 "...William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew were predecessors who had actually published the principle of natural selection in obscure places where their works remained completely unnoticed until Darwin and Wallace reawakened interest in the subject.'

 What the expert Royal Society member Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer, British evolutionary embryologist, Director of the British Museum (Natural History), President of the Linnean Society, and receiver of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal for his studies on evolution never knew - that I have uniquely discovered (see Nullius in Verba) - is that at least 25 people actually cited Matthew's (1831) book before Darwin's and Wallace's papers, which replicated Matthew's original ideas and explanatory examples, were read before the Linnean Society in 1858, seven of them were naturalists, four known to Darwin and two to Wallace. Royal Society Darwin Medal

 So where's my Darwin Medal for being proven a better scholar than de Beer on his own subject? Perhaps the Royal Society needs to improve the quality of its membership and medal winners? Linnean society too. The pseudo-scholarly Darwin glee-club shame of it!

 Visit PatrickMatthew.com to learn the truth about the discovery of natural selection.

Why Darwinists Missed the World's Most Powerful Analogy

Building a little upon the extensive work of Jim Dempster, I summarized in my book “Nullius” what Patrick Matthew originally contributed to knowledge in 1831. I wrote:

Matthew

‘Matthew originated the concept of Natural Selection in 1831 to explain the emergence and extinction of species between and after geological catastrophic events. He uniquely named it “the natural process of selection”, which he described as a fundamental law of nature. He discussed divergence in terms of diverging ramifications, the mutability of species, rejected miraculous birth of new species following catastrophes, held to a steady state in nature interrupted by catastrophes, understood the importance of the complex multi-level phenomenon of power of occupancy and ecological niches, rejected simple development from nearly-allied species in favour of descent from common ancestor, recognized what constituted a species, recognized the difference between domestic and wild species and saw artificial selection as the key to both discovering and explaining the process of natural selection.’

The last 16 words of the last sentence are rather important.

Dr Mike Weale of Kings College London    and I have spent some considerable time debating amicably whether or not (and if so – to what degree) Matthew’s various comparisons of artificial selection (in terms of humans cognitively breeding by way of selective breeding – animals and plants under protective culture to suit their own needs) with natural selection (the ‘natural process of selection’ in the wild where the most circumstance suited varieties are selected by nature to survive in the wild) is an analogy. The debate was settled on 14th April 2015 on the Patrick Matthew Project.   

Essentially, it was agreed that there are actually two main artificial and natural selection analogies that were used in the 19th century by those writing at the cutting edge about their own work that they believe led to the discovery of natural selection.

This is a new understanding in the story of the discovery of natural selection.

In current absence of any disconfirming evidence, the literature record shows that although many others before Matthew (1831) mentioned what artificial selection does, only Matthew used that information in an analogy with anything like any kind of understanding of any of the processes of natural selection to show the differences between the two. Matthew did this as an explanatory device to help readers understand what natural selection was. This was an analogy of differences. Analogies that focus upon difference, as opposed to analogies of sameness or similarities between the things compared come under the broad definition of the term analogy that is provided by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘A comparison made between one thing and another for the purpose of explanation or clarification.’ We might name Matthew's unique analogy of Artificial versus Natural Selection,: 'The Analogy of Differences'.

The same unique analogy of differences that Matthew used in 1831 was replicated first by by Mudie (1832), then Low (1844), Darwin (1844) Wallace (1858) and by Darwin again (1859; 1868). See my blog on this story for the full details

David LaveryAttribution

Loren Eiseley on cover of biography by David Lavery

Notably, the eminent anthropologist and historian of science Professor Loren Eiseley (1979 – ‘Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X’ pp – 72-73)    was convinced that Darwin must have read Matthew’s 1831 book in or before 1844 when Darwin replicated in his private essay of 1844 Matthew’s example of the differences between plants grown in nurseries and those naturally selected in the wild. Eiseley noted that following Matthew’s letter in the Gardener’s Chronicle of 1860 – claiming his priority – that Darwin (1868) replicated his 1844 private essay replication of Matthew’s unique prior-published analogy – this time citing Matthew.

Eiseley (1979): "Matthew wrote   ,

'Man's interference, by preventing this natural process of selection among plants, independent of the wider range of circumstances to which he introduces them, has increased the differences in varieties particularly in the more domesticated kinds...'

"In his unpublished essay of 1844,

Darwin wrote, 'In the case of forest trees raised in nurseries, which vary more than the same trees do in their aboriginal forests, the cause would seem to lie in their not having to struggle against other trees and weeds, which in their natural state doubtless would limit the conditions of their existence…"

In that later text, to which Eiseley directs us, Darwin (1868) wrote:

"Our common forest trees are very variable, as may be seen in every extensive nursery-ground; but as they are not valued as fruit trees, and as they seed late in life, no selection has been applied to them; consequently, as Patrick Matthew remarks, they have not yielded different races…"

Eiseley knew nothing of David Low's 1844 replication of so much of Matthew's work. Therefore he wrote that Darwin must have got this example from Matthew by 1844. Professor Low replicated Matthew's original analogy as well as being the first to second publish unique Matthewisms. Darwin read Low and recommended him to Royal Society. Low was Matthew's schoolmate. One thing we can be 100 percent sure of is that there is nothing original in Darwin's 1844 unpublished paragraph on trees, because its content and the ideas that underpin it were published by Matthew in both the main body of his 1831 book, and in its appendix. if Darwin never got this example directly from Matthew, then he got it from his friend David Low's (1844) book. And Low would have more likely than not got it from Matthew,    since he is apparently first to replicate two apparently unique Matthewisms

However, the most important point here is that Eiseley focused only on the similarity of the example of plants provided in the analogy – namely plants grown in nurseries v the wild. Had Eiseley focused on it as an analogy of differences in its own right then he would have spotted that Darwin (1859) used the same analogy of differences – only with different examples -on pages 83-84 of the ‘Origin of Species’.

The second analogy is the ‘Artificial Compared to Natural Selection analogy of similarities’ that is a comparison of the similarities between artificial and natural selection that Darwin deployed as a far more complex argumentative device in the Origin of Species (1859). For short we might name this one ‘the analogy of similarities’.

Trumpet from the rooftopsPublic Domain

Charles Darwin: The World's Greatest Science Fraudster

It is important to note that as a disciplinary group biologists are remarkable and alone in that the concept of analogy in biology is used only to refer to similarities between one thing and another. This stems in no small part from the practice of comparative anatomy which is used to determine which classification or intermediary of species a creature or fossil might be. I believe that this is why the artificial v natural selection Analogy of Differences has been so under-researched by Darwinists – the majority of whom are – I believe – biologists. Interestingly we see analogy interpreted in this way by Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, in Part 1 of his epic poem The Botanic Garden (1791, p. xvii   ).

Google BooksPublic Domain

From p xvii of Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden

This breakthrough in our understanding of what Matthew originated and Darwin and Wallace replicated, means is that we can now say four things:

(1) Patrick Matthew (1831) was first to publish the complete hypothesis of natural selection.   

(2) Patrick Matthew (1831) was also first to use the ‘Artificial versus Natural Selection Analogy of Differences’ to explain the process of natural selection.

(3) Both Darwin and Wallace subsequently replicated both in their major works on the topic; Wallace (1858) in his Ternate Paper and Darwin in his private essay of 1844 and then in the Origin of Species (1859).

(4) Darwin and Wallace each claimed that none known to them had read Matthew’s prior published ideas and that they each independently of Matthew, and independently of one another, discovered natural selection for themselves.

(5) In effect then, Darwin and Wallace claimed to have each independently generated Matthew’s prior published unique hypothesis AND his prior published unique analogy to explain it.

Public Domain

Alfred Russel Wallace - just lIkeCharles Darwin is believed by Darwinists to have "immaculately conceived" Patrick Matthew's prior published hypothesis of natural selection - whilst influenced and surrounded by naturalists who read and cited it before he supposedly miraculously replicated it!

(6) Although Darwin claimed none known to him had read Matthew's ideas before 1860, BigData analysis uniquely revealed in Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret (Sutton 2014)    that Darwin's claim is fallacious. In fact, it is newly known, seven naturalists known to him had both read and cited Matthew's book many years before 1858. Moreover, three of those naturalists were known to be major influences as naturalists, or else facilitators as naturalist editors, on the pre-1858 written work of both Darwin and Wallace on natural selection. By way of another explanatory analogy, this makes Darwin's and Wallace's so-called "independent discoveries" of Matthew's prior published hypothesis, and their replication of his explanatory analogy, like the Virgin Mary's Miraculous Immaculate Conception of Jesus of Nazareth (see my position paper on this analogy).

This is important, in my opinion. It is highly important because analogies are extremely powerful explanatory devices that have in recent years attracted much attention in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Most importantly, it currently appears (in absence of any disconfirming evidence) that Matthew (1831) not only originated and prior published the hypothesis of natural selection (in a book that we now newly know was, in fact, read and cited by seven naturalists known to Darwin and Wallace), which is arguably the most important scientific hypothesis of all time, but Matthew (1831) also originated the world’s most powerful analogy in order to explain it. Darwin and Wallace replicated both!

Conclusion and the way forward

Does this breakthrough in knowledge, driven forward by a social scientist in collaboration with a biologist, provide confirmatory evidence for the "Frozen Donkey Hypothesis"? I think, to be fair, the answer is a complex story of yes and no. But, in my opinion, Darwinists must adapt to new knowledge or else they will lose their power of occupancy in the literature on the history of discovery of natural selection.

Did Benjamin Franklin Influence Patrick Matthew?

I have earlier (here) explored the likelihood that Matthew (1831) was influenced by Empedocles. In this blog post I explore the very probable influence of Benjamin Franklin.

Writers before me have concluded that Matthew most probably was influenced by the writings of Malthus - the man who both Darwin and Wallace claimed as a most important influence on their "own" work.  Dempster (1983, p. 51) writes that both Malthus and Paley were influenced by Franklin's essay of 1755.  From that cause, it is worth looking at what Franklin wrote that may have influenced Matthew directly, or else indirectly through knowledge contamination.

In 1751, Franklin penned an essay that was finally published in Boston, USA, in 1755. It is entitled: Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries.

The relevant sections of Franklin's essay are the very final ones 22 to 24:

22. There is in short, no bound to the prolific nature of plants 
or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering 
with each others means of subsistence. Was the face of the earth 
vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sowed and overspread 
with one kind only; as, for instance, with Fennel; and were it empty 
of other inhabitants, it might in a few Ages be replenish d from one 
nation only; as for Instance, with Englishmen. Thus there are 
suppos d to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North 
America, (tho tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over 
sea) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather 
many more, on Account of the employment the Colonies afford to 
manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once 
in twenty-five years, will in another century be more than the peo 
ple of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on 
this side the water. What an accession of Power to the British 
empire by the Sea as well as Land! What increase of trade and navi 
gation! What numbers of ships and seamen! We have been here 
but little more than one hundred years, and yet the force of our 
Privateers in the late war, united, was greater, both in men and 
guns, than that of the whole British Navy in Queen Elizabeth s time. 
How important an affair then to Britain, is the present treaty for 
settling the bounds between her Colonies and the French, and how 
careful should she be to secure room enough, since on the room de 
pends so much the increase of her people? 

223 



10 OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE INCREASE OF MANKIND 

23. In fine, A nation well regulated is like a Polypus; take 
away a limb, its place is soon supply d; cut it in two, and each de 
ficient part shall speedily grow out of the part remaining. Thus 
if you have room and subsistence enough, as you may by dividing 
make ten Polypes out of one, you may of one make ten nations, 
equally populous and powerful; or rather, increase a nation ten fold 
in numbers and strength. 

And since detachments of English horn Britain sent to America, 
will have their places at home so soon supply d and increase so large 
ly here; why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into 
our settlements, and by herding together establish their languages 
and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, 
founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly 
be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, 
and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they 
can acquire our complexion? 

24. Which leads me to add one remark: That the number 
of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. 
All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (ex 
clusive of the new comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Span 
iards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what 
we call a swarthy complexion ; as are the Germans also, the Saxons 
only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of 
white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers 
were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our 
planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of 
our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars 
or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its 
people? why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in Ameri 
ca, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks 
and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps 
I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of 
partiality is natural to Mankind. 

If these three sections of  Franklin's (1755) essay, with what Zirkle (1941) saw as the texts that influenced Malthus, that so by 'knowledge contamination' influenced Darwin (and also Wallace)  did not inspire Matthew to write "On Naval Timber" in 1831 and "Emigration Fields" in 1839 then the coincidences are astounding. For Franklin writes on so many of Matthew's key themes: (1) A belief in the superiority of the Saxon's (2) The importance of trade and navigation, (3) The voracious need of the British to obtain timber (4) The fact that some varieties of the human species suffer overcrowding and so need to emigrate so as not to be 'interfering with each other's means of subsistence' (5) The likelihood that by emigration Anglo Saxon's would overtop existing populations in colonies. (6) The ability for any species  to have an ecological power of occupancy in the most circumstance suited environment - namely one that is supportive of life and devoid of superior competitors (think Dodo - until humans turned up). 

See PatrickMathew.com for more information on the discovery of Natural Selection

Did Alfred Russel Wallace Wear a Tin-Foil Hat?

Professional Responses to the Discovery that Matthew did Influence Darwin and Wallace 

In the UK, some weeks after the Scottish Daily Mail reported on the presentation of my Bombshell News of Darwin's and Wallace's great science fraud at the Edinburgh Skeptics in the Pub event on the Fringe of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, The Daily Telegraph exposed the 2014 discovery of Darwin’s and Wallace’s great science fraud in greater detail (The Daily Telegraph, 2014, May 28th, p.12) :

Public Domain

Article on Sutton's discovery. The Daily Telegraph, page 12. May 28th 2014

“Darwin ‘stole’ theory of natural selection”

Charles Darwin lifted his theory of natural selection from a book by a Scottish fruit farmer, a researcher has claimed.

Decades before ‘On the Origin of Species’ appeared in 1859, Patrick Matthew wrote of “the natural process of selection”, explaining how “a law universal in nature” ensured the survival of the fittest.

Darwin, although accepting that Matthew “anticipated” the theory, always denied plagiarism, maintaining that he arrived at the theory independently.

But Dr Mike Sutton, a criminology expert at Nottingham Trent University, believes that Darwin must not only have been aware of Matthew’s 1831 work, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, but borrowed from it heavily.

He has spent years cross-referencing passages in both books, checking citations and studying the figures and studying the figures who influenced both men [Note: that last bit is not actually accurate, because I fully completed the entire project and wrote it up as a draft book manuscript inside one year], and claims to have unearthed information which proves the naturalist lied.

“I have no doubt, based on the weight of new evidence, that Darwin read Matthew’s book and then went on to replicate his discovery and key themes.” Dr Sutton said: “Without Patrick Matthew, The Origin of Species would never have been written.”

The Daily Telegraph’s Science Correspondent, Saraha Knapton, who following a telephone conversation with me a few weeks ago, asked for and received the draft copy of my forthcoming book ‘Nullius in verba: Darwin’s greatest secret’ took the story forward on May 28th in her Daily Telegraph science blog.   

[Postscript - 6th August 2014 - Nullius is now published - here]

The Apocryphal Semelweis Reflex 

In Knapton's blog is to be found, in my opinion, the Semmelweis-Reflex response of Darwin “expert” Professor James Moore of the Open University. At least according to the information relayed in Telegraph blog, Moore, is apparently completely unaware of the wealth of science literature (e.g. Dawkins 2010) that fully accepts Matthew is the only author to have first fully discovered and fully articulated the theory of natural selection. In apparent absence of such knowledge, Moore, is quoted as saying that 'thousands of people were coming to the same understanding’. If The Daily Telegraph is quoting Moore accurately, then we really need to see Moore’s bibliography to prove it because that fantastical information is not yet in the public domain. Anyway, on the basis of his un-evidenced claim, Moore, apparently not having bothered with the scholarly chore of examining the detailed and fully referenced brand newly discovered evidence I have published in the public domain (Sutton 2014) , displays what might be the onset of an embarrassing Semmelwies Reflex. The Semelweis Reflex sufferer, allegedly, blurted “I would be extremely surprised if there was any new evidence had not been already seen and interpreted in the opposite way.’

I suspect Professor James Moore and other Darwinists would be extremely surprised if only they looked at the evidence. On which note, the response to the news in the comments to The Daily Telegraph science blog are most fascinating for anyone interested in studying cognitive dissonance and the apocryphal knee-jerk rejecting Semmelweis Reflex. On this blog you can even find a staunch anti-creationist computer scientist desperately resorting to Rupert Sheldrake's pseudo-scientific morphic resonance woo-woo to seek to explain away Darwin's and Wallace's obvious plagiarism.

A Classic Case of Cultural Cognitive Dissonance 

Among all those comments on the Daily Telegraph's official science blog, if you care to look, you will find that I asked a leading Alfred Wallace expert at the British Museum of Natural History, Dr George Beccaloni,    why he does not accept my proposition that Wallace cannot now be said to have independently discovered natural selection after it is newly discovered that Wallace’s Sarawak paper editor and publisher (Selby) had earlier read and cited Matthew’s book many times, and that Wallace’s greatest published influencer, Robert Chambers, had also cited Matthew’s book before going on to pen the influential Vestiges of Creation. Remembering folks – that’s two out of only seven naturalists who are currently known to have cited Matthew’s book – who clearly influenced and facilitated Wallace’s pre-1858 work on organic evolution and natural selection. In response to that question, Beccaloni writes his considered reply, given for the historical record:

‘I think your book is likely to 'score an own goal', by showing that 7 naturalists read Matthew's book yet failed to grasp his idea of 'natural selection'. Yes, I do think that Matthew probably DID propose the idea of natural selection as a mechanism of evolutionary change, the problem is that he did not explain it at all clearly or present it as being a new theory - which is indeed probably why those 7 naturalists (and others) missed it. Darwin and Wallace deserve the credit for explaining it sufficiently well to convince others of its importance. Note that Darwin, unlike Wallace, also accepted Lamarckism - something that always bothered Wallace who vigorously rejected Lamarckism in his 1858 paper and in his subsequent writings. It would make a very interesting study to examine the two men's attitudes to Lamarckism...’

Now that’s what I call an interesting response. For a start my goal (aim) is simply to set the record straight with my unique and veracious discovery that Matthew's book was cited by naturalists known to Darwin and Wallace. My conclusion is that they committed science fraud - but my conclusion is not my goal. Moving past Beccaloni's weirdly hostile assumptions, if he is right that my conclusions should be in the opposite direction – and of that I am far from sure – I wonder how in the world such an amazing-duel-coincidental-immaculate-conception could have occurred in the midst of such potential knowledge contamination from those who read Matthew's unique discovery of what he called 'the natural process of selection'? Did both Wallace and his influencers/facilitators wear tin-foil hats to stop Matthew's unique ideas and examples on organic evolution from spreading one to the other? How incredible it would be, would it not, if - tin foil hats aside - the unique ideas in Matthew’s book did not pass to Wallace’s work through his editor and through his greatest influencer? Particularity in light of the fact Wallace also uniquely replicated so many of Matthew's unique ideas, terms, phrases and explanatory examples.

My big data analysis of the literature shows that if Matthew's work did not influence Darwin and Wallace then it would have to be nothing more than a trifling tri-coincidence, amazing beyond rational belief, that three out of only seven naturalists proven to have read Matthew's book played pivotal roles at the very epicentre of influencing and facilitating both Darwin's and Wallace's later publications on the exact same same unique discovery, using word-shuffled Matthewian terminology and replicating Matthew's highly idiosyncratic collection of explanatory examples. 

Beccaloni's mind-switch from the official Darwinst knowledge-belief that no one read Matthew's ideas is perhaps a result of cognitive dissonance. Once faced by the newly discovered reality that naturalists known to Wallace and Darwin had read Matthew's book (Sutton 2014) Beccaloni possibly feels compelled now to 'reason' that my newly discovered seven - and he now reasons apparently innumerable unknown "others" - had read Matthew's book, which means now what Beccaloni reasons must have happened in his newly imagined reality, speculatively switched-about, is that it must be the case now that it is now Matthew's fault that others never understood his unique discovery because for some unspecific reason Matthew is believed now to have failed to make his ideas clear. Clearly, to write such a desperate creation, Beccaloni surely can't have actually or properly read Matthew's (1831) Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which expresses his original ideas far more clearly than Darwin ever did. But as in all cases of unfortunate cognitive dissonance, Beccaloni's brain, it appears, had to make up this newly adapted explanation in order to cope with the bombshell evidence that his science-guru-heros are otherwise plagiarists and science fraudsters. In short, Beccaloni has invented a brand new un-evidenced and implausible Darwinist 'knowledge-belief' in order to cope with harsh reality and of dis-confirming facts for the newly debunked 'knowledge-belief' that no naturalist read Matthew's book. Beccaloni is not to be mocked for his unfortunate bias. We should not expect anyone who has been unfortunately labelled and accepted the name of 'Darwinist' to be capable of objectively weighting the possibility that their namesake is their namesake because someone not named Darwin should be their namesake. I suppose its a bit like asking a Christian to accept new knowledge that some other prophet, incidentally not called Jesus of Nazareth (Brian perhaps?) got there and wrote some influential scrolls first.

The British Museum of Natural History has much to lose, financially and facially, in light of the newly discovered fact that Wallace's carefully spun "independent discovery" story is unravelled by facts. Cognitive imbalance caused by the stake an employee and their institution has in a busted 'knowledge belief ' was seen before when the science con-man Charles Dawson duped the Museum's Arthur Smith Woodward with his own (in hindsight) ludicrously implausible tale of how he discovered Piltdown Man 1 and Piltdown Man 2. Of course both were fakes (see Walsh 1997 for a superb, and the best, account).

Once again, then, it seems to be Pilting Down in Britain. Because yet again the British Museum of Natural History credulously makes a bit of an exhibition of itself.

One solution to this unfortunate new international embarrassment would be for the British Museum of Natural History to put the plagiariser Darwin's overbearing statue in the basement. Better still, they should hang a sign around its neck bearing the words "counterfeit originator" and feature it in an exhibition on science fraud. They could do worse than to put Wallace's brand new portrait in that same exhibition and then later stick it in a box in the attic along with all their other mistakes. Then the UK should celebrate the only independent discoverer of natural selection by establishing the Matthew Collection along with commissioning a statue and portrait of Patrick Matthew - who is the greatest deductive thinker the World has ever known. Somehow I doubt that will happen until after the World has had a good old laugh at our expense. Mind you, they can't be too hard on us because Darwin and Wallace suckered the rest of the World too. At least the myth was busted by an English person - yours truly. 

In sum, content for 154 years with the myth created by Darwin's and Wallace's story-telling that no naturalist known to them had read Matthew's book before 1859, Darwinists appear now to have a mutant argument that goes in the opposite direction in order to keep worshipping Darwin and Wallace. The mutant variety relies upon a new necessity for many, many, more naturalists than I have uniquely discovered to have read Matthew's book in order to make a new argument that Matthew's ideas were read but incomprehensible to all of the "new-unknown others" who read them, including the now known-citers (Loudon, Selby and Chambers) who influenced Darwin and Wallace on the exact same specific topic.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for his own future legacy, Beccaloni's desperate mutant variant argument is one that is unlikely to prove fit to survive outside the nurturing of his own biased-brain as curator of the Wallace Collection at the British Museum of Natural History. One reason Beccaloni's speculation will possibly not turn meme being because Matthew's ideas were very clearly stated - as the reviews of his book reveal. Indeed, some reviewers were up-in-arms over his heresy and wrote against it (Sutton 2014b - forthcoming). Matthew, himself told Darwin something about this in his 1860 reply to Darwin's letter to the Gardener's Chronicle (see Sutton 2014). Moreover, if so many more naturalists had read Matthew's book then it seems hard to imagine how Darwin and Wallace could have got away with plagiarising it, because they could not have got away with telling a lie that no naturalists had read it. But let's be balanced and consider Beccaloni's argument more closely. We can't know, but perhaps he is right that many, perhaps thousands - including many naturalists - did read Matthew's book in the 1830's and were either dead or else effectively retired by the time Darwin and Wallace published their "no naturalist read it" stories after 1859. It is not impossible that thousands of naturalists might have read and failed to understand Matthew's hypothesis (see Sutton 2014b for a discussion of this based on further newly discovered facts not yet in the public domain). Darwin provides some evidence to support such a possibility. In his letters to Wallace, following Wallace's complaint that none had shown any interest in his Sarawak paper, Darwin explained that most naturalists - himself, Lyell and Wallace aside, were obsessed merely with capturing, cataloguing and classifying specimens. This might indeed explain why many naturalists would have failed to attach any importance to what Matthew had to say on the problem of species. But we know for a fact that Wallace, Darwin,Selby, Loudon, Chambers and Blyth were all fascinated with the topic. They would have, as the new evidence linking them directly to Matthew's book suggests, see what Matthew had discovered. 

To conclude, it is important to stick with the facts and not to get sidetracked with fascinating un-evidenced speculation, which merely leads us up the primrose path to more storytelling and consequent entrenchment of new 'knowledge -beliefs'.

I’m sure we are learning much here that is of great value about how members of the scientific community initially respond to career devastating bombshell discoveries with initial knee-jerk uninformed rejection followed by more carefully constructed newly created cognitive dissonance fuelled explanations. Moreover, I suspect that many historians of science, psychologists and sociologists will be interested in this most valuable new data. Criminologists, and historians of science, might be interested in the fact that the technology of 'big data' and associated technology, such as Google's Library Project and its facilitating Chrome search engine, has effectively handed redundancy papers to frauds of the type so easily conducted by Darwin and Wallace in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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References

Dawkins, R. (2010). Darwin’s Five Bridges: The Way to Natural Selection In Bryson, B (ed.) Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. London Harper Collins.

Sutton, M. (2014) Internet Dating with Darwin. Best Thinking.

Sutton, M. (2014b) Nullius in verba. Darwin's greatest secret. ThinkerBooks.

Walsh, J. E. (1997) Unravelling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and its Solution. New York. Random House. 

VISIT PatrickMatthew.com for more information.

The Royal Society is Nought but a Darwin and Wallace Glee Club!

Sir Gavin de Beer (FRS) wrote in the Wilkins Lecture for the Royal Society (de Beer 1962 on page 333):

"...William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew were predecessors who had actually published the principle of natural selection in obscure places where their works remained completely unnoticed until Darwin and Wallace reawakened interest in the subject.'

What the expert Royal Society member Sir Gavin Rylands de Beer, British evolutionary embryologist, Director of the British Museum (Natural History), President of the Linnean Society,

Available at Amazon

and receiver of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal for his studies on evolution never knew - that I have uniquely discovered (see Nullius in Verba) - is that  at least 25 people actually cited Matthew's (1831) book before Darwin's and Wallace's papers - which replicated (without citing) Matthew's original ideas and explanatory examples - were read before the Linnean Society in 1858, seven of them were naturalists, four known to Darwin and two to Wallace.

So where's my Darwin Medal for being proven a better scholar than de Beer on his own subject?

Royal Society Darwin Medal

Perhaps the Royal Society needs to improve the quality of its membership and medal winners? Linnean society too. The pseudo-scholarly Darwin glee-club shame of it! 

Visit PatrickMatthew.com to learn the truth about the discovery of natural selection.

A Better Explanation for the Scientific Problem of Beautiful Flowers Than "God Did It".

Why do some plants have beautiful flowers? 

Sabbagh (2001 p. 19) explains:

‘In earlier pre-Darwin centuries, of course, the purpose of flowers was to enhance the beauty of the world and make it more pleasant for the acme of divine creation – ourselves – by contributing to the colourful and scented environment. The advent of the theory of evolution by natural selection means that we have to look for a more hardheaded answer, one expressed in terms of the value to the species of putting a lot of investment into surrounding the inconspicuous reproductive organs with complex, ornate and highly visible appendages. And the answer is that plants that have colourful and imaginatively sculptured flowers are those that depend for survival on attracting insects to them to carry pollen – the male seed- from the interior of the flowers to the eggs of another member of the species, or even to other parts of themselves to fertilize the flowers and produce the seeds for the next generation.’

Why do other plants have dull, hardly discernible, flowers? 

The reason why plants, such as the class known as grasses, to which all cereals belong, have insignificant and unremarkable flowers is because they rely on the wind for pollination. The wind is blind, absent nose or brain, which means you can't seduce it with beauty, perfume or any other wiles. Whilst winds can be vortexed by geological and man-made features, and influenced in other ways by plant life - that's an altogether different and far more complicated story.

Take a few moments to contemplate the sinisterly seductive nature of beautiful flowers.

Beautiful flowers appeal across the species barrier to pollinating insects such as bees, butterflies and beetles. Anecdotaly, my dog used to spend time sniffing blooms when, seemingly, no one was watching. I've seen cats and foxes do the same - sniffing one individual bloom, and then another, presumably, therefore, not the musk or urine spray of a potential mate or rival. This is not so weird as it sounds when we realise that by so doing the mammal might take part in the process of pollination as pay back for getting a nice nectar-sweet scent to sniff. 

But animal anecdotes aside, the main aim of this blog is to begin to explore why it is that flowers are associated with human romance, friendship, courtship, weddings, funerals and other ceremonious occasions? More precisely, I want to explore the following question: Why on Earth do we, who are not insects for whom flowers were selected by nature, like them so much?

Is something going on between us and flowers? 

According to most Darwinists, our perception of the beauty of flowers is a thing of chance, a random happenstance of how natural selection created them over many millions of years to entice insects to pollinate their owners, combined with our own attraction to symmetry. And if our love of flowers is naught but a cultural artifact and consequence of our attraction to symmetry in our own mating choices then that simple explanation of why flowers so appeal to us would be enough. But let us step outside the random-mutant-successful-selection box for a moment. I’m not questioning natural selection here. Rather, I wish to contemplate the possibility that nature’s selection of flowers might have resulted in a genuine objective beauty that should demand our consideration beyond the premise that it is a mere cultural –subjective-eye-of beholder assessment. Let me be clear that there is no need to reject the theory of natural selection by contemplating this seemingly implausible possibility that flowers might just be objectively beautiful as an explanation for why both humans and insects find them so attractive.

Humans have been deeply interested in beauty of flowers for a long time. As Karl Sabbagh (2001, pp. 16-17)) informs us in his excellent book on a Victorian botanical fraud, the great naturalist Charles Ray wrote in 1660 of the beauty of flowers.Sabbagh quotes the Latin translation from Raven (1942) that is as true of people today as it was over 300 years ago:

‘…the various beauty of plants, the cunning craftsmanship of nature. First the rich array of spring-time meadows, then the shape, colour and structure of various plants fascinated and absorbed me: interest in botany became a passion.

…Of course there are people entirely indifferent to the sight of flowers of meadows in spring, or if not indifferent, at least preoccupied elsewhere. They devote themselves to ball-games, to drinking, gambling, money-making,popularity-hunting.’

There is no need to get off the Internet to enjoy flowers, you can have a look at a vast array online – flower-porn if you will (click to check it out).

Beautiful are they not? Still, most of us prefer the real thing, naturally.

Lucky man that I consider myself, besides my beautiful wife there is a bowl of real tulips before me as I write these words. And I’m currently getting writing space by distracting my five year old daughter with the task of pretending she is a bee – taking the yellow pollen from one flower to the next. She’s still working on the problem of why she thinks they are as beautiful as butterflies, but is repulsed by some of the beetles that pollinate them. I might have to explain the "birds and the bees" to her soon, because she just asked how the plants make seeds.

Anyway, back to natural selection and the question of objective beauty 

The newly proven true and only independent discoverer of natural selection (see Sutton 2014), Patrick Matthew, poignantly wrote to the great science fraudster and plagiarist Charles Darwin on flowers in 1862 and again in 1871:

Matthew (1862):

‘Your's in tracing out the admirably balanced scheme of Nature all linked together in dependant connection—the vital endowed with avariation-power in accommodation to material change. Altho' this is a grand field for contemplation, yet am I tired of it— of a world where my sympathies are intended to be bounded almost exclusively to my own race & family. I am not satisfied with my existence to devour & trample upon my fellow creature. I cannot pluck a flower without regarding myself a destroyer.’

Matthew to Darwin: (Matthew 1871):

‘That there is a principle of beneficence operating here the dual parentage and family affection pervading all the higher animal kingdom affords proof. A sentiment of beauty pervading Nature, with only some few exceptions affords evidence of intellect& benevolence in the scheme of Nature. This principle of beauty is clearly from design & cannot be accounted for by natural selection. Could any fitness of things contrive a rose, a lily, or the perfume of the violet. There is no doubt man is left purposely in ignorance of a future existence. Their pretended revelations are wretched nonsense.’

Rightly keen to demolish the myth of supernatural design by a bearded being in the sky, Richard Dawkins (1996, p.256) does not consider the possibility of objective beauty:

‘I was driving through the English Countryside with my daughter, Juliet, then aged six and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wild flowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. ‘Two things’, she said ‘To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us.’ I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn’t true.’

Dawkins then goes on to write that his daughter’s response was little different from that which had been given since the middle ages –that man has dominion over nature, which is there for his delight.

Quantum physicist David Deutsch (2011) has something deeper than Dawkins to say on flowers and beauty.

Deutsch questions the possibility that we find flowers attractive because they share an objective beauty that was necessary in natural selection in order to cross the species barrier with unquestionably clear signals between plants and insects. Do we find flowers beautiful for that reason? The question is certainly a science problem in need of a solution. If Deutsch is right it might explain why so many scientists have been led astray by the beauty of flowers to think that they simply must have been purposefully designed by an omnipotent bearded spirit in the sky.

Is there something more than simply our own attraction to symmetry in our perception of the beauty of flowers? Might it be that they are objectively beautiful as a result of what it takes to signal clearly across the species barrier? Could it be also due to the fact that we share DNA with plants and insects - all three species having evolved from a common ancestor? For example, humans - it is now well known - share 98 per cent of the same genes with chimpanzees, but did you know we share 25 per cent of the same gene types as banana plants, 18 per cent with certain weeds and 44 per cent with fruit flies. 

I only wish Patrick Matthew could have known what we know today. How delighted I think that immortal great rational thinker in science would be to have evidence-led knowledge-gap-filling answers that are better explanations than a superstitious belief in divine Creators..

Writing in the freedom-space provided by the 18th century enlightenment, Matthew (1831) saw, erroneously as it turned out, no need to employ arguments regarding whatever belief he may, or may not, have had that the Christian, or any other, "God" might have had a hand in it as a political get-out-clause when he shared his unique discovery of natural selection (Matthew 1831, p.381):

‘Geologists discover a like particular conformity – fossil species – through the deep deposition of each great epoch, but they also discover an almost complete difference to exist between the species or stamp of life, of one epoch from that of every other. We are therefore led to admit either of a repeated miraculous creation; or of a power of change, under a change of circumstances, to belong to living organized matter, or rather to the congeries of inferior life, which appears to form superior. The derangements and changes in organized existence, induced by a change of circumstance from the interference of man, affording us proof of the plastic quality of superior life, and the likelihood that circumstances have been very different in the different epochs, though steady in each tend strongly to heighten the probability of the latter theory.’

What about Darwin?

Darwin typically plodded behind in the footsteps of others. In that sense he was just like Robert Chambers (1844), who had years earlier read and cited Matthew's (1831) book before writing the Vestiges of Creation (see Sutton 2014 for a fact-based discussion), which contained very similar ideas about evolution. Darwin (1859), like Chambers, also deliberately allowed a role for "God" in his book. Incidentally, Chambers's (1844) book - in all its many editions - is widely acknowledged to have hugely influenced the work of both Darwin and Wallace.

In his first and other editions of the Origin of Species, Darwin (1859) wrote as though there is a supernatural “Creator” who designed natural selection as a law of nature to make and break species (Darwin 1859 p.489)

‘Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.’

As we can see, Darwin, contrary to so much Darwinist mythmongering, kept his "God" in the Origin of Species. Nonetheless, outside the politics of appeasing the Church and all its believers, I suspect he was as stumped as Matthew by the strange appeal of flowers:

From the Spectator Archive on “The Idle Rich: http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/29th-october-1910/18/the-idle-rich

“,,, a story told by Lord Avebury in his address at the Darwin-Wallace celebration of the Linnean Society of London on July 1st, 1908. It runs thus :— "One of his friends once asked Mr. Darwin's gardener about his master's health, and how he had been lately. 'Oh!' he said, my poor master has been very sadly. I often wish he had something to do. He moons about in the garden, and I have seen him stand doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time. If he only had something to do I really believe he would be better."

Besides pollinating those flowers by sticking his nose inside one and then another, was Darwin, at turns, contemplating his so-called "Creator"? Perhaps he was pondering Matthew's great discovery and the beauty of his own great science fraud?

We can understand his behaviour, and discover more about what he did, but can't even attempt to know the mind of Darwin, because about what he secretly thought we can but wonder.

On more solid ground, science, not speculation, can help us solve the riddle of why so many rational thinkers have been led-astray by notions of beauty being a signal sent purposively to humans by a divine "Creator", rather than consequently to us after jumping the barrier between different species. Who knows what pay-off's such knowledge might have? Is David Deutsch (2011) onto something big? Perhaps the UN should sanction the placing of flowers in gun barrels in conflict zones? Might there be a ultimate flower, just waiting to be bred by artificial selection for communicating Peace and Love? If flowers signal to us because we share some 25 per cent of the DNA of plants, and even more of the DNA of insects, might the right variety of flower have certain crime reduction capacities? Would anyone be so bold as to explore such a seemingly ludicrous proposition, when so many modern humans are, as has always been the case, more concerned with ball games, money making, gambling, and popularity hunting?

As is always the case, human society cannot be reasonably distilled into convenient binary explanations. Jesus of Nazareth, Newton, Einstein, Matthew and Darwin were all great popularity hunters. Some were more circumstance suited than others to succeed, of course. But knowledge and our knowledge of history and veracity evolves - ultimately, we can but hope, it evolves towards a more accurate representation of reality. A representation that relies upon hard facts, firm evidence and not just the mere thoughts and lies of ambitious and popular men with beards.

Postscript 25th February 2015

On 21 Feb 2015 I directed Professor David Deutsch - via Twitter - to this blog post and asked his opinion of my insect and plant DNA explanation for the seemingly universal beauty of flowers. He very kindly used Twitter to reply.

The screenshot of Prof. Deutsch's reply is below. He wrote:

'Implausible, I think, because one side only has genes for creating the patterns and the other only for recognising them.'

Public Domain

David Deutsch thinks it unlikely our shared plant and insect DNA is responsible for why we are so attracted to flowers

.

At this point, as a social scientist, I must admit I'm now out of my depth as well as league. I must defer to Prof. Deutsch's superior knowledge in this area. However, I would like to invite confirmatory or dis-confirmatory opinions for Matthew's, Dawkins's and my own ideas on the fascinating question of the beauty of flowers.

References

Chambers, R. 1844. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. New York. Wiley and Putnum. (published anonymously).

Dawkins, R. (2006) Climbing Mount Improbable. New York.Norton.

Deutsch, D.(2011) The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. Allen Lane – The Penguin Group.

Matthew, P. (1831). On Naval Timber and Arboriculture: With a critical note on authors who have recently treated the subject of planting. Edinburgh. Adam Black. London. Longman and Co.

Matthew, P. (1862) Letter: Matthew, Patrick to Darwin,C. R. December 3rd. Darwin Correspondence Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3843accessed on Sat Aug 3 2013.

Matthew, P.(1871) Letter: Matthew,Patrick to Darwin, C. R. 12 Mar.Darwin Correspondence Database, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-7576 accessed on Sat Aug 3 2013.

Raven, C.E. (1942) John Ray, Naturalist. Cambridge.Cambridge University Press.

Sabbagh, K.(2001) A Rum Affair: A true story of botanical fraud. Da Capo Press.

Sutton, M. (2014) Internet Dating with Darwin:New Discovery that Darwin and Wallace were Influenced by Matthew's Prior-Discovery. Best Thinking.March 26th,