Loren Eiseley on Patrick Matthew, Chambers and Darwin

My original discovery that Robert Chambers, a great influence on Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, read Patrick Matthew's prior-published hypothesis of natural selection (because he cited it in 1832) represents just one of many bombshell's in the history of biology that explode prior Darwinist myths. All the new bombshells are inside my book Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret.

The influential importance of the wealthy publisher and geologist naturalist Robert Chambers was explained by the  famous anthropologist  and science historian Loren Eiseley in 1959 in his book Darwin's Century. Had Eiseley known then what we know today - that Chambers read Matthew's book containing the full hypothesis of natural selection - as did Wallace's (1855) Sarawak paper editor Prideaux Selby - I am sure he would have explained that exactly why the old myth that Darwin and Wallace independently discovered Natural Selection is analogous to the Christian miracle belief in the Blessed Virgin's immaculate conception of the baby Jesus. The big data discovery that naturalists known to Darwin and Wallace, who influenced their work on natural selection, had long before read and cited Matthew's book containing the full thing, drags the anomaly of Darwin's and Wallace's claimed dual independent discoveries of a prior published theory, whilst influenced by those who had read it, before they subsequently fallaciously claimed that no naturalist had read it, into the spotlight as the greatest anomalous paradox in the history of scientific discovery.

The New Facts revealed in Nullius, and reason, plus logic and reason, demand a paradigm shift from the old and credulous faith-based  'majority view' of Darwin's and Wallace's immaculate conceptions of a prior published, advertised, reviewed and cited theory, to the fact-led knowledge of more likely than not Matthewian knowledge contamination.

Eiseley (Darwin's Century) on Chambers' anonymously authored Vestiges of Creation.

 p. 132:

'The hour came in 1844 with the publication of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.'

p. 133:

'Condemned by critics as immoral and godless, it promptly took the public by storm. Four editions appeared in seven months and by 1860 some 24,000 copies had been sold. Two hundred copies of the first edition were distributed to prominent scientists in the attempt  to arouse interest. The result of this effort to bring attention to the subject is of extreme interest to the scientific historian.'

'Robert Chambers, the anonymous author, had hoped for a scientific hearing but was promptly shouted down. Thomas Huxley, who was later to become Darwin's chief defender, attacked the book with utmost savagery. Phrases such as "foolish fancies," "Charlatanerie," "pretentious nonsense," "work of fiction," "mean view of Nature" rolled from his pen.'

pp. 133-132

'Thus, as Draper commented many years ago, "happily the whole subject was brought into such prominence that it could be withdrawn into obscurity no more.'

p. 134

'Years later Francis Darwin was to write, "My father's copy [of the Vestiges] gives signs of having been carefully read, a long list of marked passages being pinned in at the end." Francis Darwin points out that Charles, seeing the difficulties Chambers got into with certain attempts to explain phylogenetic lines, wrote, "I will not specify any genealogies-much too little known at present."

p.135

'Through it all, it must be borne in mind that Chambers, as part owner of a successful publishing house, had to remain anonymous in order to protect the business interest of himself and his brother William. This is a measure of the damage which threatened a man who transgressed established views in the first half of the century.'

NOTE: This last point is most important, because  Richard Dawkins (2010) with typical biased pseudoscholarly self-protectionism, as a Darwinst named for the great replicator of Matthew's original ideas, castigates Mathew for not trumpeting his discoveries from the rooftops in effort to deny Mathew full priority for his own prior-published discovery.  Dawkins appears not to have read Matthew's (1860) letter in the Gardener's Chronicle - where he told Darwin of a naturalist (unnamed of course - for good reason) who had read Matthew's book but feared to teach its bombshell ideas because he would have received pillory punishment!  Darwinists, such as Dawkins, are self-proven by their bias to be unfit to write as 'experts' on the veracious history of the discovery of natural selection.

Eiseley (1959) thought also that another reason for the overshadowing of Matthew's original discovery is probably because his 1831 version contained the now considered correct influence of catastrophic geological and meteorological extinction events.  Only the year before, Darwin's friend and geological mentor Charles Lyell (1830) brought out the first volume of his influential Principles of Geography, which promoted the Uniformitarian principle that such extinction events never happened. Lyell did not believe transmutation of species occurred until many years later - when Darwin was close to publishing the Origin of Species. Darwin retained his mentor's uniformitarian ideas and mocked Matthew, from the third edition of the origin onward as a scientifically unfashionable catastrophist.

Eiseley later came to realise that Darwin must have plagiarized Matthew's 1831 book

Loren Eiseley (1979) was convinced that Darwin's (1844 - private essay) replication of Matthew's artificial selection analogous explanatory example of the inferiority of trees selected in nurseries, compared to those selected naturally in nature, was taken from Matthew's unique arboricultural expert and unique use of that example to explain natural selection in his book of 1831. See Eiseley (1981, pp.72-73) Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X

However, what Eiseley never discovered - is that David Low , Matthew's Perth Academy schoolmate, read Matthew's book because he took so much unique content from it, including unique Matthewian terms, and was first to replicate (without citation) Matthew's unique prior-published, artificial selection, nursery grown trees analogue, in his own book of 1844. Darwin's notebooks show he read Low's work. Darwin even recommended Low to the Royal Society for his work on the similarities between artificial and natural selection. Darwin's notebooks show he read Low's work extensively. See Nullius for all the details.

Once again all this information proves it far more likely than not that knowledge contamination occurred and that Darwin was influenced by Matthew's prior published hypothesis

Patrick Matthew's Politics

Matthew was a libertarian royalist Chartist, and was in 1839 a Scottish representative of that pre-socialist libertarian political reform movement. He resigned his position because he disagreed with

talk of violent revolution.

Matthew's 1831 book, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, wove his unique discovery of natural

Patrick Matthew

selection in with his political ideals to explain that society was acting like artificial selection in selecting poor human stock to succeed in society at the expense of better human specimens more fitted to prestigious positions. In this sense, he effectively saw that the artificial system of society was not allowing the fittest to prevail. His book warned of the consequences and was not only heretical, in that it trespassed on the domain of natural theology in terms of the origin of species, it was seditious to boot!  Both of these highly controversial traits were criticized in reviews of his book, such as the one in The United Services Journal and Naval and Military Magazine 1831 p. 457):

 "In thus testifying our hearty approbation of the author, it is strictly in his capacity of a forest ranger, where he is original bold, and evidently experienced in all the arcana of the parentage, birth and education of trees. But we disclaim participation in his ruminations on the law of Nature, or on the outrages committed upon reason and justice by our burthens of hereditary nobility, entailed property, and insane enactments."

The hostile anonymous reviewer of the Edinburgh Literary Journal (1831, p, 2) had this to say:

'The entire tract resembles a new quack medicine, full of high stimulants, ignorantly and not safely combined, and which, till known and analyzed, might prove dangerous as well as attractive to young patients (ie young planters and country gentlemen)...'

Moreover, under the laws passed by Pitt in the 18th century following fear of violent revolution, this meant that scientific societies were forbidden to discuss ideas of the kind Matthew shared. See, for example, Uglow's (2002: p. 464)    explanation of what very clearly happened in the year 1794:

''Pitt passed his notorious Two Acts against 'Seditious Meetings' and 'Treasonable Practices': the former hit particularly at the institutional societies, requiring them to be licensed and proscribing discussion of religion or politics'.

These laws were enshrined by the conventions and rules of  all British scientific associations, such as the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, so that discussions could not be held on the topics of politics, religion or news. Matthew's book was about all three and so he certainly did himself no favours if he wished for his ideas to be discussed by the 19th century gentlemen of science.

The naturalist, John Loudon who reviewed Matthew's book in 1831 mentioned its originality on "the origin of species" no less and was possibly alluding to its heresy and sedition when he wrote:

  '...for want of practice in writing, he has produced a book which we should be sorry should be absent from our library.'

 Matthew's second book 'Emigration Fields' , published in 1839, took his 'survival of the most circumstance suited' natural selection ideas forward for the British to emigrate to countries such as New Zealand in order to find new ecological and create new social niches where they could subdue, intermix with and dominate the indigenous population.

Charles Darwin

And so we can see that Matthew fully understood the political implications of his discovery of the 'natural process of selection' when he first originated it in print in 1831. Forty eight years later, in 1879, Darwin wrote to the German, Dr Scherzer:

'What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.'

At the time of writing this letter is not yet available on the Darwin correspondence project. Darwin's biography, edited by his son Francis, misspells Scherzer as Cherzer.

Sir Gavin de Beer (1962) p.330 writes in regard to this letter:

'Darwin, to the end of his days, never understood the political overtones which, whether he liked it or not, were attached to his work.'

Where the truth lies, when we are dealing with a man such as Darwin - a proven self-serving serial liar, is another matter altogether. For one thing, we know for a fact, from what he wrote, that Darwin had read the whole of Matthew's book after Matthew had claimed priority for his discovery in the Gardener's Chronicle in 1860. How could Darwin have missed the political implications so often clearly stated? For example:

Matthew (1831, p. 365): "The law of entail, necessary to hereditary nobility, is an outrage on this law of nature which she will no pass unavenged—a law which has the most debasing influence upon the energies of a people, and will sooner or later lead to general subversion…" 

And (Matthew 1831, p. 390): "…the great mass of the present population requiring no guidance from a particular class of feudal lords, will not continue to tolerate any hereditary claims of authority of one portion of the population over their fellow-men; nor any laws to keep up rank and wealth corresponding to this exclusive power. It would be wisdom in the noblesse of Europe to abolish every claim or law which serves to point them out a separate class, and, as quickly as possible, to merge themselves into the mass of the It is a law manifest in nature, that when the use of any thing is past, its use is no longer kept up."

And we know for a fact that in 1862 Darwin read Matthew's letter in which Matthew spelled out his political approach to the study of natural selection:

'My line lies more in the political & social, Your's in tracing out the admirably balanced scheme of Nature all linked together in dependent connection—the vital endowed with a variation-power in accommodation to material change.'

Robert Chambers, a staunch anti-Chartism, educational liberal, who was notoriously fearful of the consequences of political emancipation of the working classes was one of seven naturalists newly discovered (Sutton 2014) to have cited Matthew's (1831) book pre 1858. He was a friend and correspondent of Darwin, and, like Lyell - Darwin's great mentor, a member of the Edinburgh Geological Society. Their private correspondence reveals that Both Darwin and Lyell knew that Chambers was the anonymous author of the heretical Vestiges of Creation - the book that notoriously 'put evolution in the air' in the mid 19th century and which was Wallace's greatest influence.

In 1848 Chambers stood for political election. He was supported in that campaign by none other than Adam Black - Patrick Matthew's publisher who substantially advertised Matthew's book and its subject matter on species.

The real history of the discovery of natural selection and the political suppression of Patrick Matthew's priority for his prior published hypothesis of natural selection is no conspiracy theory. Rather, it is simply, newly discovered, fact-based, history.

Moreover, the reality of the circles that Mathew and Darwin both moved in are far more complex and interrelated than the simple, made-up, childish 'just so' stories told by biased Darwinists (e.g. Dawkins in Bryson 2010) about Matthew being simply an obscure Scottish writer of a 'manual on silviculture'  in order to lazily fill their pseudoscholarly knowledge gaps in the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace. By way of further example, Darwin's best friend Joseph Hooker petitioned Matthew's publisher Adam Black in his failed attempt in 1845 to get the chair of Botany at Edinburgh university. Darwin was livid that Hooker was not appointed.

The Veracity Revolution >>Blame it on Google>> No. 1 in a shameless self-trumpeting campaign

Last year I cringed amidst a captive audience. The very well paid Vice Chancellor of a British university was lecturing us by braying-on about his profound 'expert' observations that in the library of his institution students were using computers to learn and were not just "playing-around on Google."

What that so called highly paid 'expert' leader in higher education clearly did not know is that playing around on Google allows students to do what could never otherwise be achieved in a thousand lifetimes, not by anyone .

I noted that the man was wearing grey shoes.  Grey shoes, I tell you!

Thanks to Google, it is possible to scan over 30 million publications in seconds to find exactly what you are looking for. Playing around on Google gets to the truth and busts pervasive myths. Playing around on Google enables students to discover that what is written inside many scholarly books is 100 per cent wrong! Because Playing around on Google allows everyone to veraciously challenge 'expert' knowledge-beliefs that have been surreptitiously stuffed into knowledge gaps.

Dysology.com and PatrickMatthew.comAttribution

Join the Veracity Revolution. Blame it on Google and Follow Supermythbuster on Twitter

Playing around on Google proved that Charles Darwin definitely did not independently discover natural selection, neither did the other pretender Alfred Wallace (see Sutton 2014). If that veracious discovery upsets you then you should blame it on Google. 

Playing around on Google enables us to discover the origins of discoveries, ideas, terms, phrases and concepts.

Dysology.orgAttribution

The Humpty Dumpty Myth is Busted

The origin of Humpty Dumpty is Punchinello (Sutton 2013)

For daily updates on the Veracity Revolution >>Blame it on Google>> campaign you could do worse than Follow me "Supermythbuster "on Twitter by clicking here.

Alternatively, you could wear grey shoes and try clicking your heels together in your comfy dotage. 

A crisis in the history of scientific discovery

Patrick Matthew.
The Biological Father
of Natural Selection

Progress in search engine technology facilitated research in Google's Library Project of over 30 million searchable books and other publications, which led to game changing discoveries that transform the unique anomaly of Darwin's and Wallace's claimed dual independent discoveries of Matthew's prior-published original ideas from a vexation into a crisis in the history of scientific discovery.

The issue of Patrick Mathew's priority over Darwin and Wallace for his own prior-published and cited discovery is not something that the history of scientific discovery can ethically or sensibly ignore if it is to be of any use in helping us to understand how the discovery of natural selection occurred. Such knowledge is important, because it is fundamental in developing ways to increase the chances of making other great discoveries in the future.

 See the home page of PatrickMatthew.com for more details

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,

The Age of Enlightenment

Brodie, A. (2007):

'The enlightened person accepts the word of authority not as something to which he has to say ‘yes’, but as something to which it is appropriate to subject to critical analysis. The question for the enlightened person therefore is whether the word of authority can stand up to cross-examination before the tribunal of reason. If it can then it is accepted because it is sanctioned not by authority but by reason. If on the other hand it cannot withstand the cross-examination then it has to be discarded, however exalted the source.'

Brodie, A. (2007) The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation. Edinburgh. Birlinn Ltd.

Weale's Entanglement Analogy: Dr Mike Weale Discovers a Pure Coincidence, Else Further Confirmatory Evidence of Darwin's Plagiarism of Matthew

During an on-going discussion with me on July 20th 2015 Dr Mike Weale wrote in the comments section of The Patrick Matthew Project:

[ Note:  In the following text, written by Mike Weale to Mike Sutton, NTA refers to Matthew's 1831 book "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture"] This is the book that leading scholars agree contains the original complete hypothesis of natural selection, but that Darwin and Wallace claim not to have read before they replicated Matthew's discovery, his great analogy to explain it and many of his examples of its operation in nature.

Plese note: Forsdyke does not reveal the similarity of the picture drawn in text from Darwin  - that is done by Weale. We might call this item of evidence "Weale's Entanglement Analogy". I am not sure it is particular evidence for plagirism in its own right. But if we add it to the far stronger evidence from my systematic and comprehensive plagiarism check - revealed  in Nullius - it is, at least, rather curiously interesting.

Dr Weale writes: 

Mike, were you aware of the following interesting similarity between a famous passage of Darwin’s, and something that Matthew wrote in NTA? I thank Donald Forsdyke for pointing out the Matthew quote (see the end of his last video in his educational video series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL59A9C65FB0DCED9E).

The Darwin quote, from the last paragraph of “On the Origin of Species”, is:

 “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

The Matthew quote, from pp.229-30 of NTA, is:

 “Look at the broken mound, with its old picturesque trees and tangled bushes; there is the ancient root where the throstle had its nestlings, which are now at large on the leafy boughs, and are tuning their yet unformed notes to melody. Now every twig has raised its new column of foliage to the sun; and branch, and root, and stone, embellished all over in the richest variety of cryptogamic beauty, swarm of insect life.”

The scene is used differently (to contemplate Nature’s laws by Darwin, to contrast beautiful Nature with boring manicured parks by Matthew), but the similarity of the picture is striking.

Original Discovery Creates a New Problem for Darwinists

Good scholarship in any field involves questioning: '...most the the data that best fit your expectations and focus instead upon the unsolved problems, anomalies, and paradoxes of your field.' (Root-Bernstein 1993).

Consequently, the new problem that Darwinists now have to solve is:

How on Earth did Darwin and Wallace discover Natural Selection independently of Matthew's prior published hypothesis of it; despite the newly discovered fact that they were influenced and facilitated on the same topic by naturalists they knew who had long before read and cited Matthew's book, which contains it?

If Darwinists can solve this new problem, rationally and convincingly, in light of just how many of Matthew's original ideas and examples Darwin and Wallace replicated, along with his powerful Artificial Versus Natural Selection Explanatory Analogy of Differences, and his terminology,* then, and only then, can they solve what we might name the Anomalous Paradox Problem of Darwin's and Wallace's Immaculate Conceptions of Matthew's Prior Published Hypothesis.

Of significant note also, is the fact that the problem of claimed independent replication of a full, complete, appreciable, original and unique prior-published, problem solving and game-changing idea, hypothesis or theory, whilst in contact with those who are 100 per cent proven to have read the publication containing it, is unique in the history of scientific discovery to the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace. That makes it an anomaly, which has been ignored for the 155 years following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

Kuhn's seminal work on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions explains: 'A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice.' Darwinists will need now take note that the anomaly of Darwin's and Wallace's essential immaculate conceptions of a prior published theory has been highlighted by the New Data that their influencers had read it before they replicated it. Moreover, the Darwinist 'anomaly dodging' assumption, of Darwin's and Wallace's remarkable honesty, which they have shared and relied upon in order to deal with Darwin's and Wallace's so-called 'independent' discoveries of Matthew's prior published discovery, is newly bust in the light of Wallace's now proven dishonesty and Darwin's blatant lies.

If exceptional claims do require exceptional evidence, then that is exactly what Darwinists must provide now in light of the New Data presented in Nullius.

Notably, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, which means that, to repeat the point already made, what remains in Darwin's and Wallace's massively decimated private correspondence archives, private diaries, and Darwin's torn apart, missing pages and scribbled out text private notebooks and essays – dated as written in the exact same year, or after, Darwin's influential friends and associates, and Wallace's Sarawak paper editor, read and cited Matthew's work - is quite obviously not extraordinary evidence in support of their claimed 'independent' discoveries of Matthew's prior-published discovery of the natural process of selection.

According to Kuhn (1970 p. 62) the characteristics of paradigm changing discoveries include the:

'... previous awareness of an anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance.'

All Kuhn's elements of paradigm change in science are to be found in the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace. There is the anomaly of Darwin's and Wallace's 'immaculate conceptions' (independent discoveries) of Matthew's prior published discovery. There is the new BigData ID hi-technology facilitated observation that influential naturalists, known to Darwin and Wallace, in fact did read, and cite, Matthew's book pre-1858, which represents an original, anomaly highlighting, paradigm shifting, discovery of a great paradox in the history of the discovery of natural selection. Finally, there is the fact that the change of paradigm to Darwin and Wallace having been more likely than not influenced by Matthew's prior-published work long before 1858, and the new research procedures I used to bring it into existence, are meeting resistance from those still wedded to the old 'majority view' of Darwin and Wallace as independent discoverers. See for example Dr Mike Weale's position paper on my discovery of the New Data. Every criticism in it can be rebutted by reference to reason and the newly discovered facts (here).

*For the published proof of just how much of Matthew's unique and original 1831 ideas and content Darwin and Wallace replicated see e.g.: (Sutton 2014; Dempster (1995); and Dawkins, in Bryson (ed) (2010).

On Piltdown Man: There is a Stain Upon the Silence in Science Fraud Detection

Public Domain

Newspaper of the day

The discovery of fragments of a fossilised humanoid skull with an ape-like jaw at Piltdown in Sussex, England between 1908 and 1912 was hailed as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. Leading scientists, including Sir Arthur Keith, were all fooled. They thought they had found the missing link between apes and modern humans. They thought they had found concrete proof to support the theory of natural selection. They thought they had hard and tangible proof that humans were nothing special. Proof to silence creationists. Proof that humans are descended from apes. 

In 1953 the Piltdown Man myth was bust by Joseph Weiner.

Joseph Weiner, Reader in Physical Anthropology at Oxford University, ably assisted by Dr Oakley, (see Weiner 1955) proved that the skull and jaw were simply a great science fraud. They proved that skull was of a modern human and had been treated to make it look older, as had the jaw bone, which was that of and orang-utan with the teeth filed-down into a human wear pattern. A canine tooth, believed to belong to the fossilised jaw, had been painted Vandyke Brown. 

The telling question I want to ask is this: If Weiner discovered that one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever made was in fact fraudulent does that not make Weiner himself one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time? In my opinion, it does.

Rather than afford him no more than a general embarrassed and relative 'silent treatment', surely we should celebrate Weiner far more than we do. I think we should be putting him centre stage and trumpeting his name from the rooftops. Because Weiner heroically put his reputation on the line by questioning the conclusions of eminent and lauded scientists of international repute such as Arthur Smith Woodward and Sir Arthur Keith, and in so doing he rescued science from all the other credulous experts who fell hook line and sinker for the activities of Charles Dawson - one of the World's greatest science charlatans.

Is it an embarrassment of silence that keeps Weiner's face off stamps and the back of banknotes? Why is he not classed as an immortal great discoverer? Why no statue? 

We should treasure all our great detectives. Perhaps science fraud detection should become a scientific discipline in its own right?

Joseph Sidney Weiner (1915–1982)    died aged 67 years from lung cancer on 13 June 1982 at his home, 20 Harbord Road, Oxford. Two prominent texts on the Piltdown fraud (Walsh 1996; Russell, 2003) both mention the untimely death and last resting place of the heinous Charles Dawson, and yet the author of nether book had a thing to say about the untimely death and last resting place of the true expert who solved the problem of Piltdown Man.

Can you name the man who caught Bonnie and Clyde without Googling it? I suspect that same Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome plays out again and again when it comes to notorious miscreants and those who detect them.

References

Russell, M. (2003) Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson & the World's Greatest Archaeological Hoax. Brimscombe Port, Tempus Publishing Ltd.

Walsh, J. E. (1996) Unravelling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and its Solutions. New York. Random House. 

Weiner, J. S. (1955) The Piltdown Forgery. Oxford. Oxford University Press,