Did Alfred Russel Wallace Wear a Tin-Foil Hat?

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

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

Public Domain

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

“Darwin ‘stole’ theory of natural selection”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Apocryphal Semelweis Reflex 

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

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

A Classic Case of Cultural Cognitive Dissonance 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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References

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

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

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

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

VISIT PatrickMatthew.com for more information.

The wise man mocks the mocker. The mocker mocks the man.

From the third edition of the Origin of Species onward Charles Darwin (1861) admitted that Patrick Matthew (1831) had published the full hypothesis of natural selection 27 years before he and Wallace (Darwin and Wallace 1858. Darwin 1859) replicated Matthew's original discovery (without citing Matthew).

Darwin wrote in his the historical sketch in the Origin (Darwin 1861):

" The differences of Mr. Matthew's view from mine are not of much importance: he seems to consider that the world was nearly depopulated at successive periods, and then re-stocked; and he gives, as an alternative, that new forms may be generated "without the presence of any mould or germ of former aggregates."

Here Darwin does two things. Both show us his enormously sly and mockingly disingenuous dishonest character, which he deployed to hoodwink his credulous deifying "Darwinist" groupies for 155 years. Firstly, knowing full well that he was promoting, at Matthew's expense, the then fashionable (but since thoroughly debunked - see Rampino) Uniformitarian principles promoted by his mentor Charles Lyel, that geological and meteorological catastrophic events never occurred, Darwin was slyly mocking Matthew by implying he was an ignorant and out of touch biblical (e.g. Noah's  flood) catastrophist. And secondly, Darwin implies that Matthew was muddled because he seemed to believe equally in both the process of natural selection leading to the origin of new species and the alternative possibility that a God did it all.

Here is what Matthew (1831, page 384) actually wrote:

Moreover, elsewhere in his 1831 book (In Note F of the Appendix) , Matthew makes it profoundly clear that he has just handed "God" his redundancy papers as an interfering creator of new and extinguisher of old species: '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. ' Darwin's deliberate and self-serving dishonest portrayal of Matthew as someone less scientific than himself is highlighted by how his own words are more supplicating to the notion of a miraculous "God" existing and first creating species than the man whose prior-published ideas he replicated and claimed as his own Darwin, p.525 The Origin of Species: 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.' Actually reading what Matthew wrote, as opposed to what Darwin mockingly implied, reveals the dishonest depths to which the great replicating, and hypocritical, wriggler burrowed in order to portray the true Originator, Matthew, as an unscientific crank, so that he, Darwin, could achieve priority over the true originator of the full hypothesis of natural selection.

Veracious historical analysis reveals, therefore, that an old saying has evolved into a new species. Namely: The wise man mocks the mocker. The mocker mocks the man.

On: The wisdom of mockery

The wise man mocks the mocker,
The mocker mocks the man,
The mocked man mocks the mocker,

Visit the Patrick Matthew website: PatrickMatthew.com for more information about the true biological father of the complete hypothesis of natural selection

The Royal Society: An Institution that Celebrates its Great Science Fraudsters with Pride

The respective English and Welsh theft by Fellow of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin (FRS), and Alfred Wallace of the discovery of the theory of natural selection from the Scottish botanist and farmer Patrick Matthew (see Sutton 2014) is not the first time that a Royal Society member from south of the border managed to steal the great discoveries of one their northern neighbours. Darwin and Wallace got away with it for 154 years. However, an earlier science swindler, Sir Charles Wheatstone, was less successful at evading detection.

Trumpet from the rooftopsPublic Domain

Sir Charles Wheatstone (FRS) convicted science fraudster

In 1840 Sir Charles Wheatstone (FRS   ) dismissed the worth of the invention of the electric clock by the Scottish genius Alexander Bain with a wave of the back of his hand. Bain, who had little money to promote his invention had hoped for Wheatstone's support. Instead, Wheatstone capered off to "independently invent" an electric clock of his own. A few weeks later Wheatstone slyly demonstrated his new invention of the electric clock to the Royal Society, which he claimed to have invented all by himself. Next, Wheatstone followed-up that conscienceless rip-off by trying to have Bain’s patent expunged.

Trumpet from the rooftopsAttribution

Alexander Bain Scottish Inventor Victimised by Sir Charles Wheatstone (FRS) convicted Science Fraudster

Though born a humble crofters son   , Bain litigated and Wheatstone lost and was ordered to make restitution to Bain   .

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia, at the time of writing (26 May 2014), typically has the facts of this matter nicely Victorian-smog-mixed with another issue and so has conveniently obfuscated the court's finding of guilt very neatly in favour of Sir Charles Wheatstone (FRS   ) Wikipedia page on Wheatstone May 26 2014::   

‘On 26 November 1840, he exhibited his electro-magnetic clock in the library of the Royal Society, and propounded a plan for distributing the correct time from a standard clock to a number of local timepieces. The circuits of these were to be electrified by a key or contact-maker actuated by the arbour of the standard, and their hands corrected by electro-magnetism. The following January Alexander Bain    took out a patent for an electro-magnetic clock, and he subsequently charged Wheatstone with appropriating his ideas. It appears that Bain worked as a mechanist to Wheatstone from August to December, 1840, and he asserted that he had communicated the idea of an electric clock to Wheatstone during that period;but Wheatstone maintained that he had experimented in that direction during May. Bain further accused Wheatstone of stealing his idea of the electro-magnetic printing telegraph; but Wheatstone showed that the instrument was only a modification of his own electro-magnetic telegraph.’

Warning: don’t trust Wikipedia!

As we can see in the above example - some Wikipedians are as biased as Darwinists when it comes to failing to equally weigh and honestly present any evidence against their Royal Society idols. Moreover, in my personal experience, some Wikipedia senior editors are as morally bankrupt as Wheatstone when it comes to stealing the discoveries of others and effectively passing them off as their own - see Sutton 2013 for details.

So what happened to Bain in the end? John Lienhard writes   : 

‘Bain died poor at 67, in a home for the terminally ill. And we're left asking why things work this way. In fact, our sense of justice recoils. Yet creating ideas and making money are two separate human enterprises. Bain managed only the idea part. Yet history might be more just than it first seems. For when we trace the story of these devices, we find Bain wearing the crown for having changed his world after all. And that's really no small reward.’ 

Interestingly, the science swindler Wheatstone can be seen in this picture sitting    close to another famous Royal Society science crook - Charles Darwin (FRS).

Public Domain

Royal Society Fellows and Fellow Science Swindlers

For more details on this and further examples of great science frauds you could do worse than read Grant, J. ( 2007) Corrupted Science: Fraud, ideology and politics in science. Wisley. Artists and Photographers Press Ltd.   

Click here to read the book that dropped the bombshell on the history of science. Big data analysis proves Darwin and Wallace stole the theory of natural selection from Patrick Matthew:

Thinker Media IncUsed only with express written permission

Nullius in Verba

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On Why Darwinists are Extremists

Darwin: The Microscopist Who Didn't Discover Evolution.  By Brian J. Ford. The Microscope. 59:3, 2011. pp 129-137. Click to read

Darwin neither discovered evolution as a general concept, nor did he discover evolution by natural selection. Others, whose work he knew, got there long before him.

p.129:

"But why is he [Darwin] universally promoted as one of the world's greatest iconoclasts? Evolution was not his idea, yet 'Darwinian evolution' is a buzzword. Indeed the question, 'Are you, or are you not, a Darwinist?' seems to mark out the real biologists from those beyond the pale."

"If you don't espouse Darwinism, then the biological establishment won't want you."

p. 136:

"Darwin is set on a pedestal as though he were Einstein or Copernicus, and anyone doubting adherence to this conventional view risks ostracism. In science, as much as in religion, we can find extreme views that fly in the face of realities."

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

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

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

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

Available at Amazon

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

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

Royal Society Darwin Medal

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

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

Patrick Matthew . Com

The website PatrickMatthew.com was established in 2104 following the unique Big Data discovery, revealed in Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret, that influential naturalists, known to both Charles Darwin and  Alfred Wallace, had read and then cited the 1831 book containing Patrick Matthew's full hypothesis of natural selection before Darwin and Wallace each replicated it along with many of Matthew's unique explanatory examples.

This paradigm changing new discovery in the history of science busts the 155 year old myth, started by Darwin in 1860, that Darwin and Wallace each discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Matthew. Moreover, Darwin's fallacious claim, that before 1860 no naturalist had read Matthew's ideas, is newly 100 per cent proven to have been just one of six deliberate self-serving lies he told to achieve priority over Matthew.

Technological progress in internet search engine technology facilitated original Big Data research in Google's Library Project of over 30 million searchable books and other publications. This research led to game-changing discoveries, which have transformed the unique anomaly of Darwin's and Wallace's claimed dual independent discoveries of Matthew's prior-published original ideas. That old anomaly was changed by the New Data in 2014 from a vexation into a crisis of credulous deifying Darwinist belief in a double occurrence of paradoxical immaculate conceptions by Darwin and Wallace, miraculously occurring as each logically must, whilst they were surrounded by naturalists they knew, who influenced them, and whose minds were fertile with Matthew's original work, having read and then cited his 1831 book decades before Wallace (1855), Darwin and Wallace (1858) and Darwin (1842, 1844 and 1859) replicated the original work within it, and decades before Darwin fallaciously claimed no naturalist had read it before 1860.

http://patrickmatthew.com/

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