The Google Monster
The Google (1913)
My original work in discovering the links between David Low and Robert Mudie to Patrick Matthew's (1831) Original prior-published discovery of the 'natural process of selection' and Darwin's replication of it would not have been possible without Google Chrome and the ID research method, which enabled me to search through over 30 million books and journals.
So effective is the ID research method that it enabled me to get back further with the Google search engine than Google's own staff - where I used the Google Monster to sniff out its namesake.
Into the forests of the 19th century with Google to find evidence of Darwin's plagiarism
In the year I was born,
Loren Eiseley caused a stir in 1959 when he accused Charles Darwin of plagiarizing the work of
Edward Blyth (see
Smith 1979 for an interesting but somewhat disingenuous overview of Eisleley's collected works of 1979, where Smith, in the general and unfortuantely biased fashion of so many typical desperate dysological Darwinists gives the dismissive false impression - deliberate or just remiss - that it is he who has discovered that Blyth took much from Mudie's 1835 "Feathered Tribes" book, when in fact Eiseley (1979, e.g, page 61) labored the point and it is from him that Smith gets it - so long as you bother to read Eiseley carefully.. The difference between Blyth and Smith is that Blyth was careful to cite his sources. The difference between Blyth and Darwin is just the same! The difference between Eiseley and Smith is that Eiseley was careful to cite his sources. The difference between Eiseley and Darwin the same.
Eiseley's collected papers on the topic of Darwin's plagiarism of Blyth can be found in the Book that contains those collected papers on Darwin. namely,
Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X , which was published in 1979, two years after Eiseley's death.
Edward Blyth is acknowledge to have Influenced Darwin. His most influential papers were edited by Loudon, who had earlier - in 1832 - reviewed Matthew's (1831) book and said it might have something original to say on "the origin of species"! Darwin's associate William Hooker (father of Darwin's best friend) knew Loudon and his friends very well!
Loren Eiseley (1979) ably demonstrated (pp 61-62) that Darwin cumulatively borrowed from Blyth's (1835) book 'The feathered tribes of the British islands' and his other published papers, without citing them.
Much of Darwin's prose, it was ably demonstrated by Eiseley, came from Blyth's papers of 1835 and 1837. But it is true also that nothing much of the full hypothesis of natural selection comes from them (
see Smith 1979 ); although they are important papers on variety and habitat etc. But when it comes to his
1837 paper on to topic of "variation" and the "localizing principle" - (published by Longman and co - Matthew's London publisher - no less) - Eiseley (1979, p. 91) explains that Blyth comes close to the theory on natural selection. On this point, Eiseley- points out the work of De Beer which shows how much Blyth influenced Darwin's writing in his private
Zoonomianotebook of 1837-38. What De Beer and Eiseley failed to note is that Blyth's "localizing principle" is heavily dependent upon Matthew's bombshell observations six years earlier of "power of occupancy".
In particular, we must remember that the religious Blyth did not believe in the evolution of species and pulled back form where his prose was leading-back to Matthew's conclusions that species could vary so much that they became new species. See Eiseley (1979 p.58 for an explanation of this fact). And that is a key point about the limitations of stopping at Blyth, as Eiselely did, and of not going back from him to Matthew - who originated and wrote out the entire theory of natural selection and was cited many times and reviewed by Blyth's editor - John Loudon and with whom we can establish collegiate links with Blyth's friend Mudie and others (as explained in great detail in
Nullius ) and particularly Mudie's acknowledged influence on Blyth and the prose and ideas that Darwin copied from Blyth, without any attribution, that Blyth did attribute to Mudie.
Some 55 years later, now that the dust has settled on Eiseley's (1959) work, and his many papers that followed, it is essentially agreed that Darwin did steal much prose from Blyth and no doubt was influenced by the information he provided. However, unlike Matthew - the Originator of Natural slection and the great analogy that explained it, Blyth was well acknowledged by Darwin from the third edition of the Origin of Species onward as an important and highly valued general influence on his work.
Blyth might not have published the hypothesis of natural selection before Darwin, but Patrick Matthew certainly did before them both.
Prior to the reading of Wallace's and Darwin's papers before the Linnean society in 1858, it is widely agreed by the top scholars in the field that Patrick Matthew in 1831 penned the entire hypothesis of natural selection.! See
my Rational Wiki essay for the details and references.
Of great importance, is the fact that it has gone unremarked until I
wrote in 2014 these very same words you reading , that the editor and publisher of Blyth's (1835, 1836) most important papers on organic evolution was John Loudon, who in 1832, reviewed NTA and remarked that Matthew had discovered something unique on the origin of species!
Since Darwin admitted Blyth's influence on his thinking, this discovery of almost certain
knowledge contamination, is alone enough to completely demolish the 154-year-old Darwinian myth that Matthew had no influence on Darwin.
Eiseley thought also that in addition to stealing from Blyth that Darwin had read and plagiarized Patrick Matthew's discovery of natural selection. But apart from what
Jim Dempster,
Milton Wainwright and
Hugh Dower and myself (
Nullius in Verba 2014 ), have written on that topic, Eiseley's discovery in this area has been most conveniently ignored by Darwinists.
Eiseley noted that following Matthew’s letter in the Gardener’s Chronicle of 1860 – claiming his priority – that Darwin (1868) replicated his 1844 private essay replication of Matthew’s unique prior-published analogy – this time citing Matthew.
'Man's interference, by preventing this natural process of selection among plants, independent of the wider range of circumstances to which he introduces them, has increased the differences in varieties particularly in the more domesticated kinds...' "In his unpublished essay of 1844,
Darwin wrote, 'In the case of forest trees raised in nurseries, which vary more than the same trees do in their aboriginal forests, the cause would seem to lie in their not having to struggle against other trees and weeds, which in their natural state doubtless would limit the conditions of their existence…"
In that later text, to which Eiseley directs us, Darwin (1868) wrote:
"Our common forest trees are very variable, as may be seen in every extensive nursery-ground; but as they are not valued as fruit trees, and as they seed late in life, no selection has been applied to them; consequently, as Patrick Matthew remarks, they have not yielded different races…"
Eiseley knew nothing of David Low's 1844 replication of so much of Matthew's work (see
Nullius). Therefore, he wrote that Darwin must have got this example from Matthew by 1844. However, I discovered with ID that Professor David Low replicated Matthew's original analogy in 1844 as well as being the first to second publish unique Matthewisms. Darwin read Low and recommended him to Royal Society. Low was Matthew's Perth Academy schoolmate and shared the exact same Edinburgh and London Publishers as Matthew (see my
Position Paper Sutton 2014). How's that for a bunch of mere coincidences?
David Low (1844) wrote enough that was similar to Matthew's text for it to be said, I think, that Darwin could in fact have got the idea - as a form of indirect 'knowledge contamination' from him:
‘The Wild Pine attains its greatest perfection of growth and form in the colder countries, and on the older rock formations. It is in its native regions of granite, gneiss and the allied deposits, that it grows in extended forests over hundreds of leagues, overpowering the less robust species. When transplanted to the lower plains and subjected to culture, it loses so much of the aspect and characters of the noble original, as scarcely to appear the same. No change can be greater to the habits of a plant than the transportation of this child of the mountain to the shelter and cultivated soil of the nursery; and when the seeds of these cultivated trees are collected and sown again, the progeny diverges more and more from the parent type.'
However, another got there before Low. His name was Robert Mudie and he was born in Matthew's county of Forfarshire in Scotland and he published on this topic only a year after Matthew. I came accross Mudie by searching with the ID method (as explained in Nullius, in the section that is
free to read on Amazon ) for specific words terms and phrases that, out of 30+ million books and journals online, Matthew 1831 appears to have coined. Mudie in 1832 was
first to be second to use the extremely rare and apparently unique phrase "rectangular branching". This strongly suggests it is more likley than not that Mudie read Matthew's book as soon as it came out.
Only later did I find, from reading Eiseley (1979), that Mudie was a friend and associate of Darwin's great influence, Blyth. See page 171 of Eiseley 1979 - which explains that Blyth and Muddie worked together on an illustrated translation of Cuvier in 1840 - and that Blyth had read and cited much of Mudie's work. Some of the prose within Mudie's considerable output was bout the camouflage of birds, Blyth used and cited it. That same prose, Eiselely discovered, was replicated without citation by Darwin.
If the internet was available in Eiseley's day there is little doubt that he would have made the same connection that I did, Namely that Mudie - who so influenced Blyth and Darwin - had surely read Matthew by 1832.
The case for Matthewian
knowledge contamination of Darwin's brain by Mudie, who read Matthew (1831) and wrote about evolution without citing Matthew, is extremely powerful and it is far more significant than the simple fact discovered by Eiseley and celebrated by his peers, that the prose of Blyth (taken from his associate Mudie) - was replicated by Darwin without citation to its source.
‘If we are to observe nature, therefore, we must go to the wilds, because, in all cultivated productions, there are secondary characters produced by the artificial treatment, and we have no means of observing a distinction between these, and those which the same individual would have displayed, had it been left to a completely natural state. The longer that the race has been under the domestication and culture, the changes are of course the greater. So much is that the case that in very many both of the plants and animals that have been in a state of domestication since the earliest times of which we have any record, we know nothing with certainty about the parent races in their wild state. As to the species, or if you will the genus we can be certain. The domestic horse has not been cultivated out of an animal with cloven hoofs and horns; and the domestic sheep has never been bred out of any of the ox tribe. So also wheat and barley have not been cultivated out of any species of pulse, neither have Windsor beans at any time been grasses. But within some such limits as these our certain information lies; and for aught we know the parent race may, in its wild state, be before our eyes every day and yet we may not have the means of knowing that it is so. The breeding artificially has been going on for at least three thousand years…’
‘But there is another difficulty. When great changes are made on the surface of a country, as when forests are changed into open land, and marshes into corn fields, or any other change that is considerable, the changes of the climate must correspond; and as the wild productions are very much affected by that, they must also undergo changes; and these changes may in time amount to the entire extinction of some of the old tribes, both of plants and of animals, the modification of others to the full extent that the hereditary specific characters admit, and the introduction of not varieties only but of species altogether new.
That not only may but must have been the case. The productions of soils and climates are as varied as these are; and when a change takes place in either of these, if the living productions cannot alter their habits so as to accommodate themselves to the change there is no alternative, but they must perish.’
Mudie (1832) seemed to be recommending that humans engage in trying to approximate a kind of natural process of selection (370-371):
“Cultivation itself will deteriorate, and in time destroy races, if the same race and the same mode of culture be pursued amid general change. Our own times are times of very rapid change, and, upon the whole, of improvement; we dare not, without the certainty of their falling off, continue the same stock and the same seed corn, season after season, and age after age, as was done by our forefathers. The general change of the country, must have change and not mere succession, in that which we cultivate; and thus we must cross the breeds of our animals, and remove the seeds and plants of our vegetables from district to district. There is something of the same kind in human beings..”
The Matthew --> Mudie --> Low --> Blyth --> Darwin Connection
Much of the text that follows is taken from my previous blog on the
F2b2 Hypothesis:
The Case of Robert Mudie and Matthewian 'Knowledge Contamination' of Darwin's so called 'independent discovery of natural selection.
- In his Book The Botanic Animal Robert Mudie (1832) was apparently the first to replicate the Matthewism "rectangular branching" - a phrase not used in print again (apparently) until 1871.
- The Scot, Mudie, like Matthew, was born in Forefarshire Scotland
- Mudie, a prolific author , worked worked energetically for burgh reform with R. S. Rintoul , editor of the radical Dundee Advertiser - a newspaper that was very kind to Patrick Matthew - giving him a voice when others would not.
- Mudie was a friend and twice co-author with Blyth - the naturalist who most assisted and influenced Darwin pre-Orign. And Blyth's two early papers on species variety - that so influenced Darwin - were edited by John Loudon who reviewed Matthew's 1831 book in 1832 and remarked that it may have had something original to say on "The Origin of Species".
- Mudie died in 1842 - leaving his second wife (daughter of a captain in the East India Company) penniless. One report describes him as an intemperate spendthrift worn out too early by excessive intellectual endeavor and poverty.
- The highly respected anthropologist and science historian Loren Eiseley (1979, p. 214) spotted in a different 1832 publication of Mudie's that this particular Scot had somehow grasped, something, quite significant:
'Long ago when Darwin was still a youth aboard the Beagle, the Naturalist Robert Mudie, faithful to his century, had written:
' "There is a law that maintains the species." Scarcely had he made this assertion before he was busy explaining that all cultivated plants or animals were more or less monsters and that of the appearance of their parentage we know little or nothing. Even of wild forms he ends by hinting ambiguously of the emergence of species "altogether new". Finally he verges on complete heresy. "There is something," he almost whispers, "of the same kind in human beings," '
In his own earlier book of 1832, Mudie writes a great deal of text that focuses upon Matthew's topic of forest trees and the effects upon wood of the natural and cultivated circumstances in which grows.
Conclusion
Did Mudie read his Forefarshire neighbor's - Patrick Matthew's - book, published the year before one of his own replicated a unique Matthewism and another of his books touched upon the same heresy?
Did he influence Blyth with some type of Mathewian
knowledge contamination so that Blyth's work - that so significantly influenced Darwin - infected Darwin's brain?
Did Darwin get his knowledge about the difference between trees under artificial selection and those under natural selection directly from Matthew, and/or indirectly from either (or both) Mudie and Low?
Nullius in Verba
Was Blyth, Darwin's great influencer, more likely than not double-dosed with Matthewian knowledge via his editor Loudon, who reviewed Matthew's book, as well as by Mudie? I would say so.
Darwin always maintained that neither he nor any naturalist known to him had read Matthew's 1831 book, which contained the full prior-published hypothesis of natural selection and the most powerful analogy in the world to explain it. Darwin was 100 per cent wrong! He did know seven naturalists who read it - because they cited it in the literature pe-1858! And three of those naturlaists (Loudon, Selby and Chambers) played major roles at his and Wallace's epicenter of ipre-1858 influence on natural selection.
If such a macabre thing were possible, I expect Loren Eiseley would be singing in his grave.
To find out more:
Read my book
Nullius in Verba for more highly detailed information about Darwin's and Wallace's great science fraud.
Sir Gavin de Beer (FRS) wrote in the Wilkins Lecture for the Royal Society (de Beer 1962 on page 333):
