My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century: Natural Selection and Patrick Matthew (Paperback)
William James Dempster, the author of 'Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century' (Dempster 1996) , died aged 90 years in 2008. The name W.J. Dempster has gone down in the annals of both the history of transplant surgery and, thanks to this book, the history of the discovery of natural selection.
It in in this book that Dempster ably champions the great contribution to knowledge that was made by Patrick Matthew many years before Wallce and Darwin replicated Matthew's discovery, his name for it and the examples he used to explain it.
Dempster unearths many examples of Charles Darwin’s poor scholarship, lack of integrity and unwarranted, yet self-serving, denigration of Patrick Matthew - the little known true originator of the theory of natural selection.
For the most part the Darwinists sought to bury Dempster and this book in oblivion by way of the silent treatment, but on rare occasion Dempster’s books did attracted scorn from Darwinists. One particular scholar of the history of science reveals his own bias in a laughable example of desperate muddled thinking and failure to understand the importance of questing for veracity in history:
Bowler (1983 p.158):
‘One writer has even gone so far as to hail Matthew as the originator of the modern evolution theory (Dempster 1996). Such efforts to denigrate Darwin misunderstand the whole point of the history of science: Matthew did suggest a basic idea of selection, but he did nothing to develop it; and he published it in an appendix to a book on the raising of trees for ship building. No one took him seriously, and he played no role in the emergence of Darwinism. Simple priority is not enough to earn a thinker a place in the history of science: one has to develop the idea and convince others of its value to make a real contribution. Darwin’s notebooks confirm that he drew no inspiration from Matthew or any of the other alleged precursors.’
Pentland Press’ the vanity publisher of this book collapsed with unpaid debts in 2002 (see Mirror 2002) yet new and second-hand copies can be picked up at bargain process here on Amazon. Snap yours up, because I expect them to become collector’s items now that Darwin's and Wallace's great science fraud was proven in 2014.
‘Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century’ is essential reading for anyone interested in seeing further than the fallacious pens of biased Darwinists who, never having read a word of Matthew’s original book, insist on parroting Darwin’s snaky lie Matthew merely buried his ideas in one or two scattered passages in the book’s Appendix, when in fact Matthew’s (1831) ideas on natural selection run throughout the entire book. By way of fact-based example, it is in the main body of the book that Matthew used the analogy of artificial selection as a heuristic device to explain natural selection and it is where he called upon naturalists to conduct experiment to test his hypothesis. What Dempster failed to discover, however, in all three of his books on the topic, is that it is also in the main body of Naval Timber and Arboriculture where Matthew (1831) uniquely named his breakthrough the ‘natural process of selection’. That finding is important because, Darwin who started the self-serving Appendix Myth, uniquely shuffled those same four words into their only other grammatically correct equivalent: the ‘process of natural selection’. Darwin (1859) used that shuffled term – nine times in the Origin of Species. A year later, he claimed to have had no prior-knowledge of the Originator’s book (see Sutton 2014).
Where Dempster's valuable contribiton makes a ground breaking difference is in his reasoned arguments, supported with a multitude of his own new evidence, that Matthew should be hailed as the true discoverer of natural selection, simply because he most certainly did more than merely enunciate it, he worked it out and published it in detail as a complex and fully comprehensive law of nature. Moreover, Matthew got it right and Darwin wrong when it came to comprehending the impact of geological disasters on species extinction and emergence. Yet, from the third edition of the Origin onwards, Darwin (1861), a follower of Lyell’s erroneous uniformitarianism, jumped at the chance to denigrate Matthew by referring to him as a catastrophist. Dempster (1996) made this injustice abundantly clear, but if you can find a Darwinist, or any other biologist, admitting as much and citing Dempster then you've found one more than I have. Punctuated equilibrium – essentially Matthew’s discovery - is accepted science today but, as as Dempster (1996; 2005) noted its Darwinist purveyors sought to keep the originator of that theory buried in footnote oblivion. Rampino (2011) explains some of the detail.
However, as Dempster made clear, Matthew also accepted at face value, in print at least, Darwin’s excuse that he had arrived at the theory independently. Consequently, despite Dempster’s able championing of Matthew, Darwinists retained their solution to the problem of Matthew’s prior discovery by affixing him with their mutually approved status of obscure curiosity. Refusing to give the originator of natural selection his due credit for discovering it – no matter how good and complete his hypothesis - Darwinists stuck to their guns – in the teeth of Dempster’s superb scholarship - by claiming that there was no evidence that Matthew had influenced a single person with his discovery. Filling in the knowledge gaps as to what really happened to Matthew’s ideas between their publication in 1831 and Wallace’s, (1855), Darwin’s and Wallace’s (1858) and Darwin’s (1859) replication, Darwinists simply parroted Darwin’s Appendix Myth, Scattered Passages Myth and Mere Enunciation Myth as plausible devices to enable them to accept Darwin’s fallacious tale that Matthew’s ideas went unread by natural scientists until Matthew drew Darwin’s attention to them in 1860. All three of the above myths are uniquely bust (Sutton 2014).
It’s a crying shame too that only after Dempster's death did biologists such Dawkins (2010) and Bowler (2013), respectively, cite and treat more fairly Dempster’s classic ground-breaking work on Matthew's unique contribution to knowledge.
Dempster’s informed reasoning that Matthew should be duly recognised and celebrated as an immortal great of science, with full priority over Darwin and Wallace, is now confirmed by the newly disproven arguments of leading Darwinists such as Mayr (1982), Gould (2002), Shermer (2002), Hamilton (2001) and, most recently, Dawkins (2010). Because their biased Matthew denial opinions have their roots in Darwin’s, newly debunked, self-serving myths and lies (see Sutton 2014).
Most crucially, Dempster’s stalwart scholarship and excellent books on Matthew’s significant contribution to knowledge played a priceless role in helping me to finally set the historical record straight by proving that Darwin and Wallace were enormously influenced by Matthew’s prior-discovery of the natural process of selection before each replicated it while claiming to have discovered it independently.
By so by ably championing Matthew, against all odds, Dempster's stalwart scholarship rescues those who read it from the unquestioning mythical stories told by Darwinists desperate to keep their namesake from veracious scholarly dissection.
As Matthew (1831, p. vii) so presciently wrote:
'...the man who pursues science for its own sake, and not for the pride of possession, will feel more gratitude towards the surgeon, who dislodges a cataract from the mind's eye, than towards the one who repairs the defect of the bodily organ.'
Today, we can, if we so choose, read Dempster in light of the newly discovered facts about what really happened to the ideas in Matthew's book pre-Origin (Sutton 2014). By so doing , we can at last see further than the end of Darwin's fallacious pen, and further than the lingering Victorian smog of faux-skepticism born of adoring Darwinist propaganda.
Biblography and References
Bowler, P.J. (1983) Evolution: the history of an idea. Berkeley. The University of California Press. p.158.
Darwin, C. R. (1837) Notebook B: Transmutation of species (1837-1838)]. CUL-DAR121. Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker. Darwin Online.
Darwin, C. R. (1842) Unpublished Essay on natural selection. See Darwin Online.org.uk.
Darwin, C. R. (1844) Unpublished Essay on natural selection. See Darwin Online.Org.uk
Darwin, C. R. and Wallace, A. R. (1858)On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London.
Darwin. C. R. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London. John Murray.
Darwin, C. R. (1861) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (Third Edition) London. John Murray.
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.
Dempster, W. J (1996) Evolutionary Concepts in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh. The Pentland Press.
Dempster, W. J. (2005) The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins. Sussex. Book Guild Publishing.
Hamilton, W. D. (2001) Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2: Evolution of Sex. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Hamilton, D. (2012) A History of Organ Transplantation. Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Hopewell, J. (2009) Dempster, William James (1918 - 2008), Plarr's Lives of the Fellows Online. THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND.[...]
Hopewell, J. (2014) Early History of the Treatment of Renal Failure. British Transplant Society.
Joekes, M. Porter, K.A. and Dempster, W.J. (1957). Immediate post-operative anuria in a human renal homotransplant. British Journal of Surgery. Volume 44, Issue 188, pages 607–615, May.
Joekes, M. (1997) ISN VIDEO LEGACY PROJECT. Volumes 3-4. p. 280-295.
Mayr, E (1982) The growth of biological thought: diversity, evolution, and inheritance. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.
Mirror (2002) The Book Worm Turns Up Yet Again.
Rampino, M. R. (2011) Darwin's error? Patrick Matthew and the catastrophic nature of the geologic record. Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology. Volume 23, Issue 2-3.
Shermer, M. (2002) In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Sutton, M. (2014) Internet Dating with Darwin: New Discovery that Darwin and Wallace were Influenced by Matthew's Prior-Discovery. BestThinking.com.
Wallace, A. R. (1855) On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species. The Annals and Magazine of Natural History. Series 2. 16. 184-196
Wallace, A. R. (1858) Paper presented to the Linnean Society in: Darwin, C. R. and Wallace, A. R. (1858)On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London.
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