[Quotes] [History, #1, #2, #2b: Darwin's lies (1), #2b: Darwin's lies (2), #2b: Darwin's lies (3), #3, #4, #5
Note: These are allegations only. I believe that Darwin was dishonest and lied to help get his theory accepted, but I cannot prove it. All I can do is present the evidence that, in its cumulative weight, persuaded me, so that readers can make up their own minds.
"Theorists often claim individuals are unimportant to the progress of science. Great researchers see far because they stand on the shoulders of others. If one slips, another will climb to take his place. So if Darwin had backed away, someone else would have picked up the notion that species evolve as environments eliminate animals that are unsuited to their surroundings, Alfred Russel Wallace being the obvious candidate. .... not much would have changed, it is argued. We would simply speak of Wallacism, not Darwinism. Thanks to Browne we can now see this notion is untenable: Darwin was irreplaceable. ... impoverished Wallace had no connections while Darwin was armed with powerful defenders who took control of key scientific publishing outlets and academic positions and ensured natural selection got the most favourable of receptions ... [Wallace's] decision in 1869 to renounce natural selection and claim that only a 'spirit force or deity' could explain the evolution of human attributes would have been calamitous for the general acceptance of natural selection had Wallace been its prime exponent. By contrast, Darwin never wavered through all his subsequent works, presenting a consistent, ungodly, rational explanation of the living world ... Thanks to Darwin's intellectual rigour, care for his ideas and concern for his own status, his beloved theory gained an acceptance that no other scientist could have achieved so quickly or thoroughly. His success may vex those who still refuse, for religious reasons, to accept natural selection. The rest of us have many reasons to be grateful." (McKie R., "The origin of The Origin of Species." Review of "Charles Darwin: The Power of Place," by Janet Browne, Jonathan Cape, 2002. The Observer, November 10, 2002. http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,836872,00.html). [top]
"Similarly, without Einstein, there would still have been something like the theory of relativity; without Darwin, something close to the theory of evolution. But they wouldn't have been the same theories. They wouldn't have been formulated in the same way or presented with the same vigor, the same force of persuasion. They wouldn't have had the same influence or the same consequences." (Jacob F., "Of Flies, Mice, and Men," [1997], Weiss G., transl., Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1998, pp.140-141). [top]
"Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more-and for more drastic-modifications of the average person's worldview than Charles Darwin. ... Remember that in 1850 virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. The world they inhabited had been created by God, and as the natural theologians claimed, He had instituted wise laws that brought about the perfect adaptation of all organisms to one another and to their environment. ... Such was the thinking of Western man prior to the 1859 publication of on the Origin of Species. The basic principles proposed by Darwin would stand in total conflict with these prevailing ideas. First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of evolution by natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely materialistically. It no longer requires God as creator or designer .... Darwin pointed out that creation, as described in the Bible ... was contradicted by almost any aspect of the natural world. Every aspect of the `wonderful design' so admired by the natural theologians could be explained by natural selection. ... Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day." (Mayr E., "Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought," September 23, 1999, lecture in Stockholm on receiving the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Scientific American, Vol. 283, No. 1, pp.67-71, July 2000, pp.67-69). [top]
"These were virtues or accidents. But side by side with them were what I shall describe as vices. These, we now have to admit, were almost as great a help, almost as valuable a combination in achieving his success, as the virtues that accompanied them. By that I mean his public and political success in mass conversion. These vices were of three kinds: a conservative outlook in every respect except the evolutionary hypothesis; a failure to recognize or to relate his own ideas, his larger ideas, with those of others working in the same field; and a flexible strategy which is not to be reconciled with even average intellectual integrity: by contrast with Wallace, Lyell, Hooker, Chambers or even Spencer, Darwin was slippery." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1959, p.60). [top]
"Professor Eiseley presents a detailed argument designed to show that Darwin probably derived the idea of natural selection from two articles written by his acquaintance Edward Blyth and published in The Magazine of Natural History in 1835 and 1837. If these articles were in fact the source of Darwin's theory, Darwin was guilty of grave intellectual dishonesty. In the present writer's opinion, Professor Eiseley fails to establish his case beyond reasonable doubt, although the evidence he presents is sufficiently disturbing to merit further investigation aimed at establishing or disproving his thesis." (Greene J.C., "The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought," [1959], Mentor: New York NY, 1961, reprint, p.366). [top]
"According to anthropologist Loren Eiseley, Darwin appropriated the work of Edward Blyth, a little- known British zoologist who wrote on natural selection and evolution in two papers published in 1835 and 1837. Eiseley points to similarities in phrasing, the use of rare words, and the choice of examples. While Darwin in his opus quotes Blyth on a few points, notes Eiseley, he does not cite the papers that deal directly with natural selection, even though it is clear he read them. The thesis has been disputed by paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. But Eiseley is not the only critic of Darwin's acknowledgment practices. He was accused by a contemporary, the acerbic man of letters Samuel Butler, of passing over in silence those who had developed similar ideas. Indeed, when Darwin's On the Origin of Species first appeared in 1859, he made little mention of predecessors. Later, in an 1861 `historical sketch' added to the third edition of the Origin, he delineated some of the previous work, but still gave few details. Under continued attack, he added to the historical sketch in three subsequent editions. It was still not enough to satisfy all his critics. In 1879, Butler published a book entitled Evolution Old and New in which he accused Darwin of slighting the evolutionary speculations of Buffon, Lamarck, and Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus." (Broad W.J. & Wade N., The New York Times], "Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science," Simon and Schuster: New York NY, 1982, pp.30-31). [top]
"Edward Blyth ... made many contributions to the natural history of Southeastern Asia; yet he could have been largely unknown today had he not been saved from oblivion by Loren Eiseley, who has suggested that Blyth was Darwin's main, but unquoted, source of inspiration with respect to the notion of 'natural selection'. Eiseley arrived at this conclusion through a literary investigation. The material thus brought forward is of varying credibility, but still I think one must be a very orthodox Darwinian to be left completely untouched by Eiseley's accusation." ( Lovtrup S., "Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth," Croom Helm: London, 1987, p.27). [top]
"However, it is certain that Darwin listened to, and noted with care, the words of someone else who saw the force of natural selection: Edward Blyth, a south London chemist a year younger than Darwin, whose passion for natural history had led him to neglect his business, so that he had to sail for Calcutta at the age of thirty-one and take up a poorly paid position as curator of vertebrate collections in the local museum. Before leaving for India, Blyth spoke often at scientific meetings in London, some of them attended by Darwin. Darwin's early notebooks on 'transmutation' (for years he avoided using the word evolution) contain transcriptions of what Blyth said. In 1835 and 1837 Blyth's theories were published in the British Magazine of Natural History. Darwin, according to a cryptic reference in a letter, seems to have read these too." (Hitching F., "The Neck of the Giraffe: Or Where Darwin Went Wrong," Pan: London, 1982, p.231). [top]
"Why isn't Edward Blyth's name a household word? Why isn't he buried in Westminster Abbey? Blyth (1810-73), a creationist, first published essays on natural selection in 1835, 1836 and 1837, over twenty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. Loren Eiseley found evidences in Darwin's essays that, between 1842 and 1844, he had studied Blyth's work. Later, after Blyth went to Calcutta, Darwin corresponded with him, showing particular interest in his studies of animal variation. ... If Darwin did absorb Blyth's ideas, he made no reference to him." ( Pitman M.*, "Adam and Evolution," Rider & Co: London, 1984, pp.75-76). [top]
"Because of the enormous prestige of Darwin, as well as this very elusive quality of a simple idea, the discovery that Blyth had written upon natural selection in 1835 fell upon deaf ears. No one, it appears, thought of actually examining Darwin's volumes with Blyth in mind. The present writer sought to do so for just one reason: I failed to comprehend how Charles Darwin could have been unacquainted with the periodical in which Blyth published. It was one of the leading zoological journals of the day. Darwin's friends, Henslow, Jenyns, Lyell, had all appeared in its pages. To assume that a man of Darwin's `prodigious memory and power of abstraction' was unacquainted with writings on the species problem in so prominent an organ as The Magazine of Natural History in the period from 1835 to 1837 seemed illogical in the extreme." (Eiseley L.C., "Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and the Theory of Natural Selection," in "Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X," E.P. Dutton: New York, 1979, p.50). [top]
"Of special relevance to this note are two of Blyth's many papers. The papers in question appeared in 1835 and 1837, both in The Magazine of Natural History, a leading journal of the day. The references are vol. 3 (1935), pp. 40-53, and vol. 1 (1937), pp. 1-9; pp. 77-85; pp. 131-141, the second paper appearing in three parts. ... His paper of 1835 describes conservative natural selection, the process whereby a species clearly adapted to an environment does not lose that adaptation. ... So already in 1835-6, while Darwin is still away on the Beagle, the crucial question has been asked. ... It was into this situation that Darwin returned from the voyage of the Beagle. It is not only inconceivable in principle that Blyth's papers, published in a major journal, would have escaped Darwin's notice, but as Eiseley points out at length there is ample evidence from Darwin's essays of 1842 and 1844 that he had studied Blyth's work closely. ... Darwin by his own account was a voracious reader of other men's work, obviously of Blyth's papers ... It was not in his character, however, to make a return for what he received ... " (Hoyle F. & Wickramasinghe C., "Evolution from Space," [1981], Paladin: London, 1983, reprint, pp.171,173,175). [top]
"Eiseley, although a supporter of Darwinism, devotes a great deal of his essay to a discussion of why Darwin makes no reference in The Origin of Species to Blyth's critical papers of 1835 and 1837, although he references Blyth in other much less important respects. The evidence does not permit of any conclusion except that the omissions were deliberate. Eiseley also wonders why Blyth did not protest about the omissions, but on this there seems no mystery to us, since it was in 1860 that Blyth was desperately trying to secure his future. To have created a rumpus over priority with a man of Darwin's position would not have seemed the best way to obtain the pension of £150 per year. There is no law which compels a scientist to reference his sources. It is only protests from colleagues, and the fear of being treated similarly, which keep the record straight. ... The failure of biologists to insist on this matter being set right is somewhat surprising, especially as an attempt to plagiarize the work of Mendel at the beginning of the twentieth century did in fact set off a major scandal. Aside, however, from the gentle remonstrances of Geldart in 1879 and Vickers in 1911, there was nothing in a hundred years up to Eiseley's courageous essay of 1959. It would seem to us that a serious sin of omission remains to be redeemed by the world of professional biology." (Hoyle F. & Wickramasinghe C., "Evolution from Space," [1981], Paladin: London, 1983, reprint, p.179). [top]
"But the precise sequence of ideas and arguments by which Darwin was persuaded to put evolution and natural selection together has not been clear. The finishing stroke has recently been accomplished by Loren Eiseley. It depends on Eiseley's discovery of the use Darwin made of another unacknowledged and hitherto almost unsuspected source. This is in the work of a young contemporary, the Londoner, Edward Blyth. What was the work of Blyth? This remarkable naturalist from his chemist's shop in Lower Tooting wrote three articles on heredity, variation and selection in nature and in domestication. They appeared in the Magazine of Natural History, between 1835 and 1837. His argument consists in an examination of the great ideas of selection, artificial, natural and sexual, and the struggle for existence, which he might have picked up from Erasmus Darwin or any of his successors, such as Lawrence and Prichard (whom he cites). Blyth attempts to show how these ideas can be used to explain, not the change of species which he was anxious to discredit, but the stability of species in which he ardently believed. In the course of his argument Blyth closely examines each of the problems which was to occupy Darwin's mind during the following forty years: blending inheritance as against mutation, the inheritance of acquired characters, geographical isolation, geological successions, island faunas, the origin of instinct and so on. In all these relations Blyth quotes a wealth of examples from his own observations of nature. These afterwards appear repeated, or indeed copied, by Darwin in his preliminary essays of 1842 and 1844. The evidence quoted by Eiseley shows us that in the Origin Darwin is arguing against an invisible and absent opponent. Blyth, whom he does not cite, was employed far away in Calcutta from 1841 to 1862. Further it also shows us that when Darwin refers to Malthus as his inspiration in his essay of 1858 and later in his autobiography, he is choosing to avoid mentioning his significant inspiration which was Blyth." (Darlington C.D., "Darwin's Place in History," Basil Blackwell: Oxford UK, 1959, pp.3-35) [top]
* Authors with an asterisk against their name are believed not to be evolutionists.
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Created 1 October, 1999. Updated: 3 August, 2003.