Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 10]

Written in 1996. Undated. But written immediately after publication of his second book. This is the last of the 10 transcribed of the 11 Wavertree Letters from the retired surgeon and pioneering human organ transplant research scientist Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie of the Patrick Matthew Trust

Jim Dempster

Dear Ian,

Thanks for yours of the 11th.

Please give the books away as I have done here. The prof of Zoology at Edinburgh seems a nice guy; send him one. Send them to the academic departments in each big town.

 Hutton. I told you the mess Simmonds got into without looking up my book’s index! I spend some time on Hutton. He is the father of British Geology. Lyell took most of Hutton and added some relevant points and called it Uniformitarianism which dispensed with catastrophes (of Cuvier) and mass extinctions; these are now back after 170 years! If you find some on or thing new – look up the index. Harper will speak on Biodiversity. Diversity was introduced by Cuvier – the four main branches of animal life; he denied any heredity link along the branches but Lamarck added ‘branches’. Matthew introduced ‘diverging ramifications of life forms occupying a new field’ after a catastrophe. Edward Blyth (1835-37) came in with reiterate diversity and ramifications. Darwinists try to argue that Darwin introduced diversity; some mad American thought Darwin lifted divergence from Wallace. See my book. See page 132 for what Darwin missed in South Africa.

Photographs. The only one I have I sent to Australia for a Scot, based in Queensland, who wants to include in his book a word about Matthew.

I am sending you a brief outline of evolutionary paradigms. Paradigm is the ‘in’ word: American, of course! I have given the historical development of the ideas. Now that Cuvier’s catastrophes and mass extinctions are back Matthew’s paradigm is up do date. Darwin hated Cuvier – for some reason. Jealousy? He wrote that the catastrophes had been invented. This is in my book.

I have the impression that Darwinists are not aware that the “Lyell-Darwin evolutionary paradigm’ had abolished catastrophes and mass extinction. Test the audience on this!

Simmonds will not be going to Dundee. There is so much in my book one has to spend weeks on it. Simmonds keeps on finding things and fails to look at my index. I have not missed much and the few points I have missed I have committed to essays. Did I send you ‘the Consequences of punctuated equilibrium’? I have discussed the theory in my book. Gould and Eldredge – lifelong Darwinist propagandists now have a new role an ‘anti-Darwin mode’ which is punctuated eq. This restores the catastrophes and mass extinctions and much else which disagrees with Darwinism. BUT little about Lamarck and Cuvier!

Kilpatrick. No enclosed article! The Scots have forgotten all their great men – Hutton, John Hunter (our Lamarck), Robert Grant (teacher of Darwin at Edinburgh and later prof. at University College, London – 1828). I deal with them in my book. Hunter is our link with Buffon and Lamarck. You could ask Kilpatrick who asked him to write on PM. Strange that pathologists should be interested.

By the way on the ecology front. Matthew was complaining about

Dempster's second book.
Published in 1996

the extravagant use of fertilisers in the 1860s. Guano had been discovered and imported. Also his concern about the forests. The poor nature of nursery trees – Darwin takes up this point and acknowledges Matthew.

For the organisers. Robert Smith is not in the Chambers Nat. Biographical Dictionary. Is he in the Scottish! If not send a brief statement to Prof John Horden, Univ of Stirling.

Addendum – Ecology.

If we accept that ecology is the study of plants and animals in their environment, then we are back to one of Lamarck’s main concepts approved of by no less than Darwin. See the Historical Sketch enclosed. Then turn to the first page, chapter 1 of all editions of the Origin of Species and there is a sentence with ‘the conditions of life’. Enclosed.

Then turn to the Historical Sketch where Matthew is considered and you will find Darwin pointing out that Matthew stressed ‘the conditions of life’. Enclosed. Darwin is very odd about the conditions of life. The phrase occurs all over the Origin and yet he admitted to Professor Semper in 1881! (See the book page 148) that he had not given sufficient weight to ‘the conditions of life’. Look at 2nd paragraph. Was he denying his Lamarckian attachment[?] Darwin was a Covert Lamarckian! Use the Historical Sketch and Lamarck’s concepts and you will find them all in the Origin without any reference to Lamarck. Lamarck referenced once; Cuvier once

The Creator referenced on average 6 times. Citation analysis would award first place to the Creator!

No Creator in Lamarck or Matthew. Stress that because the Origin is supposed to be completely natural science.

See my book page 212 – 2nd para – conditions of life

This is not in the [my] book.

Darwin elsewhere said that he could not find much evidence for ‘the conditions of life’ but that recently more evidence was appearing. Lamarck and Cuvier seem to have had enough evidence before Darwin was born; Matthew in the 1820s saw enough evidence. Some Darwinist may come in with this point. It seems to me that Darwin was hiding his Lamarckism.

~~~~~~~~~~

Notes and Comments by Mike Sutton

Here we see evidence that Dempster made sure free copies of his self-published book were distributed by the Patrick Matthew Trust, which funded its production.

Most importantly we see also Dempster's analysis of where Matthew's work fits into the various breakthroughs in thinking made in academic development of the field of organic evolution and natural selection. 

Note that Matthew was first with the divergent ramifications of life and that Blyth built upon that only after Matthew and only after, as my original discovery reveals (Sutton 2014), Blyth's editor! Loudon reviewed Matthew's book in 1832 and mentioned the question of Matthew's originality on the question of the "origin of species" no less!. 

 The importance of the bombshell discovery of this Matthew -> Loudon -> Blyth -> Wallace -> Darwin route of possible knowledge contamination is completely lost on many.

Note also that Matthew's book was complete heresy because he excluded any notion of a creator in it - which probably explains, in part, why it was not cited much in the first half of the 19th century. This fact is dealt with at length in Nullius (Sutton 2014). It explains also why, pre-1858, it was banned by the public library of Perth in Scotland and why, pre-1858, a naturalist professor of an esteemed university failed to teach the observations in it for fear of pillory punishment. 

Matthew's (1831) outright mockery of Christianity in his book would, in part, explain why Darwin lied from 1860 onwards that no one had read Matthew's original ideas on natural selection. Perhaps Darwin was afraid of his ideas being proven to have come via knowledge contamination from those of an outright heretic? 

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 9]

Wavertree 17.5.98

 Dear Ian,

…

 I wonder if you read the Oldie? Enclosed is Smullen’s article. I hear he contacted you. No offer of an apology is forthcoming and The Oldie pretend they don’t know who he is. …

Only one biologist has taken any interest in my book. A palaeontologist at Bristol University has bought my book and seeks my help with his work on James Hutton! He was a sort of Renaissance man – interested in many subjects – breeding, geology, moral philosophy, chemistry and latent heat (from Black) which started him on vulvanism. He built a house overlooking Salisbury Crags and the view stimulated his interest in geology and now he is recognised as the founder of Geology. John Hunter was the same – anatomist, geologist, surgeon, fossil collector and essays on natural history. There is a bit of all this in my book.

Then Charles Lyell came along with his Uniformitarianism which Hutton and Hunter had recognised so many years before. Penguin has recently reprinted the first edition of Lyell’s Principles with a foreword by Jim Secord of Cambridge (an American who has been here since 1980) which is quite dishonest. The first edition in anti-Lamarck but the 12th edition is pro-Lamarck!

 Hope you are all well

Best wishes,

Jim

Notes and Comments by Mike Sutton 

This looks like someone called Smullen wrote something published in the "oldie" that upset Jim Dempster.

 Here Dempster reveals also that he thinks there is some kind of coordinated deliberate dishonesty afoot to conceal Lyell's move towards Lamarckinsm. 

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

Wavertree 26.8.97

Dear Ian …

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

We can’t win.

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

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

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

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

 Best wishes,

 Jim

~~~

Notes and Comments by Mike Sutton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History will not be kind to biased career-Darwin scholars

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 6]

Wavertree 15.1.97

Dear Ian,

…

 I enclose a letter the NS actually published. So typical of Darwin promoters – they don’t know their Darwin. The chapter mentioned is the one chapter to keep quiet about because the Creator is mentioned twice. Twice again in the Recapitulation. Sometimes the Creator was in sometimes out! The Creator is mentioned four times in all six editions; Lamarck and Cuvier get one mention! I have rewritten many times the article I sent you. It can be heavy reading.

I have another one finished purely on punctuated equilibrium.

Hope all is well with you.

Best wishes to all,

Jim


Notes and Comments by Mike Sutton

Dempster's Punctuated Equilibrium article can be read on this website here. 

NS refers to the New Scientist magazine. Dempster is referring to a letter of his that was published in the New Scientist.  Dempster's New Scientist letter of 1996 can be read on this blogsite - here.

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

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 3]

Wavertree 26.8.95

Dear Ian

Many thanks for your last two letters.

Well! I have just sent back the corrected galley proofs plus the index. An index is so easy to compile with a computer.

The 1861 letter of PM is still a mystery. I appealed to the Dundee Advertiser to ask for suggestions as to what the Farmers Newspaper meant to farmers in 1861. I followed up the suggestions which were sent to the Dundee paper but no letter. There is in London a huge Newspaper library which I used previously to dig out Matthew’s letters. He nearly always wrote to that paper the Dundee Advertiser. I approached the library again with the new suggestions but no result. …

 I was pleased to read the paper on Lamarck. It is the only sympathetic attitude to Lamarck that I have come across in the literature since about the 1950s. he has been consistently slandered from Darwin to Richard Dawkins; the latter, I may say, comes in for some stick in the book. He is either ignorant or deceiving the public.

I think Robb has been very kind to me. He has done a lot to bring PM to the notice of people, I asked him some time ago to check in Geology whether PM had ever attended the Pliny Society. No evidence. He will certainly receive a book from me.

 I will be sending off my first contribution to old man Burns. I should get the final galleys soon. The printers have done A GOOD JOB. … The book is now 356 pages plus the index which is another 5 or 6 pages. …

 Do give Min Hunter my regards. I have brought John Hunter into the book quite a lot.

Regards

Jim

~~~

Notes and Commentary by Mike Sutton

In this third letter to Ian Hardie (of the Patrick Matthew Trust), Jim Dempster refers once again to his criticisms of Richard Dawkins scholarship in "The Blind Watchmaker".  A correspondent of Dawkins, Dempster (1996) criticises Dawkins for writing the palpable nonsense that Matthew did not understand what he had written.

 Perhaps Dawkins wants us to believe he thinks Matthew was a blind monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter that was yet to be invented?

Dempster's (1996) book hammers further home the facts of such shamefully pseudo-scholarly Darwinist propagandising against Matthew by Richard Dawkins in several others areas.


Min Hunter was a friend of the late John Matthew (the last surviving direct descendant in Scotland to bear the name Matthew) .

Dempster's last book "The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwin's" focused on John Hunter as a much neglected forerunner of Darwin.











NOTE - Dempster's next letter to Hardie is published on this site already. It is  here: 30.12.94 letter: http://patrickmathew.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Dempster

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 2]

Note: This is the second of the 10 transcribed Wavertree Letters from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie (of the Patrick Matthew Trust)


Wavertree 22.9.94

Dear Ian,

Thanks for your letters of 13.9 and 23.9. …

Your letter of the 13.9 brought a cloud over the horizon. A cloud as ancient as patronage itself. You write “We feel that to succeed it should not be too confrontationist re the Darwin lobby…” this is the problem of “He who pays the piper calls the tune”. I don’t know what you and Mrs Hunter mean. Does it mean that the present book is too confrontationist? If so then you must exclude me from funds out of your trust because that is my style. I found in reading the literature that from Darwin onwards there was a gang up on PM and Lamarck. If by countering their unfair, dismissive remarks I was or am going to be confrontationist I can only bow myself out.

I presume you and Mrs Hunter are familiar with the Darwin Lobbyists. They would not give a tinker’s curse for what I say. When I presented the evidence contained in the Appendix to Jay Gould of Harvard he dismissed PM with “He buried his head in his trees and saw no forest.” In actual fact PM as soon as he had finished his book went into the political aspect of the Appendix, joined the Chartist movement… He was elected the candidate for east Fife and Perth for the Great Convention of 1839. So – do we let Gould’s stupid and ignorant remark go by for fear that the sale of the book will suffer?

The “We feel” sentence continues “… and should set Patrick Matthew in the context of his era… etc”

If you turn to page 19 of my book you will see the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph does exactly that. Throughout the book I have taken the approach of the contextual historian and this is what I am continuing to do with the work I have been engaged on. If by this approach I am to confrontationist I can only say – that’s me.

You see “The man who pays the piper calls the tune” has led to tears in the end over the whole history of patronage. If the piper remonstrates he is unfairly accused of being churlish and looking a gift horse in the mouth. I had hoped this situation would not arise.

 I have mentioned several times to you that the cost of another edition would be high. …

 If you turn to my book you will see the name of Edward Blyth. I have a chapter relating him to PM and Darwin. Another chapter deals with Darwin’s Historical Sketch which includes PM. This Sketch is the most dishonest piece ever Darwin wrote. He makes PM look ridiculous but as I present it now Matthew’s approach is completely modern with all those catastrophes and disappearance of the dinosaurs. There is another chapter on Darwin who learned nothing during five years at University. When he was in Edinburgh for two years he came under the care of Robert Grant who taught him about the fauna of the Firth of Forth, encouraged him to collect invertebrate specimens and demonstrate them to the Pliny Society and since Grant was an enthusiastic Lamarckian Darwin got grounded in that too. Darwin’s comment: the whole thing was a bore and learned nothing. He then went to Cambridge for three years. There he collected beetles and other specimens, went on geological trips with Sedgwick the professor of Geology. Darwin’s comment : the whole thing was a bore and learned nothing. So why did Henslow recommend him as naturalist for the Beagle?

PM comes in for a bit of stick from me over his colonial policy which could not be more brutal and inhuman – but in the “Survival of the fittest” sense exactly what became social Darwinism. If you read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ the same inhuman conclusions are drawn i.e. the savages will be annihilated and in time to come there will be a hoped for, improved Caucasian people and below them the chimp and gorilla. All other humans would be eliminated.

So I suppose you will designate this contextual approach as confrontationist. So be it. I have found another letter from PM to Darwin which I knew must be around because the reply is in my book. This letter accompanied a review of the Descent of Man by Matthew in the Scotsman newspaper. The central library dug out the review which could have been more critical. Many people were dismayed at the time because Darwin had now changed his mind and says he now realised he stressed natural selection too much in the Origin!

So that’s it for the moment.

Sincerely,

 Jim Dempster

~~~

Notes and commentary by MIke Sutton

Dempster reveals he personally informed the famous Darwinist Professor Gould (Stephen Jay Gould) of exactly what was in the appendix of Matthew's 1831 work, On Naval Timber, regarding the first full hypothesis of macro evolution by natural selection, and that Gould merely dismissed the evidence with an off-the cuff propagandising unevidenced dismissal.

We see here also the first evidence in writing (it is clearly and prominently included in Dempster's 1996 book) that Dempster was first to note that Matthew had in fact been correct and Darwin wrong regarding catastrophic meteorological and geological extinction events. Note: Jim Dempster was way further ahead in this regard than Michael Rampino (Rampino 2011), who is generally misattributed with this important discovery - and who attributes Dempster by way of a mere cursory footnote in his famous article on the topic.

In this letter, Dempster refers to Min (Mrs) Hunter - who was a friend of John Matthew (who was a descendant of Patrick Matthew) . The book Dempster is writing at the time of the Wavertree Letters  is  his 1996 'Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century'. The Patrick Matthew Trust was financially assisting Dempster's work. Later in 2005 Dempster published his third book on the topic 'The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins'.

It is notable that in the letter Dempster outlines that his approach to the topic is deliberately critically confrontational, because he felt that the so called "Darwin Industry"- so as to foster and maintain their impression of Darwin's original genius - was incredibly biased in its effective propagandising  against Darwin's intellectual forbears Lamarck and Matthew.   I have taken the same strategically objective, honest and open stance in my work (Sutton 2014a; Sutton 2014b and 2016). Indeed, feeling that Dempster's superb groundbreaking work on Matthew and Darwin has been for the most part cannily ignored by Darwin scholars my own approach goes further with zero regard for any undue reverence to Darwin, the Darwin lobby, or their credulous Darwin worshipping misplaced sensitivities, poor and pseudo-scholarship, and irrational thinking.

Jim Dempster's Correspondence: The Wavertree Letters [Letter 1]

Jim (W. J) Dempster

For the next 10 days a new blog post will be published each day on the Patrick Matthew blog. Each post will be a letter.

Each letter, published in chronological order, is from Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie. The letters were written during the period when Hardie co-managed the Patrick Matthew Trust.

Please Note: Some details concerning living people have been omitted in order to protect certain minor issues of possible personal privacy and sensibility.  Wherever this occurs the point of redaction is indicated by three full stops in a row "..."

Much of the correspondence concerns Dempster's second book. Dempster, W. J (1996) Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh. The Pentland Press.

PLEASE NOTE All of these letters, published on the Patrick Matthew Blog are the copyright of the Dempster Family Private Archive - (C) All International Rights Reserved. Not to be reproduced without written permission. 

Letter 1 (Jim Dempster to Ian Hardie)

Wavertree 20.08.94

Dear Ian

Many thanks for your letter and enclosures. The article for country life I find rather lifeless but let it go. I have written to Fiona about a minor change. When you return the photograph can you enquire whether they can improve the quality. There are sorts of tricks these days. That photo, I think I told you was turned down by American publishers as being of poor quality. If they can send us some better quality prints it would be helpful.

I saw Gribbin’s article in the Sunday Times. I wrote him and complimented him on being hooked on only one reading. Hooker found it the most difficult book he ever read; Huxley has to re-read several times before he was able to point out several mistakes especially Darwin’s opinion that natural selection was always a slow process. It so happens that several months ago I was so appalled at the number of mistakes in the Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins that I wrote him a small essay. It was mainly the usual English diatribe against Lamarck without mentioning that by the 6th edition of the Origin Darwin was won over to Lamarckian ideas. The inheritance of acquired characteristics came from Buffon and not Lamarck. It was Huxley who wrote Darwin to point out that his Pangenesis was what Buffon had written almost a hundred years ago. So – the Darwin Industry (coined by Adrian Desmond) are determined to shield Darwin from Pangenesis and all the other untruths Darwin uttered about his predecessors. I asked Richard Dawkins why he had listed in his bibliography the 1st edition and not the 6th edition. Here is his disingenuous reply.

“I don’t understand why you are ‘surprised’ that I refer to the 1st edition of the Origin. Apart from the fact that the last edition contains the well-known acknowledgement to Matthew, I greatly prefer the first edition. It lacks errors that Darwin introduced, (like Pangenesis) in response to criticisms that we can now see to have been erroneous.”

 Can you spot the similarity?

The piece about Matthew in the 6th edition is in the so-called ‘Historical Sketch’. It makes Matthew out to be an idiot but turns out now to be very modern. I am dealing with this in my current study. I refer in my book to the Huxley – Darwin correspondence about Pangenesis.

Richard Dawkins knew nothing about PM and states that he was taught that PM was ‘an enigma’!

I thank you for pursuing a possible publisher. My big problem is the typing of the manuscript. I had a secretary when I wrote the book but not now. My standard of typing would not be acceptable by publishers. It will be very costly to hire a typist. That is my main problem these days.

I came across in the transactions of the Royal Society another letter from Matthew to Darwin. Matthew had clearly written a review (9.3.71) of the ‘Descent of Man’ (1871) for the Scotsman Newspaper; a copy of the review was enclosed. Darwin wrote back curtly a few words, mainly about his ill-health, as usual, but made no reference to the review and signed off curtly with a ‘yours faithfully’. Even so Darwin did not let up on his rubbishing of Matthew for by February 1872 the 6th edition was published with the Historical Sketch.

So – I wrote to the National Library on George IV Bridge and asked them to track down the review. I have just received a copy. It is a long but very favourable review but Darwin took care not to mention it in his letters.

I have been immersed in a marvellous book – The politics of Evolution by Adrian Desmond. He lives quite near here. He deals with another Edinburgh graduate – Robert Grant – who befriended Darwin when he was at Edinburgh. Told him all about Lamarck, the fauna of the Firth of Forth and encouraged him to present short papers at the Pliny Society. When Darwin returned from the voyage he lived in Gower Street a stone’s throw form the University College where Grant was now the professor of Zoology and preaching or rather lecturing on Lamarckism. Darwin avoided him for the rest of his life and spread untruths about him. Desmond asks why? I think Darwin from the beginning was making sure that his predecessors would be blanked out so that he could claim ‘I owe nothing to my predecessors’. What arrogance! So his predecessors were Herbert Spencer, Lamarck, Robert Grant, Patrick Matthew, Edward Blyth. All these people were subject to Darwin’s malicious untruths which everyone believes. His treatment of Edward Blyth I deal with in my book.

Arthur Keith in his book ‘Darwin re-valued’ asks “why was Darwin so abrupt with Herbert Spencer?”

I have a great deal of typing to do which I find rather boring. I think I now have all the data I need. The local library have been most helpful.

Sincerely,

 Jim

~~~

Notes by Mike Sutton

In fact, Darwin's Historical Sketch was included in every edition of the Origin of Species from the third edition onward (Darwin 1861).  Dempster never got that fact wrong in this letter, it's just that he writes "by the 6h edition" meaning it was definitely in that edition.

It is also important to note that this letter established that Richard Dawkins was well aware of  the completeness of Matthew's (1831) on the topic of natural selection as early as 1994, not least thanks to the correspondence he received from Jim Dempster on the topic.