Mike Sutton
Dr Mike Sutton is the author of 'Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret'.
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Seeing Further with William James Dempster: Pioneering Surgeon, Leading Scientist and Researcher in the Field of the World's Greatest Science Fraud
Apr. 19, 2014 8:08 am
On William James – W.J. – ‘Jim’ Dempster: Pioneer Surgeon, World Leading Research Scientist and Genuinely Great Skeptical Scientific Scholar on the Origin of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Jim DempsterAttribution
Dempster's Three Excellent Books on The History of the Discovery of Natural Selection
With the hi-tech discovery in 2014 of a wealth of new data, Jim Dempster's ground-breaking work is taken further in my book to argue two things (1) Patrick Matthew can now be the only independent discoverer of natural selection (2) Darwin and Wallace plagiarised Matthew and committed the world's greatest science fraud.Click here to find out more.
On Dempster
William James Dempster, known to his friends and associates as Jim, died aged 92 years in 2008.
The name W.J. Dempster has gone down in the annals of both the history of transplant surgery and the history of the discovery of natural selection.
(c) Soula Dempster. All rights reserved.Used only with express written permission
William James Dempster
Born on the island of Ibo, north of Madagascar, on 15 March 1918, Dempster was a pioneer kidney transplant surgeon and researcher (Reader) at Queen Mary’s Hospital, London.
Soon after initial breakthrough success in Boston USA, transplant surgery progress started in the UK. The first deceased donor transplant was unsuccessfully performed in the UK in 1955, at St Marys Hospital by Charles Rob (1913-2001) and Jim Dempster (See Joekes, et al 1957 ). At that time, it was Dempster who led the World in detailed research in kidney transplant surgery (see Dempster 1957; Hamilton 2012, p.195). Hopewell (2009) wrote of Dempster:
‘His contribution to the nature of the rejection reaction in canine renal allografts can rightly be called unique. He published more than a 100 reviews and papers on the subject between 1951 and 1957, gaining him worldwide recognition as a pioneer. His macro- and microscopic observations confirmed that rejection was an example of immune response, mediated by serum antibodies.’
Most people have heard of Dr Christian Barnard - who is acclaimed with performing the world's first heart transplant - but few of Dempster. That is a travesty because all of Bernard's supposedly successful transplant forays failed (see Grant 2007, p. 5), exactly as Dempster warned. Dempster knew that the science of tissue rejection was not yet ready.
In addition to his leading scholarship in human organ transplant surgery, following decades of research, Dempster unearthed 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.
Dempster (1996), was not anti-Darwinism because he totally accepted the veracity of the theory of natural selection as the best explanation for organic life forms. However, despite never coming right out and saying so in print, he appears to have been quite convinced that Darwin had, despite his own claims to the contrary, read Matthew’s (1831) prior publication of his unique discovery of natural selection. Moreover, Dempster finally concluded that evolutionary biologists were suppressing many facts about the origin of the Origin of Species (Dempster 2005, p. 10):
‘The suppression of the work of Patrick Matthew since 1831 raises doubts about the so-called intellectual integrity of many scientists.’
In the acknowledgements section of his 2005 ‘The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins’, a book that Dempster seemingly had no choice but to vanity publish with the Book Guild, it is most telling that such an admired, highly published in the leading science journals, pioneering researcher of international reputation, and highly praised skillful surgeon, such as Dempster felt the need to thank vanity publishers for: ‘…their cooperation and courage in publishing a book with a more balanced appreciation of Charles Darwin’.
© Soula Dempster. All rights reserved.Used only with express written permission
Jim Dempster and his wife Cherry. Picture taken in mid 1960's. Dempster in his mid-40's.
In the introduction to that excellent book, Dempster wrote so honestly and forcefully of the Darwinist-led ‘Patrick Matthew Burial Project’, that it is not difficult to see why the innumerable evolutionary biologists, who sit, effectively, as biased gatekeepers of the orthodox scientific press on the subject of evolution, engaged in petty, cowardly and devious brute censorship of his important findings and rational fact-based conclusions, that we can see clues regarding what might have led Dempster to resort to the use and then praise of vanity publishers; acts that might otherwise be disingenuously portrayed as pathetic. Dempster (2005, p. 1) wrote:
‘The twentieth century not only introduced the new ideas of Einstein and his colleagues to the attention of an awed public, but also an old subject – natural selection – was, at last, accepted by most of the influential biologists, 100 years after Patrick Matthew introduced the principle in 1831. Not only was natural selection accepted, but also Charles Darwin was ‘reinstated’ in the 1940’s, while Patrick Matthew was marginalised. Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr and several other distinguished biologists were responsible for this turn of affairs. What these biologists were now determined to do was to establish Charles Darwin as the only important initiator of evolution by natural selection. From 1942, when Julian Huxley published “Evolution, The Modern Synthesis”, the glorification of Darwin to the exclusion of everybody else began.’
In his 2005 book, knocking to pieces the fragile mythology spun around one great plaster saint of Darwinism, Dempster who had contracted malaria as a child, wrote that he thought it ludicrous that Alfred Russel Wallace had the impudence to claim that he had discovered the process of natural selection while suffering from the same incredibly serious illness (see Dempster 2005 ). Dempster’s first-hand experience of the ravages of malaria on his own then fevered brain, knew better. And he knew better from both research and experience, than to credulously believe the daft knowledge gap filling mythology of Darwinists that a trinity of amazingly ‘independent discovery’ of natural selection had been made first by Matthew (1831), who prominently published it, and then by Wallace (1855) and Darwin (1837, 1842, 1844,1858, 1859) who miraculously conceived the exact same idea, same name for it, and same explanatory examples of it, because they failed to read the one book in the world that others had read but not told them about.
For the most part the Darwinists sought to bury Dempster in oblivion by way of the silent treatment, but on rare occasion Dempster’s books did attract 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.’
For my own part, ignoring Bowler’s dreadful bulldogging dysology, inspired and greatly tutored by Dempster’s published research, my research efforts revealed (Sutton 2014) that Matthew did indeed influence three naturalists (Loudon, Selby and Chambers) who first cited Matthew’s 1831 book and then went on to most significantly influence and facilitate both Wallace’s and Darwin’s published work on natural selection.
Like Matthew and Darwin, Dempster studied at Edinburgh University. Of the three, only Dempster graduated. Matthew left, aged 17 to run his deceased father’s estate, business interests and orchards, and Darwin left, supposedly because he disliked anatomy classes, but also under a cloud of condemnation, after unethically presenting a paper on his furtive researches into his tutor’s unpublished discoveries. Darwin went on to take up a new degree course at Cambridge.
Dempster’s keen scientific scepticism was no doubt fuelled in part by his research work in the 1950’s, alongside Sir Arthur Keith, the famous anatomist and anthropologist who was involved in vouchsafing the remains of Piltdown Man as genuine. For some, that great error is enough to implicate him as a suspect in the great Piltdown Man science fraud.
Whilst I claim that Darwin and Wallace committed the World’s greatest science fraud, I suspect that some will argue that the Piltdown Man hoax remains the title holder. And that means that Dempster was, in one way or another, quite closely associated with what are arguably the two greatest science frauds of all time (see Info.com 2014).
The Piltdown Man is a counterfeit combination of a pre-historic fossilized modern-man human skull and fossilized ape-like jaw discovered in an English gravel pit in Sussex in 1912. An anonymous hoaxer had cleverly combined an ape jaw with skull fragments of a modern man. The effect was to create the impression that modern humans may have branched from a common ancestor and developed a larger brain before becoming more humanoid. The Piltdown skull was the only such example of its kind. All other specimens that had been discovered suggested increased brain size followed other evolutionary development towards modern human appearance. In other words, apart from the Piltdown fossil, earlier human ancestors were found to have smaller craniums and smaller and more delicate human jawbones. The 'missing link' fraud was so good that scientists argued over the veracity and meaning of the skull for some 40 years. The teeth in the ape jaw had been filed to give them the appearance of a human wear pattern. In the end, chemical investigations in the 1950s at last proved that the cranium and jaw were of different ages.
Dempster’s mentor, Keith (1886 – 1955) studied medicine at Marrischal College, Aberdeen where, among his achievements as an anatomist, he was awarded a copy of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. Between 1928 and 1955 Keith wrote the introduction to various printings of the Origin.
As well as being a renowned anatomist and anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith was also Director of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. We might guess that Sir Arthur nurtured Dempster’s (2005) interest in the venerable John Hunter, since it was Sir Arthur Keith who set up the experimental Buxton Browne Farm to emulate the philosophy and scientific practice behind Hunter’s famous botanical research establishment at Earls Court (Dempster et al 1963). And it was on Buxton Browne Farm that Dempster played a major role in pioneering transplant research (Hopewell 2014):
‘W.J. Dempster had trained in Edinburgh medical school, where he was a contemporary of (Professor Dame) Sheila Sherlock. On leaving the RAF after the war he sought further surgical training, as did so many of his contemporaries. Sheila, now working at Hammersmith, suggested he apply there. He did so successfully, and Prof. Ian Aird set him the task of investigating the fate of canine renal allografts, which later he wryly described as the worst job in the hospital. His animal work was carried out at the Buckston Browne Farm, the animal laboratory of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and he published over a hundred papers and reviews between 1953 and 1977. These included observations on the histological features of the rejection reaction; confirmation that it was an immune response mediated by serum antibodies; demonstration of the effect of irradiation; tolerance; the graft versus host reaction, and graft preservation. His work brought him worldwide recognition among fellow workers in the field although his contributions tend to have been overlooked, partly as the result of his warning against clinical transplantation just as it was due to take off.’And:‘…Jim Dempster’s warning against clinical transplantation in the late 1950s was justified. I say no more than that he had a feeling that the stage was not yet set for safe transplantation, and in that view he was correct, before the introduction of maintenance dialysis and chemotherapy for rejection. It was not until these provisions were met that patient survival from transplantation could be regarded as completely acceptable.’
Most intriguingly, Dempster, the professional scientific skeptic, had connections to Darwin that go deeper than his youthful association with Arthur Keith. Because, during the late 1940’s he spent six months at ‘Downe’, Charles’s Darwin’s house, which is today a shrine to Darwin, in the village of Downe in Bromley, Kent, at the time it was owned by the Royal college of Surgeons. Joekes (1997) explains why:
‘In 1948-9, I remember having lunch with one of the surgical assistants of the Chair of the Pathology unit there, James Dempster, with Ian Aird who was the Professor of Surgery. At that stage there were some rumors that somebody in South America, and I can't remember who it was, was treating people with acute renal failure by implanting on their radial arteries an ox kidney. And Ian Aird said to me, "Now why aren't we doing that?" And I said to him, "Well nothing at the moment would persuade me to have a foreign kidney put into my circulation. If I was bleeding, if I had acute nephritis, which was not my idea of how to set about it.""Well," he said, "Why don't you and James go down to Downe and solve this problem? I'll give you 6 months," he said. "Go down and solve the problem of transplantation.…Downe House was Charles Darwin's house, where he lived for many years before he died, and this had been bought by the Royal College of Surgeons and it had as a member one of these surgical urologists who was extremely crafty at passing a catheter on all the gentlemen with obstruction. And he made a large sum of money from this, which he gave to the College with a view that it should be altered to, Downe House and made a research laboratory....….We started looking at what was considered to be the only way to getting a transplanted kidney - in the neck. We published a paper showing that these kidneys didn't work normally. There had been some previous work in the mid 30's in which somebody had tied a non-elastic ligature around the ureter, partially obstructing it and the kidney behaved, so far as you could interpret the older data, exactly the same way these kidneys in the neck. So we decided that the right thing to do was to implant the kidney, not in the neck with the ureter coming to the outside and stenosing, but it should be put into the iliac fossa with the ureter implanted into the bladder so you wouldn’t run up against this stenotic problem of the ureter. This proved to be so and this kidney, these kidneys worked perfectly normally. And it was largely James Dempster's really beautiful surgical techniques that made all this work possible. I was really there only looking after the functional and electrolytic point of view to see what was happening. We wrote two papers on this. One on the neck kidney, and then the kidney in the RIF [right iliac fossa] and tried to publish it in this country, but none of the journals would accept it. They said that transplantation was not for the likes of us, and that kidney transplantation was not I think, as I suggested, not quite… British. So we had to send it to the Acta Medica Scandinavica where the papers were published eventually. I think a lot of people thought for a time that this work was being done in Scandinavia.’
It seems this was not to be the only time that Dempster’s ground-breaking research would be rejected. because so too, apparently, were Dempster’s three ground breaking books (Dempster 1983; 1996, 2005), on the topic of Matthew’s discovery of natural selection. Dempster's important books, it seems, were destined to be shelved unless vanity-published.
Paul Harris Publishing, the company that published his first book on Matthew went in receivership two years later (Glasgow herald 1985). Eleven years later Dempster (1996) re-published, with the much maligned vanity publisher ‘Pentland Press’ what was essentially the same book, quite expanded, clarified and edited to remove some of the unnecessary repetition of the first. This seminal work is the world’s first and most comprehensive account of Matthew’s (1831) work. Unfortunately, Pentland Press also collapsed with unpaid debts in 2002 (see Mirror 2002).
Dempster’s (1996), ‘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 that Matthew merely buried his ideas in one or two scattered passages in the book’s Appendix, when in fact Darwin knew full well - not least because Matthew informed him and Darwin admitted as much to his friend Joseph Hooker - that Matthew’s (1831) ideas on natural selection run throughout the entire book. By way of just three fact-based examples, it is in the main body of his book that Matthew uniquely named his breakthrough the 'natural process of selection', it is where he 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 Darwin (1859) uniquely four word shuffled the unique term that Matthew (1831) coined in the main body of On Naval Timber and Arboriculture to name his great discovery.
As said, Matthew named his breakthrough the ‘natural process of selection’. That fact is most important, because Darwin, who deployed the self-serving Appendix Myth, used the same four words to coin their only grammatically correct equivalent: the ‘process of natural selection’.
Darwin (1859) used that shuffled term – nine times in the Origin of Species, where he repeatedly referred to 'natural selection' as "my theory". Then, only a year later, he claimed to have had no prior-knowledge of the Matthew's book (see Sutton 2014) or the unique ideas within it. Small wonder Darwin was so keen to spread his Appendix Myth. Once Matthew went into the press in 1860 in the Gardener's Chronicle to lay claim to his misappropriated discovery, Darwin must have feared exposure if too many people were to read in detail anything other than the appendix to Matthew's book. (see Sutton 2014).
Dempster (1985) reasoned with a multitude of his own 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 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.
Dempster wrote that there is no need to accuse Darwin of plagiarising the work of Patrick Matthew because it is already well established that he acted badly in not citing his influencers in the first edition and other editions of the Origin of Species (Dempster, 1983 p. 64):
‘Patrick Matthew and Robert Chambers carried out their great tasks single- handed. Without the help on the one hand of his great wealth and on the other of Hooker, Lyell, Lubbock, Blyth, Wallace and many others, it is doubtful whether Darwin, single-handed, could have avoided making a botch of his theory or even whether he could have, had the Origin published. Even so, in spite of all the outside help, he retreated more and more towards Lamarckism.There is no need to charge Darwin with plagiarism. His scholarship and integrity were at fault in not providing all his references in the Origin: he had after 1859 another twenty years in which to do so. What one can say is that denigration of Patrick Matthew was unwarrantable and inexcusable.’
But if those last three sentences do not, in fact, say that Darwin had seen Matthew’s work, replicated it, and then perpetrated a long-running science fraud by never admitting he had prior-knowledge of Matthew’s discovery, what do they say?
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 in my own BestThinking article (Sutton 2014), which, incidentally, was flat rejected, without a word of reason, by the Journal for the History of Biology within 24 hours of it being submitted. Here then is a little circumstantial evidence, which might just possibly explain why Dempster’s superb scholarship on the story of the origin of Darwin’s Origin of Species had to be vanity published. Because it seems, in light of the evidence, possible that evolutionary biologists perhaps wish to play no part in the release of (a) unique and new hard-evidence discoveries that Darwin told deliberate self-serving lies about the location, depth, extent and early publication publicity surrounding Matthew’s explanation of his discovery (b) that Darwin created deliberate myths about Matthew in order to achieve primacy over the Originator, (c) the fact that Darwinists have for over a century been credulously parroting those same myths, rather than investigating Darwin's incredible claims of 'independent' discovery, and, most importantly of all, (d) the unique and new bombshell discovery that - contrary to current 'knowledge' Matthew actually did influence Darwin and Wallace via three prominent naturalists who cited Matthew's book pre-Origin and then went on to significantly influence and facilitate Darwin and Wallace in their published work on natural selection.
Following the flat refusal of the Journal for the History of Biology to even so much as send my ground-breaking article out for peer review, and following the refusal of dozens of mainstream scientific text book publishers to publish my forthcoming book on Matthew's newly discovered 100 per cent proven, verifiable, influence on Darwin and Wallace, without the BestThnking site, without 'PatrickMatthew.com ', and without various other websites and blogs that I publish, you would not now know that Robert Chambers - author of the hugely influential 'Vestiges of Creation' - and friend, correspondent and geological collaborator with Darwin - cited Matthew’s book in 1832, that Darwin's Royal Society colleague and co-committee member Prideaux John Selby (friend of Darwin's father) - cited Matthew’s book many times pre-Origin, commented on his natural selection notion of ‘power of occupancy', and then went on to edit and publish Wallace's (1855) Sarawak paper on evolution, and that John Loudon (1832) reviewed Matthew's book, commented upon its originality on the very topic of what he called 'the origin of species' and then edited and published Blyth's hugely influential, pre-Origin papers on natural selection – Blyth being Darwin’s most prolific informant on the subject of species and varieties (see Sutton 2014).
Why in the world would the scientific press, which is controlled on the precise topic of natural selection by known expert Darwinists - not wish to publish such a irrefutable, verifiable in the literature, bombshell of a discovery? Surely my manuscripts hailing this breakthrough in knowledge were not both flat rejected because they contain new and unique discoveries that blast to smithereens 154 years worth of Darwinian-led knowledge gap-filling mythology? It appears so - otherwise my arm should have, most surely, been taken off to the shoulder by objective scientists wishing to reveal this valuable brand-new and unique information that turns on its head, with hard facts, current rhetorical Darwinist explanations for the origin of Darwin's Origin of Species. And, by association, it seems rather likely that, having experienced self-serving Darwinian brute censorship, that the respected scientist Jim Dempster was forced to resort to the vanity press as the only way to publish his superbly informative scientific books in an age before platform-levelling e-books took off.
In his third book on Matthew, Dempster (2005) told some of the story of the naturalist John Hunter, but that book is really little more than a vehicle to once again explain just how much original material Matthew (1832) wrote on the subject of organic evolution. In it, Dempster explains how Matthew improved on the ideas of Buffon, Curvier, Lamarck and Decondolle.
One can only assume that, to their eternal shame, multiple rejections from mainstream publishers – too dim to properly assess important, sound and groundbreaking scholarship – or else too afraid to publish the heresy of a Darwin critic – meant that Dempster’s (2005) final book, published just four years before his death, was vanity published with the Book Guild. It’s a crying shame too that only after Dempster's death did biologists such as 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. Thanks to the work of a great pioneering surgeon, a truly great and original skeptical scientist, and thanks to Google's amazing library of 30 million+ searchable publications, we finally know the truth about the origin of Darwin's replication of Matthew's bombshell discovery.
Dempster's little-known books paved the way to the 2014 discovery of the real, shamefully fraudulent, origin of Darwin's Origin of Species. 'Nullius in Verba: Darwin's greatest secret' is dedicated to the man I never met beyond his written words . It begins:
'This book is dedicated to the scholarship of the pioneering surgeon, transplant scientist and organic evolution expert William James Dempster, without whose three superb seminal books I would not have known either how or where to begin. I read each through twice before starting and a third time before ending. Soon I will read them again.
Dr. Mike Sutton April 24th, 2014'.
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, http:
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. (1957) AN INTRODUCTION TO EXPERIMENTAL SURGICAL STUDIES. Oxford. Blackwell.
Dempster, W.J., Melrose, D. G. and McMillan, I. K. R. (1963). Buckston Browne Farm. Correspondence. British Medical Journal. March 16. p. 744. http:
Dempster, W. J. (1983) Patrick Matthew and Natural Selection. Edinburgh. Paul Harris Publishing.
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.
Glasgow Herald (1985) Contract for Paul Harris. June 29th. page 15: http:
Gould, S. J. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Harvard. Harvard University Press. pp. 137-141.
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. http:
Hopewell, J. (2014) Early History of the Treatment of Renal Failure. British Transplant Society. http:
Info.com. (2014) What was the World’s greatest science fraud: http:
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. http:
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: http:
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: http:
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.
Author's Favorite
Soula Dempster
May 24, 2015 at 6:44 am
Factual corrections to the above story of W J Dempster, with apologies to Mike Sutton for not coming up with these sooner.
Dear Mike,
The following statement has been attributed, on Facebook (seen May 2015), to Mr Alan Rickman, actor (best known for playing baddies like Snape in the Harry Potter films), writer and Director, alongside his photograph.
It goes like this:
“And it’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.”
I am assuming therefore that it is true, and a true reflection of Alan’s deepest thinking, and Alan Rickman did, in fact, say, and furthermore, believes in, his statement quoted above.
I comment in connection with this statement of Alan Rickman’s thusly:
If Alan Rickman could tell the truth for Patrick Matthew about his true role in originating the hypothesis of natural selection in his book ‘On Naval Timber and Arboriculture’ printed in 1831, a full 28 years before Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859; and tell the truth about Mr W J Dempster F R C S (Edinburgh and London) and his true role as Pioneer of Modern Kidney Transplantation Research in the late 40s and early 1950s until his early retirement from the field in 1978, it would do much to verify the veracity of his recent statement.
Alan Rickman would do well to read the ebook recently on Amazon.co.uk (2015) written by criminologist, Dr Mike Sutton, reader at Nottingham University, who has dedicated this book of his, Nullius In Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret, to W J Dempster in recognition of his pioneering work (from mid 1980s until his death in 2008) into the Patrick Matthew issue of true priority of natural selection and the Royal Society’s Charles Darwin’s scandalous malfaisance, to prove the veracity of Alan’s above statement. Otherwise, the above statement will remain just a mere curiosity that someone said at sometime and was thought to be true but was not verified in concrete terms: a mere footnote in the poor memory of time.
As The Royal Society of Medicine’s recent obituary of John Hopewell (undated), online Independent (20 May 2015) under Chris Maume of 16th May 2015, Alan Rickman will notnotice that the said John Hopewell seems to have returned from the war and, or so it reads to me, assumed the pioneering role of all the medical research at Buckston Browne Research Farm (Royal College of Surgeons Research Facility), Downe, Kent, into transplantation of kidney in late 1940s and early 1950s and seems to have assumed the role of Pioneer as ‘the’ Urologist. I can only find that he is an FRCP. I do not know if he is an FRCS and if the FRCS permits alone to perform operations on human bodies, therein lies a tale maybe. There are as few dates as possible to enable this attempt at re-writing the historical facts of transplantation history in John Hopewell’s name. A little unfair for him being dead and all, if you would care to read on.
So, again, the Royal Society of Medicine member, this time, is accorded a wrongful place in history, or so it reads to me, someone who knows quite a lot of pertinent facts in the historical period of which the obituary speaks.
I have held, in my hand, at my father’s (W J Dempster, FRCS) laboratory on premises of Hammersmith Hospital, Du Cane Road, London, at the age of 6 (circa 1963), the beating heart of an extra heart placed in the carotid artery of a dog in his research experiment to keep the brain alive better than relying solely on the iron lung which had difficulty to provide enough oxygen to the brain during the transplant operation of the heart. The dog was alive and well, did not seem to be in any pain, was happy to come to me for strokes and cuddles. But the surgeon who performed the operation on a human earlier in 1955, at which my father assisted looking through a glass dome over the operating area, so I believe, didn’t have so much luck and the patient died.
And, due to my father’s early remark made in his paper on Kidney Homotransplantation (August 1952), and I quote:
“While it may be heroic surgery to attempt, at this juncture, kidney homotransplants in the human, it is unwise to carry out such procedures without any scientific knowledge of the fundamental processes involved. When all the evidence of the nature of the disintegration of homotransplanted tissue is borne in mind, it is quite out of the question that kidneys should be homotransplanted in man just in case a permanent survival might be obtained.”
For which statement, Mr W J Dempster F R C S suffered greatly at that hands of his peers and colleagues, and finally, when he thought he had discovered a 4th cell in the blood he was blocked from using the electron microscope at the National Physical Laboratory, London. The field was left open and someone else claimed the discovery.
In John Hopewell’s ‘Early History of the Treatment of Renal Failure’ published on the British Transplant Society website, (BTS.org.uk/About-Us/History/Memoir_by_John_Hopewell), first seen by myself on 24th Feb 2013 and verified in May 2015, Hopewell states thusly:
“His [W J Dempster] work brought him worldwide recognition among fellow workers in the field although his contributions tend to have been overlooked, partly as the result of his warning against clinical transplantation just as it was due to take off. Below, I [John Hopewell] introduce an argument that he may have been right after all.”
Writing a Biographical Entry for Dempster, William James, the Royal College of Surgeons, Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows Online Library, seen by myself on 07/03/2015, they write, and I quote:
“His [WJ Dempster] contribution to the nature of the rejection reaction in canine renal allografts can rightly be called unique. He published more than a 100 reviews and papers on the subject between 1951 and 1957, gaining him worldwide recognition as a pioneer. His macro- and microscopic observations confirmed that rejection was an example of immune response, mediated by serum antibodies… Jim and his colleagues were also the first to show that not only delayed type hypersensitivity reactions but also the response to skin allografts could be suppressed in animals by whole-body x-irradiation. He also anticipated the concept of graft-versus-host responses.”
The Royal Society of Medicine, in 2015, and John Hopewell, writing in 2013, must think that I and my two brothers, daughter and sons of Mr W J Dempster FRCS are already dead or not game enough to make their father’s contributions fully known.
As with Patrick Matthew, my father is buried in an unmarked grave.
Both original discoveries in hypothesis of Natural Selection and delicate research and techniques for the safe transplantation of kidney and heart were therefore gifted to the world in the same way that the World Wide Web was gifted by Sir Tim Burners Lee with the unfortunate result that it was left to others to make money from these.
They reinstated Alan Turing, didn’t they?
My plea to Alan Rickman, the famous actor, writer and director, therefore, is that he qualify his above statement and bring a concept, thus far unreal, into reality and make it concrete, or else he and his statement will be consigned to oblivion. But Alan Rickman, for all the baddies’ roles that have given him fame, he may find the role of Charles Darwin just too bad as to give him infamy.
Thanks for listening.
Well we never know who is listening Soula.
We found Matthew's grave last week.
The truth will always burrow upwards in the end.
In the words of Johnny Cash "You screw with me and I'll screw right up from underneath ya".
It's time to set some more records straight. Its quite clear that the shameful and pseudoscienceihistory inspired Darwinist Patrick Matthew Burial Project included your father's later work on Matthew. The fact he was side-lined for an earlier involvement in ethics and veracity at the expense of popularization of false heroics is most interesting.
Semmelweis was a similarly officially-faked national hero (Hungarrian) .
I wonder how many other scandals involve other fake heroes?
Soula Dempster
April 28, 2015 at 10:43 am
Words From the Dempster Family
In your expose on W J Dempster, 19 April, 2014, an article of dynamic proportions that my father, W J Dempster of the article, would have been immensely proud. Just two minor things though. W J Dempster did die in 2008, but he was 92 years of age. In the caption under the first image, it reads, W D Dempster. But no matter really.
I think that the article is excellent. John Hopewell has written kindly after my father's death of course, that it was to be regretted that my father left the research field when he did. I think the next myth to be busted about W J Dempster is the fact that he was not anti-Darwinist THEORY. If he were, I would have known about it, and it would have meant that he was religious. He knew the bible well as in his own words he had been a 'God-believing will-he' until the age of around 15 (influenced by his uncle who was a priest) when he was introduced to other texts by other people (unfortunately, he never mentioned who).
He was anti Darwin the MAN because of his disgraceful obliteration (attempted of course) of all his contributors to what became HIS theory alone. I tracked down an article on the fact that an Essex beekeeper had had a letter from Darwin saying that he thought he had written to thank this person for his contribution to his understanding of how the honey bee forms the honeycomb cells but he thought it might have got lost in the post. I have been searching for the link again but am unable to find it. I was looking at the Essex Beekeeping Association and the Chelmsford one, but just can't find it back. I should have documented this of course but I lack this discipline at moments.
Sorry! I think my father did not make it clear that he was not anti-Darwinist THEORY, because he was perhaps courting controversy in order to be able to write about all the people who had contributed to the hefty tome but not been recognised in the first edition, at least. We could not understand, as a family, his intense delight and enthusiasm when he turned up some unknown contributor to the THEORY. Not that is, until now.
I find myself similarly bitten by the bug of trying to produce some writings for children to encourage them to simply keep their environment litter-free and plant bee-friendly flowers in their gardens, failing that a window box. Just trying to help the enivronmental programme and bees in general! I'm just thinking that maybe his name is still linked with an anti-Darwinist position and that maybe I'm guilty by association.
Yours most sincerely, Soula Dempster
Dear Soula
Thank you for writing to Best Thinking with these helpful comments and reflections. Howard L. Minnick (who has commented below) is the third great grandson of Patrick Matthew. He corresponded with your father and has links to The Patrick Matthew Trust.
Many thanks for pointing out the caption typo. I have now corrected it accordingly. I corrected also to add the fact your father was aged 92 when he died. I updated the article by adding at the very end the fact that my book is dedicated to your father's work on Matthew.
There is an old newspaper article from 1860 which covers the story that a beekeeper has accused Darwin of plagiarisng his work on honeycomb cells. I transcribed it for a website called The Patrick Matthew Project. the article was written in response to Matthew's claims that Darwin was getting the credit for his theory. The story was covered on 24 November 1860 in the Saturday Analyst and Leader, The website has not yet published the transcribed article but they will soon. I forget the name of the beekeeper in question - but he is named in the article.
Personally I was never in any doubt that your father totally accepted the theory of natural selection as veracious. His work makes this very clear and it is the best we have that shows exactly and to what great extent Matthew got the whole thing first.
An unanswered question arises as to whether your father believed Darwin deliberately plagiarized Matthew's work. He came as close as it is possible to get when he wrote in his book of 1983 - Dempster, W. J. (1983) Patrick Matthew and Natural Selection. Edinburgh. Paul Harris Publishing. on page 64:
.There is no need to charge Darwin with plagiarism. His scholarship and integrity were at fault in not providing all his references in the Origin: he had after 1859 another twenty years in which to do so. What one can say is that denigration of Patrick Matthew was unwarrantable and inexcusable.’
As someone who would know. I wonder if I might intrude to ask if you could let us know whether or not your father believed that Darwin had definitely read and plagiarized Matthew's work? Or did he express any doubts about that being the case?
Soula Dempster
April 29, 2015 at 9:53 am
In reply:
Excuse the informality of my address but I feel I know you, Mike, through your article on W J Dempster, my dad. His enthusiasm and energy for research into the topic never left him right up until he died at 92. It has brought tears of joy to my eyes and is really nice to have him supported after all these years even though he has passed on and perhaps he knows it still.
As a family, we never did quite understand why he just had to continue with the furrow he was ploughing - so deep did it get.
As a family, we never did quite understand why he just had to continue with the furrow he was ploughing - so deep did it get.
I remember my father telling me the story of driving Sir Arthur Keith around the countryside on jolly trips out. "Well," said Sir Arthur, "if you are going to go at this pace all the time, you'd better take me home now."
My father slowed down from a near top speed of 30 mph to a more reasonable speed of around 20mph or less so that Sir Arthur could take in the sights, sounds and smells all around him. Another interpretation of this could be that the scientist goes slowly over his/her territory, checking and re-checking and thinking laterally in the way of turning one's head from side to side to get the best view, unblinkered.
My father slowed down from a near top speed of 30 mph to a more reasonable speed of around 20mph or less so that Sir Arthur could take in the sights, sounds and smells all around him. Another interpretation of this could be that the scientist goes slowly over his/her territory, checking and re-checking and thinking laterally in the way of turning one's head from side to side to get the best view, unblinkered.
I'm sorry, Mike but my father would only go as far as to say of Darwin that he must have known about Matthew.
I do remember typing up some correspondence to Howard Minnick during the 3 years I looked after my father following my mother's demise. My father had tracked down Patrick Matthew's relative in New Zealand (and got her to send some Manuka honey for me). They exchanged some letters and she revealed that her son had drowned off the coast a while earlier (not good on dates) so Matthew's line was set to be forever expunged. Then Howard turned up! My father was delighted.
I wonder, Mike, if we might email privately?
Kind regards,
Soula Dempster
Dear Soula
Yes, of course we can email privately. I think you have my university email address from the email I sent this afternoon.
Howard arranged for us to have copies of two volumes of Matthew family history that was authored by Wulf G. Gerdts - who is related to Matthew through his son who had a farm in Germany.
Volume 1 contains pictures of Matthew that were not before seen in the public domain. You can see them {here }. The same site has a page on your father {here } For the historical record, I would like to add some more information - including a photograph - of your father to that page. We can, of course discuss that possibility through email Michael.sutton@ntu.ac.uk
Very many thanks for letting us know your father's ultimate considered opinion on what Darwin knew about the existence of Matthew.
I learned form Dr Mike Weale that I was wrong about that newspaper article having anything in it about a beekeeper.
Dr Weal just had an important paper published in the Linnean journal on the importance of Matthew. Dr Weale cites your father's work in his paper. I will email you a copy of his Linnean Journal paper. Links to the BBC Radio 4 interview can be found {here} Dr Weale's site contains everything we've been able to find out about Matthew. Its a treasure store {here}
Kindest regards
Mike
Howard L. Minnick
March 21, 2015 at 3:34 pm
Redundency is Redundantly Ignorant of The Facts !!!
It's true Mike....and it's by choice, We could both write a book about it... and ironically... probably make a fortune on it. That's what makes it so damn laughable...
Howard
Howard - The history of science is not going to treat well Darwin and his Darwinists.
Early deceit from Darwin, and subsequent credulous acceptance of his fallacious tale that no naturalist known to him had read Matthew's ideas, has dominated the literature for the past 155 years. Following my unique discoveries - revealed in Nullius in 2014 - we now newly know - thanks to BigData searching technology - that both Darwin and Wallace were surrounded by naturalists who did read Matthew's book prior to 1858 - because they cited it in the literature. Hence their minds were fertile with Matthew's ideas. Darwinists are now left believing in the miracle of Darwin's and Wallace's duel independent, "immaculate" conceptions of Matthew's prior published theory. Such improbable duel 'independent' conceptions, free of any 'knowledge contamination' - in light of the facts about who we now know they knew who cited Matthew's book pre-1858, is analogous to St Mary's virgin conception of Jesus of Nazareth with the help of a supernatural deity whilst surrounded by fertile human men. It's not a great time to be an atheist Darwinist unless you care to believe in highly improbable miracles and think that they should be taught as history of science knowledge in universities.
The 2014 New Data is only the first wave. I expect The Frozen Donkey Hypothesiswill be confirmed and scholars will from now on simply go around Darwinists and establish a new power of occupancy in the literature on the history of the discovery of Natural Selection.
