Ian Hardie and his wife discovered that many authors, including Jim Dempster have mistranscribed a letter from Darwin to Matthew. Tipped off by an email from Ian on 9th November 2019, I verified his finding and found that The Darwin Correspondence project (
archived here) and others have not only mistranscribed the
letter sent from Darwin to Matthew to have it that Darwin writes: "Your parable of the Damascus woman is quite new to me & very striking." In fact, we can see from the photograph of the letter (as opposed to replicating citations and then pretending the words copied come from visiting the National Library of Scotland) Darwin actually wrote: "Your parable of the Damascus Woman is quite new to me and my thinking."
My further research after being tipped off by Ian Hardie found the source of what we might call the "striking error" that others have copied without due citation to him is
W. T. Calman (1912, pp. 451- 457) who was shown the three letters on or before 1912 by Matthew's daughter Euphemia. Claman (1912 p. 451) wrote that the letters had never before been published. Matthew and Darwin scholars should note that the above letter is one of the three later originally found by Ian Hardie and Min Hunter at the home of John Matthew after his death. They set up the Patrick Matthew Trust, which employed Jim Dempster to research and write on this topic.
Using a secondary transcribed source such as Calman's published transcription of 1912 yet citing the material as though it is the primary source whist ignorantly replicating a transcription error unique to the secondary source is one of the most simple forms of poor scholarship counting as academic misconduct by plagiarism. This mistranscription and wrong attribution issue on the Darwin Correspondence website and elsewhere in the literature on Darwin and Matthew is just one more ironic example of the many issues of dreadful scholarship plagiarism that that run through the so called "Darwin industry" like hidden woodworm in an antique.
By way of another ironic example of even worse academic misconduct by plagiarism we can see Dagg's disgraceful plagiarism in the Linnean Journal, in a paper that desperately tries to argue - through what is arguably the most pitiful systematic failure to cite the most relevant compelling newly published evidence of it - against Darwin’s plagiarism. Dagg plagiarised, by failure to cite me as the discoverer even though he knew I discovered it, my original unearthing in 2013 (and
first published in 2014 and then in two peer reviewed papers,
Sutton 2014 and
2015) that Selby (editor of the journal that published Wallace's 1855 Sarawak paper, which Darwin read pre-1858) cited Matthew's 1831 book and the original ideas in it years before Darwin and Wallace wrote on the topic. See all the fully referenced and
evidenced details here of Dagg's ironic plagiarism (perhaps the most ironic example of plagiarism in history?) of my original research, which he had prior read and commented upon at length elsewhere on the Internet.
The important issue to note here is that the Darwin Correspondence Project and others all one way or another appear to have copied/replicated Caimen's and other's subsequent publication of the mistranscription, but essentially pretended they got the text from the original letters National Library of Scotland or from them as an orignal source in someway being elsewhere, which scholars in the know can prove is impossible. I think this is most ironic given the issue at the heart of this Matthew and Darwin topic being one of plagiarism and failure to truthfully reference sources. Just as Darwin did not want to cite Matthew the dangerous radical Chartist leader, Christian god and priest and upper-class mocking atheist, it appears that these Darwin Industry members have behaved similarly. Indeed, John van Wyhe a major force behind the Darwin Correspondence Project resigned from the editorial board of the Polish journal that published my 2015 article on the independently verifiable evidence of Darwin's plagiarism. He then emailed a Scottish journalist to claim that the new and independently verifiable evidence of who I discovered did read and cite the book containing Matthew's prior published theory is nothing more than silly. See the
detailed facts of that story here.
Note: For the historical record, I have a copy of van Wyhe's Sutton's research on Darwin and Matthew is a "conspiracy theory' email that he sent to a Scottish journalist. But for reasons of his copyright, I cannot legally publish it.
Of course, again with great irony, in reality, conspiracy theories are those that tautologically claim there is conspiracy because people are conspiring, because the evidence of that conspiracy is not available, because there has been a cover-up of it. That most certainly is not the case in this story, as the independently verifiable published and expertly peer reviewed facts prove.
Proper academics interested in how the so-called "scientific establishment" seeks to silence those who bust much loved myths with new facts may care to note that Dr Mike Weale (then Reader in Statistical Genetics at Kings College London - the owner of the "Patrick Matthew Project" website wrote an email in 2016 to the VC of Nottingham Trent University - where I then worked before my retirement in 2018 as Reader in Criminology in a vicious attempt to have me disciplined or perhaps even sacked for what I wrote about van Wyhe's dreadful behaviour. Weale failed, of course, because an independent investigation by a Professor of Law and by HR at the university exonerated me of misconduct and pointed out Weal's disingenuity. Again, for the historical record, I have Weal's ludicrous, malicious, email to the VC Edward Peck and a copy of the findings of the investigation that exonerate me of academic misconduct.
Scholars of plagiarism and poor scholarship know that offenders are caught out when they copy mistranscribed text from secondary sources whist citing the primary source as where they got it. By comparing a photographic image of his original letter to his mother with the version of it he transcribed in his memoirs, I originally proved that Wallace slyly lied in his autobiography to cover up the fact he bragged to his mother that Darwin and his cronies were going to pay him for co-operating in essentially pretending that he and Darwin jointly but independently discovered Matthew's prior published theory independently of its prior published source in Matthew’s 1831 book. Get the independently
verifiable facts here.
Furthermore, I conducted an experiment that proved official Wikipedia editors of the Wikipedia page on Patrick Matthew are systematically deleting my newly unearthed facts about who read and reviewed and sought to brute censor so much as private rumination on Matthew's breakthrough years before Darwin or Wallace penned a word on the topic (see the
results here).
I suspect the Darwinites running the Darwin Correspondence Project will seek next to slyly hide the plagiarism of Calman's erroneous 1912 miss-transcription by editing the page with reference to the correct content of the original letter on the web page of
PatrickMatthew.com, yet fail to admit it. But they cannot hide what they did. Because their original page is now archived for all to see, here:
http://archive.is/IGEq3
Liars, plagiarists and malicious fact deniers always come undone in the end when facts follow their age old habit of burrowing to the surface. Then they get their rightful place in history. The facts and their deniers that is.
