To date, most historians of science and scientists have credulously swallowed the toff, King Charles Darwin's, serial lies about the discovery of evolution by natural selection and instilled that palpable nonsense into to minds of the general population. But in 2020 we can see a paradigm change taking place. Proper scientists and other veracious scholars are now citing the independently verifiable facts of how Darwin's and Wallace's influencers, friends, Wallace's Sarawak paper editor, and their influencer's influencers red and cited Patrick Matthew's (1831) prior published theory years before Darwin and Wallace even put pen to paper on the topic in a private notebook.
This is what a paradigm change looks like.
Over the past few years, I can’t think of a single conversation that we have had that both Darwin and Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret (“Nullius in verba” is Latin for “on the word of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it”) and as a result of it has experienced a torrent of verbal abuse on social media. So why has Dr. Sutton been the victim of such abuse? In a nutshell, Sutton has asserted that Darwin is a fraud and that his main thesis on natural selection was stolen from Matthew without any acknowledgement. Furthermore, using a new methodological technique that Sutton developed, he believes Darwin lied about his knowledge of Matthew’s work.
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| Professor Dr Mark Griffiths |
Over the last few years, I have read over a dozen of Sutton’s online articles about Darwin and Matthew, and I was also one of the first people to read Sutton’s book before it was published. Sutton’s work is meticulous, rigorous, and fully referenced. Most of his critics have never read (or simply don’t want to read) his book. Instead they appear to take potshots at his research and reputation without bothering to read the original source.
The first thing to note concerns Sutton’s methodology. His method – sometimes referred to ‘internet dating’ in his articles (but nothing to with people meeting up online, so apologies if the use of the words ‘internet dating’ in my article lured you to read this blog on false pretences) but called ‘Internet Date-Detection’ (ID) in his book – relies on the 30+ million books and documents that the Google Books Library Project has digitized and dating back centuries. Using the ID method, Sutton has used a search engine to track down obscure books, articles, and letters (and short phrases within these documents) to work out who published what and when with pinpoint accuracy. (For instance, back in the 1990s, I thought I had first coined the word ‘screenager’ but Sutton used his ID method and proved that others before me had used the word in print prior to my own articles).
Page 20 of Fraud and Misconduct in Research:
‘Plagiarism may present a particularly difficult challenge because sometimes establishing
deliberate
plagiarism is not simple. Issues concerning the nature of giving proper credit, being influenced by
ideas vs. “stealing” ideas, simultaneous discoveries, or interpretations may create a gray area where
the intent to plagiarize is difficult to establish. While today there is computer text-matching software
that can—under certain conditions— identify similar texts and thus raise the suspicion of plagiarism,
human examination is always required to actually decide if plagiarism is involved (see also Biagioli
2012). If quotation marks or proper references are provided then matching texts may not necessarily
constitute a case of plagiarism. Nevertheless, with so much of the scientific research floating in
cyberspace, such text-matching programs can have an important role in identifying plagiarism. Yet
even with this technology, establishing bona fide cases of plagiarism may not be simple. One recent
illustration involves Mike Sutton, a criminologist, who relied on text-mining software to claim in an
e-book he published in 2014 (Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret) that Charles Darwin and
Alfred Wallace plagiarized the theory of natural selection from Scottish naturalist Patrick Matthew.
This claim—as could be expected—created much turmoil and remained controversial.3’
Page 174
‘French astronomer Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was suspected of stealing ideas
“outrageously, right and left, whenever he could,” and German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm
von Leibniz was also suspected of similar acts. Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei was
This document contains independently verifiable evidence from the publication record that the original findings in Mike Sutton’s (2014)
book ‘Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s greatest secret’ have been interpreted as being so significant the author’s write that Darwin’s name may
now have to be added to a list of plagiarising science fraudsters.
2
said to “shamelessly” have stolen ideas from German astronomer Johannes Kepler and others.
Likewise, Graeco-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, as well as Dalton,
Lavoisier, and Pascal, may have all been involved, and possibly guilty of, some form of deceit in their
work. 80’
‘George Becker (1984) accused Merton of misinterpreting and ignoring sources (to the point of
faulty use of evidence), thus calling into question Merton’s conclusions regarding the relationship
between German pietism and the rise of science over the past four centuries.81’
Page 217 Notes to Chapter 2
‘3. For a concise review see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Sutton_(criminologist)
Page 232 notes to pages 172–175
‘80. Given Sutton’s previously mentioned work, Darwin may have to be added to this list'.
Dr. Mike Sutton, a criminologist, has used a battery of Internet search tools to demolish the main Darwinian argument, which would be either to say that Darwin did not have access to Matthew's work, which is denied by Darwin himself in the paragraph above, or that Matthew had presented his ideas in a very indirect way and with very little diffusion, as Darwin literally says:
"Unfortunately the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the "Gardeners' Chronicle", on April 7, 1860."
In any case, Darwin read Matthew and took his ideas from a book that, certainly was of a different matter, but not less important, since in 1831 naval wood and arboriculture were key issues for the country's economy, and therefore the book had been widely distributed. Matthew predates Darwin but his characteristics (Scottish, sympathetic to the Chartist revolts in London) did not allow him to fit the profile of the new liberal model.'
See other scholarly affirmations of the facts over credulous propaganda beliefs HERE
In 2020, proper academics are now throwing out the dog's breakfast of credulous serial liar and plagiarist #CharlesDarwin toff worship!— Dr Mike Sutton (@Criminotweet) January 21, 2020
See what a paradigm change in science and the history of science looks like: https://t.co/O9fyK7t5Vr pic.twitter.com/4jtKo1hpZL
