Posts by MikeSutton:
- With Charles Lyell in The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. 1839. On page 56.
- With William Hooker (1850). Loudon’s Hortus Britannicus: a catalogue of all the plants indigenous in or introduced to Britain. (Part 1). On page 477.
- With John Lindley in Loudon’s (1835) An Encyclopædia of Gardening: Comprising the Theory and Practice of Horticulture, Floriculture, Arboriculture and landscape Gardening. On Page xxxii.
- With Captain FitzRoy of the Beagle in The New Zealand Journal April 29th (1843). On page 98.
- With Darwin’s publisher John Murray, in The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc (1831). On Page 47.
- With the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ (anonymous author Robert Chambers) The Edinburgh Literary Journal: Or, Weekly Register of Criticism .Volume 4. July – December (1830). On page 48.
- With Sir Humphrey Davy in Scientific Books Published in 1831. In Arcana of Science and Art (1832). On page 303.
- With Samuel Pepys (Loudon 1844). in ‘List of books referred to’ of Arboretum et fruticetum britannicum: or, The trees and shrubs of Britain. Vol. 1 On page ccxi.
- With Sir John Frederick William Herschel. The Quarterly Review[6]. Volume 60. (1839). On page 345
- With Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the 1st Century Roman medical encyclopaedist, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1842). Volume 4. On page 407.
- The Athenæum (1839) (Block advertisement for NTA and Review of Emigration Fields).[7]
- Loudon (1831) (Citing Matthew in Bibliography).
- Loudon (1838) (Article citing Matthew).
- The Gardener’s Magazine (1841) (In response to NTA, article throwing down a challenge to Matthew on tree pruning).
- Memoirs of the Caledonian Horticultural Society of Edinburgh (1814-1832) Published letter by Matthew (1829) on fruit and hybridizing trees. Also block advertisement for NTA (1831).
- 1969 – William, D. Hamilton presents a paper on selfish and altruistic behavior, which includes the phrase selfish gene, at the Smithsonian Institute Annual Symposium. He publishes the paper in 1971. In coining the phrase in this 1969 paper Hamilton is proven to be the originator of the basic selfish gene concept.
- 1974 – Richard, D. Alexander publishes the phrase selfish gene in an article on the evolution of social behavior. He becomes the second person to use it.
- 1975 – Donald, T. Campbell publishes the phrase selfish gene in an article on biological evolution. He is the third person to use it.
- 1976 – Richard Dawkins comes fourth in the selfish gene stakes. He publishes the first edition of his best selling book The Selfish Gene. Weirdly, the book makes no mention at all of the fact that three earlier scientists ‘anticipated’ Dawkins with both the phrase and concept ‘selfish gene’. Dawkins (30th Anniversary 3rd edition in 2006) does mention and cite both Hamilton and Alexander on several occasions, but (a) does not credit Hamilton as the originator of the title of his book (b) does not cite Hamilton’s 1969 paper which coined the term and (c) (pp. 325-329) analyses citations of Hamilton’s work (p.328) because he says that Hamilton is not cited as much as he should be. This really is odd scholarship, because we know that Dawkins himself never cited Hamilton as the originator of the selfish gene phrase and basic concept when he wrote that in 1976. In addition to publicly scrutinizing the citation scores of the unheralded scholar who really has priority over the selfish gene, Dawkins further labors to explain in some detail that he found one of his own unpublished stencilled student lecture bibliographies from 1970 that he claims proves that he did not get the idea of the genetical theory of social behavior from within E.O. Wilson’s 1975 book entitled Sociobiology. Dawkins does cite Alexander’s 1974 paper but makes no mention that this author also ‘anticipated’ him with the selfish gene phrase. Finally, Richard Dawkins completely fails to cite Campbell’s paper, which was published only the year before Dawkins’ famous book. Perhaps Dawkins’ (2006) greatest unintended ironic treatment of Hamilton is where on page 317 he says that Hamilton typically forgets his own origination of ideas and needs to be reminded of it. Sadly, this is not a confession on Dawkins’s own part because he is merely pointing out that Bartz is often wrongly attributed as the originator of one of Hamilton’s theories. Coincidentally Hamilton had ‘anticipated Bartz, exactly as he did Dawkins, by seven years!
- – 2005 – On reading his INTRODUCTION TO THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (Dawkins 2006) of the Selfish Gene anyone would be forgiven for assuming that Dawkins must have coined the term selfish gene. Because for several pages Dawkins explains how we should emphasize one word or the other in the phrase to understand what he means by it. He explains how his publishers wanted him to change it so that the title of his book would be more upbeat and goes to great lengths to explain what he means by selfish. And he runs through all kinds of alternative title that he might have used instead. But nowhere in all this self-celebration of the book and the poignancy and meaning of its title does he ever admit that the phrase is not one of his own creation.
- This blog post is nominated for the Worlds Most Ironic Contest .
- Research suggests some young people are spending many hours on the Internet or on games consoles.
- Research has failed to establish that violent media is either a necessary or sufficient condition for causing crime.
- Research suggests that computer games can be addictive (immersion and unreality factors) and playing can be compulsive.
- Fewer potential offenders are getting addicted to opiates and other drugs or misusing alcohol out of boredom because they have escaped boredom in the real world by entering a more exciting cyberspace to play and interact with others.
- Potental offenders and victims are becoming gaming “addicts” and/or compulsively checking Facebook or other social networking sites.
- The game players and other “netizens” are playing at home so (a) fewer potential offenders on the streets and fewer potential victims (b) houses are occupied for longer and so less susceptible to burglary.
- Immersion and gaming prowess and reputation may be sufficient substitutes for the same things in the offline (real) world (some anomie issues to research here).
- The Internet allows more people to work from home so teleworking may reduce the pool of “available” victims on the street and also ensure fewer homes are empty during the day.
- Measure time spent gaming by groups that research predicts are at greater risk of becoming offenders.
- Conduct ethnographic studies with young people to gauge whether, and if so to what extent, gaming is used as a substitute for risky activities in the offline (real) world. And do this in relation to both potential offending and victimisation.
- Examine issues of offline and online peer status.
- Examine (correlation) between console and game sales – and any data on playing time and type of games – with the general crime trend over the past 20 years.
- Try to gauge what percentage of young people today have access to or own the hardware necessary to play video games.
A Bombshell for the History of Discovery and Priority in Science
March 24th, 2014
Patrick Matthew’s book, revealing his discovery of natural selection, was cited in the literature before 1858 by three naturalists who played key pre-1858 roles in facilitating and influencing Darwin’s and Wallace’s published ideas on natural selection.
Abstract
Darwin and Alfred Wallace claimed to have discovered natural selection independently of Patrick Matthew. Matthew’s discovery of the ‘natural process of selection’ was published 27 years before Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read before the Linnean Society in 1858. In 1861, in the third edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: ‘In 1831 Mr Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged on in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860.’ To date, there has been no hard evidence to prove that Darwin’s or Wallace’s work was influenced by Matthew. However, newly discovered literature reveals seven naturalists cited Matthew’s book before 1858. Three played key pre-1858 roles facilitating and influencing Darwin’s and Wallace’s published ideas on natural selection. They are: Loudon – who edited and published Blyth’s acknowledged influential articles on evolution; Chambers, author of the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ – which both Darwin and Wallace also acknowledged influenced their work; and Selby – who, in 1855, edited and published Wallace’s Sarawak paper. These new discoveries mean that Matthew now has full scientific priority for the theory natural selection.
Introduction
In the field of evolutionary biology, Patrick Matthew (1831) is acknowledged as the first discoverer of the theory of natural selection (e.g.: Clarke, 1984, Dempster 1983, 1996, Wainwright, 2008, 2011, Dawkins 2010). He discovered the process, and then fully articulated and disseminated it in his book: ‘On Naval Timber and Arboriculture’ (hereafter NTA) with major Edinburgh and London publishers, 27 years before Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Wallace’s papers were famously read before the Linnean Society (Darwin and Wallace 1858), and 28 years before Darwin (1859) principally reproduced Matthew’s hypothesis, albeit supported by a great and unique synthesis of confirming evidence, in the Origin of Species (hereafter Origin).
The current consensus of scientific opinion is that Matthew should not be attributed with full priority over Darwin and Wallace, nor should he be ranked alongside them as an immortal great thinker in science; because it is believed that he failed to influence anyone with his ideas. For example, Judd (1909; p.342) wrote:
‘…Matthew anticipated the views of Darwin on Natural Selection, but without producing any real influence on the course of biological thought…’
Charles Wells and Edward Blyth are the only other contenders for priority for the theory of natural selection. Like Matthew, Wells (1818) wrote upon the subject of adaptation to environment and subsequent varieties within species. Like Matthew, he saw the important difference between artificial and natural selection. Like Matthew, he wrote about humans and mentioned other animals, but unlike Matthew, he made no mention of trees or plants and most crucially, did not write about new species emerging over millions of years by way of divergence from a common ancestor. Critically, as Eiseley (1959 p. 122) observed, ‘There is no clear expression of unrestricted deviation in unlimited time.’
Blyth (1835, 1836), whose work was published after Matthew’s, was one of Darwin’s prolific correspondents and influential informants. He wrote about adaptive varieties of different animals. However, as an unwavering creationist, Blyth believed that variation occurred only within existing species. Much has been made by a few (e.g. Eiseley 1979; Davies, 2008) of Darwin’s failure to cite Blyth’s two papers of 1835 and 1836, yet none who note this certain un-cited influence upon Darwin take account of the fact that Blyth’s ideas were published four and five years after Matthew’s. More tellingly, those two key papers were published in a journal owned and edited by the Scottish botanist John Loudon. That fact, though previously unremarked, is significant. Because Loudon (1832) had earlier reviewed Matthew’s book (see also: Matthew 1860a) and remarked positively upon its author’s unique ideas on what he referred to as ‘the origin of species.’ Consequently, the likelihood of Blyth’s work benefiting from Matthewian knowledge contamination is extremely high. Therefore, both the post-NTA date of Blyth’s published papers and his editor’s prior-knowledge of Matthew’s unique discoveries must now engender significant doubt that Blyth’s published work on the topic came independently of Matthew’s unique discovery and original ideas.
At the time of writing, Darwin and Wallace are commonly believed to have each discovered natural selection independently of Matthew and independently of one another. Darwin is hailed as an immortal great discoverer and thinker on the subject of organic evolution because he alone is recognised as first to take his own discovery of the theory of natural selection forward, with many confirmatory evidences, knowingly convincing others of its veracity and phenomenal importance.
Darwin made a number of excuses for not having read NTA. However, a careful examination of the literature refutes all of those excuses. Additionally, this article challenges the current knowledge consensus that Darwin and Wallace discovered natural selection independently of Matthew. Because new evidence proves that NTA was read by at least seven naturalists, three of whom were at the epicentre of influence and facilitation of Darwin’s and Wallace’s published ‘discoveries’. Furthermore, two of those three were personal associates of Darwin and Wallace.
The disconfirming evidence for Darwin’s excuses is considered in Part I of this article. Part II presents newly discovered information about who did read NTA pre-Origin. Finally, Part III presents a conclusion that is nothing less than a bombshell for the history of science. Namely that, despite Darwin’s and Wallace’s claims to have discovered natural selection independently of NTA, those claims are impossible to sustain rationally in light of newly discovered incontrovertible facts about the naturalists they knew who read NTA and the acknowledged roles played by those naturalists in influencing, editing and facilitating their published ‘discoveries’.
Part I
Darwin’s and Wallace’s Excuses Examined
Contrary to currently accepted ‘knowledge’ that Matthew’s (1831) ideas on natural selection went unread pre-Origin because they are contained solely in the appendix of NTA (e.g. Mayr 1982, Gould 2002, Bowler 2003) any complete reading of the book proves this to be a myth. By way of example, the following samples of text from the main body of NTA are sufficient to disconfirm the Appendix Myth:
Matthew (1831, p.301)
‘Our author’s next implied assumption, that a tree produces best timber in a soil and climate natural to it (we suppose by this is meant the soil and climate where the kind of tree is naturally found growing), is, we think, at least exceedingly hypothetical; and, judging from our facts, incorrect The natural soil and climate of a tree, is often very far from being the soil and climate most suited to its growth, and is only the situation where it has greater power of occupancy than any other plant whose germ is present. The pines do not cover the pine barrens of America, because they prefer such soil, or grow most luxuriant in such soil; they would thrive much better, that is, grow faster in the natural allotment of the oak and the walnut, and also mature to a better wood in this deeper richer soil. But the oak and the walnut banish them to inferior soil from greater power of occupancy in good soil, as the pines, in their turn, banish other plants from inferior sands – some to still more sterile location, by the same means of greater powers of occupancy in these sands. One cause considerably affecting the natural location of certain kinds of plants is, that only certain soils are suited to the preservation of certain seeds, throughout the winter or wet season. Thus many plants, different from those which naturally occupy the soil, would feel themselves at home, and would beat off intruders, were they once seated. We have had indubitable proof in this country, that Scots fir grown upon good deep loam, and strong till (what our author would call the natural soil of the oak), is of much better quality, and more resinous, than fir grown on poor sand (what he would call the natural soil of the Scots fir), although of more rapid growth on the loam than on the sand; and the best Scots fir we have ever seen, of equal age and quickness of growth, is growing upon Carse land (clayey alluvium).’
And (p.302-303)
‘The use of the infinite seedling varieties in the families of plants, even in those in a state of nature, differing in luxuriance of growth and local adaptation, seems to be to give one individual (the strongest best circumstance-suited) superiority over others of its kind around, that it may, by overtopping and smothering them, procure room for full extension, and thus affording, at the same time, a continual selection of the strongest, best circumstance-suited, for reproduction. 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 difference in varieties, particularly in the more domesticated kinds; and even in man himself, the greater uniformity, and more general vigour among savage tribes, is referrible to nearly similar selecting law – the weaker individual sinking under the ill treatment of the stronger, or under the common hardship.
As our author’s premises thus appear neither self evident, nor supported by facts, it might seem unfair, at least it would be superfluous, to proceed to the consideration of his conclusions and corollaries.’
As demonstrated, page 302, which from the main body of NTA, not its Appendix, is where Matthew named his discovery the ‘natural process of selection.’ Incidentally, his term has only one grammatical correct anagram: ‘process of natural selection,’ which is the term Darwin (1859) used nine times in the Origin.
Pages 301 to 303 of NTA reveal that Matthew saw the competition between species as a struggle for existence identified by two closely related concepts: that successful species have a ‘power of occupancy’ being ‘most circumstance suited’ to their environment. These ideas were later represented by Herbert Spencer’s (1864) phrase: ‘survival of the fittest’, which is not entirely dissimilar to a sentence Matthew penned for NTA’s appendix (1831 p.385): ‘Nature tests their adaptation to her standard of perfection and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction.’
Reproducing large swathes of text from NTA in a letter published in the Gardener’s Chronicle, Matthew (1860a) made Darwin aware that his unique ideas about natural selection were in the main body of NTA as well as its appendix, Darwin acknowledged that fact when he wrote, in turn, to his friend and botanical mentor Joseph Hooker, asking him to approve, sign and then forward to the editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle his response to Matthew’s claim of scientific priority (Darwin 1860a):
‘The case in G. Chronicle seems a little stronger than in Mr. Matthews book, for the passages are therein scattered in 3 places. But it would be mere hair-splitting to notice that.— If you object to my letter please return it; but I do not expect that you will, but I thought that you would not object to run your eye over it.— My dear Hooker it is a great thing for me to have so good, true, & old a friend as you. I owe much to science for my friends.’
The seed of the myth that Matthew’s discovery was buried solely in the appendix of NTA was perhaps planted 28 years earlier in Loudon’s[1] review (1832):
‘One of the subjects discussed in this appendix is the puzzling one, of the origin of species and varieties; and if the author has hereon originated no original views (and of this we are far from certain), he has certainly exhibited his own in an original manner.’
Despite his private acknowledgement to Hooker that Matthew’s ideas were in various parts of NTA, Darwin’s subsequent public reply to the Gardener’s Chronicle no doubt propagated the myth that Matthew’s wrote only briefly about natural selection and that his discovery was hidden solely in an appendix to an ostensibly unsuitable book (Darwin 1860b):
‘I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, had heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture.’
In a letter to the French naturalist Quatrefages de Bréau, Darwin (1861), Darwin again excused himself for not having read NTA. This time he portrayed Matthew as an obscure writer and, by immediate association, implied that forest trees was an inappropriately obscure topic to enclose the discovery of the unifying theory of biology. Only this time Darwin portrayed the record of the discovery as briefly scattered rather than appendix bound:
‘…an obscure writer on Forest Trees, in 1830, in Scotland, most expressly & clearly anticipated my views – though he put the case so briefly, that no single person ever noticed the scattered passages in his book.’
Then, in the third edition of the Origin, Darwin switched-back to portraying Matthew’s discovery as being brief and scattered in an appendix only. By so doing he created the full blown Appendix Myth, which serves to this day as the best solution to the otherwise unsolved science problem of Darwin’s and Wallace’s independent replication of Matthew’s published prior-discovery of the ‘natural process of selection’ (Darwin 1861a):
‘In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged on in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860.’
Most interestingly, Wallace later admitted that Matthew had first discovered natural selection and additional laws of evolution. That admission appears to have passed without further remark by Darwin and Wallace scholars, which is surprising since Wallace went on to dub Matthew one of the most original thinkers of the first half of the 19th century (Wallace 1879, p. 142):
‘Mr. Matthew apprehended the theory of natural selection, as well as the existence of more obscure laws of evolution, many years in advance of Mr. Darwin and myself, and in giving almost the whole of what Mr. Matthew has written on the subject Mr. Butler will have helped to call attention to one of the most original thinkers of the first half of the 19th century.’
In a letter to Samuel Butler, about Butler’s book: ‘Evolution Old & New’, Wallace went so far as to rank Matthew at least equal in importance to Darwin as an original thinker (Wallace, 1869a):
‘My dear Sir
Please accept my thanks for the copy of “Evolution Old & New” and of “Life & Habitat” you were so good as to send me.
I have just finished reading the former with mixed feelings of pleasure & regret. I am glad that a corrected account of the views of Buffon, Dr. Darwin & Lamarck and especially of Mr. Patrick Matthew, should be given to the world; but I am sorry that you should have, as I think, so completely failed in a just estimation of the value of their work as compared with that of Mr. Charles Darwin; – because it will necessarily predjudice [sic] naturalists against you, & will cause “Life & Habitat” – to be neglected, & this I should greatly regret.
To my mind your quotations from Mr. Patrick Matthew are the most remarkable things in your whole book, because he appears to have completely anticipated the main ideas both of the “Origin of Species” & of “Life & Habitat”.’
If Wallace was right to describe Matthew as one of the greatest original thinkers of the first half of the 19th century, then it follows that Matthew must surely rank high amongst the greatest of that entire century. And if Matthew was among the greatest original thinkers of an entire century then he is most surely an immortal great thinker of science.
Wallace’s statement about Matthew’s greatness was made by a Victorian naturalist who would have known best on that precise matter second only to Darwin and certainly more than Wells (1973), who alone prosecuted a thesis that Matthew and Darwin failed to understand each others ideas. The implications, therefore, of Wallace’s admission are astounding. Specifically, that if he and Darwin were not influenced by Matthew then they were not influenced by the greatest original thinker there has ever been on the very discovery they each replicated, affirmed with further evidences and then claimed as their own independent discovery.
In light of his prior breakthrough, the sole rationale for denying Matthew a place above or alongside Darwin and Wallace is that he failed to influence anyone with it. And the accepted explanation for why, pre-Origin, all 19th century ‘gentlemen of science’ – including Darwin and Wallace – were completely unaware of Matthew’s solution to the problem of species, is that he obscured it away in the appendix of an inappropriately titled and highly specialised manual on naval timber and arboriculture, a book which naturalists would be extremely unlikely to read. Moreover, according to this solution, to what is effectively the science problem of Darwin and Wallace’s independent replication of Matthew’ ideas, Matthew failed to sufficiently promote his discovery. Typical examples of this ‘blame Matthew’ solution can be found in Darwin (1861a), Wallace, (1871), Hamilton (2001) and Dawkins (2010).
Turning first to examine the claim that Matthew’s discovery was hidden solely in the appendix of NTA, as this article has already as demonstrated, that claim is completely disconfirmed by pages 301-303 of NTA. It is further disconfirmed by many other examples within NTA (see Appendix One, Sutton 2014). Having disconfirmed the Appendix Myth, it is appropriate to examine the veracity of Darwin’s second excuse that no naturalist would have read Matthew’s book because it was on a subject unlikely to appeal to naturalists. Dawkins’ articulation of this rationale typifies it well, because he dually seeks to explain that the reason why no naturalist would have read NTA was due to Matthew’s failure to understand the great importance of his own discovery. Dawkins (2010. p.209):
‘Did he see the explanation for all of life, the destroyer of the argument for design? If he had, wouldn’t he have put it in a more prominent place than the appendix to a manual on silviculture?’
The general acceptance of this obscure topic argument clearly has its provenance in Darwin’s (1861a) deployment of the same excuse. In reality, this excuse is more remarkable in its inaccuracy than the simple Appendix Myth. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a lengthy explanation of just how historically misinformed this excuse is, sufficient criticism to disconfirm its veracity can be furnished by just a few key facts. Wainwright (2011), for example, correctly notes, the subject of naval timber was an important subject for the British Empire in the first half of the 19th century. Timber was the raw material that drove the industrial revolution. That Matthew had chosen the subject of timber to publish his great hypothesis is not at all incongruous. Contrary to popular modern opinion, it was timber, not textiles, that was the most important product and prime mover of the Industrial Revolution (Brineley pp. 72-73). Timber was required for ship building and in even greater quantities for production of alkalis for textile manufacture. Unsurprisingly, therefore, John Lindley, the economic botanist and great friend of William Hooker, who had his own book reviewed directly above a review of NTA (Loudon 1832), went on to write two books that included the subject of naval timber (Lindley 1839, 1853).
Growing oak for naval ships was an important concern of science in the first half of the 19th century. This is no better evidenced than by the fact that Martin Rees, current President of the Royal Society, in his chapter within the same book in which Dawkins (2010) claims Matthew’s big scientific idea was inappropriately published in a book on silviculture, reveals that in 1662 John Evelyn – a founding member of the Royal Society – presented a scientific paper of major importance before the Society entitled: ‘Sylva or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions.’ Two years later, Evelyn (1664) published his paper as a seminal book (see Rees 2010) entitled: ‘Sylva, or a discourse of forest-trees, and the propagation of timber’.
Most tellingly, Darwin’s 1838-1851 notebook of books read proves that Darwin read Evelyn’s book on silviculture. Hard facts such as that trump rhetoric and prove that, far from being on an inappropriate and obscure topic, the title and subject matter of Matthew’s book was outwardly ideal for the inclusion of his discovery and a scientific call for others to conduct empirical research and experimentation to test it. Naval Timber and Arboriculture was a title and topic indubitably as likely as Evelyn’s to attract naturalists such as Darwin to gather evidence to test Matthew’s hypothesis, which is clearly what Matthew intended (Matthew 1831 p.386):
‘In the first place, we ought to investigate its dependency upon the preceding links of the particular chain of life, variety being often merely types or approximations of former parentage; thence the variation of the family, as well as of the individual, must be embraced by our experiments.’
Having refuted Darwin’s excuses that Matthew hid his discovery solely in the appendix of NTA, and that both NTA’s title and subject matter were inappropriate to contain unique ideas on organic evolution in the first half of the 19th century, it is perhaps useful to examine why Matthew did put so much of his discovery, and his discussion of its implications, into the appendix. He may have done so for two reasons. It seems likely that he believed it was the right place for a deductively derived hypothesis, as apposed to an inductive theory inspired and supported by sufficient confirmatory empirical evidence. If so, that would explain why he wrote the following in the main body of NTA (Matthew 1831, p. 303):
‘As our author’s premises thus appear neither self evident, nor supported by facts, it might seem unfair, at least it would be superfluous, to proceed to the consideration of his conclusions and corollaries.’
Those further conclusions and corollaries were saved for the appendix, which may also have been used so extensively because it seemed the appropriate place for heresy. Matthew could not trumpet his discovery of natural selection from the rooftops without the prior publication of Chambers’ (1844) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which so effectively prepared the general public and scientific community for a godless explanation of species (see: Millhauser 1859, Secord 2000). Nor could he have safely done so without a network of sympathetic and influential supporters. Furthermore, Matthew lacked any such sort of scientific support network of the kind afforded to Darwin and Wallace by way of membership of key scientific associations and powerful patrons such as Lyell, Gray, the Hooker’s, Baden Powel and Huxley. Consequently, Matthew had to be subtle in his dealings and where he placed his words. NTA’s appendix contained so much godless heresy (Matthew 1831, p.381):
‘Geologists discover a like particular conformity – fossil species – through the deep deposition of each great epoch, but they also discover an almost complete difference to exist between the species or stamp of life, of one epoch from that of every other. We are therefore led to admit either of a repeated miraculous creation; or of a power of change, under a change of circumstances, to belong to living organized matter, or rather to the congeries of inferior life, which appears to form superior. The derangements and changes in organized existence, induced by a change of circumstance from the interference of man, affording us proof of the plastic quality of superior life, and the likelihood that circumstances have been very different in the different epochs, though steady in each tend strongly to heighten the probability of the latter theory.’
Contrary to Dawkins’ (2010) claim that Matthew did not see that his discovery provided the explanation for all life and that it destroyed the argument for design, the above paragraph proves that Matthew did fully understand, appreciate and articulate the great significance of what he had discovered. Dempster (1996) makes the same argument and provides a wealth of further evidence that Matthew fully understood the significance of his discovery. On another point of related detail, Chambers’ (1844) Vestiges was less heretical than NTA, because Chambers expressly assigned the grand design and creation of the process of organic variety and species development to the Abrahamic God. And yet, even such clear inclusion of a creator in the process remained problematic for the Church, which at the time so dominated society, including the universities. Millhauser explains why (1959, p 91):
‘ “Development” reduces the Creator almost (or completely) to a passive spectator of His own automatic universe; it abolishes miracle and special intervention, approximates the Deity to an impersonal principle like gravitation, and hovers perilously on the brink of atoms and void. Or (to rephrase the philosophical objection in practical terms) it presents an entirely unfamiliar conception of the Godhead, to which mere intellectual inertia, supported by profound emotions, is bound to offer vehement resistance.’
In his reply to Darwin’s letter in the Gardener’s Chronicle, Matthew explained precisely why notions of heresy prevented him and other naturalists from promoting his discovery in the first half of the 19th century (Matthew 1860b, p. 433):
‘I notice in your Number April 21st Mr. Darwin’s letter honourably acknowledging my prior claim relative to the origin of species. I have not the least doubt that in publishing his late work he believed he was the first discoverer of this law Nature. He is however wrong in thinking that naturalist was aware of the previous discovery. I had occasion some 15 years ago to be conversing with a naturalist, a professor of a celebrated university, and he told me he had been reading my work “Naval Timber,” but that he could not bring such views before his class or uphold them publicly from fear of the cutty-stool[2], a sort of pillory punishment…’
Matthew focused his most heretical ideas on natural selection in the appendix of NTA, which is not at all indicative that he failed appreciate their enormous implications. What better place to put heresy than in an appendix? What better way for any reader to know exactly where to look first to find dangerous ideas? Were NTA to face a ban, the appendix could be severed without spoiling the entire book. Indeed, there is evidence from other cases that this was Matthew’s likely motive. For example, John Whitehurst (1778) – writing at the time of Darwin’s grandfather – did the exact same thing with his heresy on evolution. And more than two decades before Lord Mondobbo’s (1774) and Buffon’s (1775) heretical assertions on the topic of apes resembling humans, the same appendix ploy was used to contain an argument that humans are the same species as apes (Edwards 1751).
The, failure to take it forward argument against Matthew’s claim to greatness
Having disproven Darwin’s excuses for why no one would have read NTA, it is pertinent to examine another argument for denying Matthew full priority and scientific recognition as an immortal great thinker. This next argument has it that Matthew failed to develop his ideas beyond what he wrote in NTA, which, incidentally, ignores the fact that he did take those ideas forward for humans in Emigration Fields (see Dempster 1996). This ‘failure to proceed’ argument, blended with a ‘no impact whatsoever’ belief, can be seen in Mayr’s (1982, p. 500) reasoning:
‘Patrick Matthew undoubtedly had the right idea, just like Darwin did on September 28, 1838, but he did not devote the next twenty years to converting it into a cogent theory of evolution. As a result it had no impact whatsoever.’
Contrary to Mayr’s thinking, the conventions of scientific priority (Merton 1957) do not demand that a discoverer must personally take their discovery forward, or to demonstrate that they fully appreciated what they discovered. If simply taking one’s own discovery forward is a necessary condition of scientific greatness then Higgs would not have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics, because other scientists, not Higgs, found proof of his hypothetical Higgs-Boson particle. And Fleming should not be hailed as the discoverer of penicillin. Instead, we should be celebrating Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. Because it was they who discovered Fleming’s obscure published comment on his discovery. And it was not Fleming but they who then did something further with that discovery (Fletcher 1984). Furthermore, Mendel was 16 years dead before anyone understood what he had discovered (Hasan 2005) . Today, therefore, it seems that there are essentially two generally accepted conditions that are necessary for a scientific discoverer to be attributed with absolute incontestable priority. What we might term Condition I is being first to publish (see Merton 1957) and Condition II, as evidenced in the rationale for denying Matthew full priority over Darwin and Wallace, is proving the originator significantly influenced the work of subsequent and important pioneers in the field.
Whilst it is important to note that the history of scientific discovery has many typical examples of precursory influence not being a zero-sum game (Shermer 2002), what is different and most unusual in the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace is that Darwin and Wallace each claimed that it was a zero sum game, because, despite Matthew fulfilling Condition I they claimed absolutely zero prior-knowledge of NTA. Therefore, contrary to the scientific principle of nullius in verba, enshrined within the motto of the Royal Society since 1663, on the word alone of Darwin and Wallace, yet in the historical absence of any disconfirming evidence, Matthew is effectively said to have failed to satisfy Condition II. However, we now know that Matthew did fulfil Condition II, by way of influencing the naturalist who influenced the naturalist. Because Loudon (1832), reviewed NTA, then edited and published Blyth’s (1835; 1836) hugely influential journal articles.
Part II of this article examines the influence of six further naturalists who read NTA, revealing that two played roles far greater than Blyth’s in Darwin’s and Wallace’s published ‘discoveries.’ Before then however, having established that other naturalists did read NTA, and having disproven Darwin’s excuses for not reading the book, it is necessary to examine further evidence in order to determine the likelihood that Wallace and Darwin could have avoided reading the one book, above all others, that both really needed to read.
Advertised, reviewed and cited: If seven other naturalists could read and then cite NTA pre-Origin then why not Darwin and Wallace?
Wainwright (2008) provides disconfirming evidence for Darwin’s excuse that NTA was an obscure book by an obscure author by identifying two anonymously authored reviews: one in the Edinburgh Literary Journal (1831) and one in the Gardener’s Magazine (1832). The latter, as Matthew informed Darwin, was in fact authored by Loudon (see Matthew 1860a). In addition to those valuable findings, NTA was advertised in the London Literary Gazette (1831), and The Magazine of Natural History and Journal[3] (1831, p.571), both of which mention the topic of varieties, species and their geographic location. NTA was cited in Arcana of Science and Art (1832), and in an eight volume collection on the trees and shrubs of Britain (Loudon 1838). It was cited in an encyclopaedia on gardening (Loudon 1835). NTA was even listed within the Library of Congress (1840 p.127), having been cited two years earlier (Woodbury 1838) in a United States Congress debate.
In addition to many more reviews and citations, NTA was advertised for years by its Edinburgh publisher Adam and Charles Black. Whenever Matthew’s Emigration Fields (1839) was advertised in a publication, NTA was promoted via the strap-line: ‘By Patrick Matthew, author of Naval Timber and Arboriculture’. Both books were typically advertised together as follows (Roger, 1849 p.250):
‘MATTHEW. EMIGRATION FIELDS:
North America, the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand, describing these Countries, and giving a comparative view of the advantages they present to British Settlers. By Patrick Matthew, Author of “Naval Timber and Arboriculture.” With two Folio Maps, engraved by Sydney Hall. Post 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth.” The information contained in this work is of such a nature, that every one who has an intention of emigrating, should, before fixing upon any country as his future residence, consult the EMIGRATION FIELDS.”
DUNDEE CHRONICLE.
MATTHEW NAVAL TIMBER AND ARBORICULTURE.
Being a Treatise on that subject, with Critical Notes on Authors who have recently treated the subject of planting. By Patrick Matthew. 8vo, 12s. cloth’.
The Athenaeum, which was the journal of Darwin’s and Joseph Hooker’s favourite gentleman’s club of the same name[4] advertised NTA and Emigration fields, then published a two page review of the latter (The Athenaeum 1839, p.v; pp. 476-477). Darwin’s co-authored book (King et al 1839) was advertised and reviewed on pages 446 to 449 in this very edition of the Athenaeum. We know Darwin read that publication, because his private notebook of ‘Books to Read and Books Read’( Darwin 1838 -51) reveals that he had extensive knowledge of what was in this particular 1839 edition of the Athenaeum. Darwin wrote in his ‘books to read’ section of his notebook:
‘Athenaeum 1839. p. 546[5] — Mr Conrad has published work on fossil shells of N. America. And ‘Dr Moreton’s Crania Americana. with remarks on geograph distrib of Man. Mentioned by Athenaeum 1839 p. 765. in Geograph. Soc??’
Contrary to the impression given by Vorzimmer (1977), Darwin was not at all meticulous in recording which books he read, because the Athenaeum (1839) is not included in Darwin’s ‘books read’ section of his private notebook. We know he read it, however, because in the ‘books to read’ section of that same notebook he used it several times as a source of references for other sources.
We should further note that there is no mention of NTA in any of Darwin’s ‘Books to Read and Books Read’ notebooks until Matthew’s (1860a) claim to priority letter was published in the Gardener’s Chronicle (see: Darwin 1852-60). However, those notebooks were not started until 1838. Returning from the voyages of the Beagle still believing that species were immutable, it is by way of what Darwin wrote in his 1837-38 private Zoonomia notebook, that it is generally agreed that 1837 was the year he appears to have first come to terms with the probability of natural selection being the solution to the origin of species (see Sulloway 1982, 1984). Most notably, Matthew’s expert subject of fruit trees is the very first topic covered in first sentence of that notebook (Darwin 1837-1838.p. 1):
‘Two kinds of generation the coeval kind, all individuals absolutely similar, for instance fruit trees, probably polypi, gemmiparous propagation, bisection of Planaria, &c., &c.’
Later in the same notebook he wrote about pippin apples:
‘Never They die, without they change; like Golden Pippens [sic] it is a generation of species like generation of individuals.’
Two years before the publication of NTA, Matthew (1829 p.467-477) sent the Caledonian Horticultural Society of Edinburgh an account of the varieties of apples and pears in his famous orchard in the highly fertile Carse of Gowrie in Scotland. Besides extensive information on grafting and hybridizing, here Matthew wrote of the rarity of his own Scarlet Golden Pippin, of which he possessed only one tree, believed to have come from the seed of the common Golden Pippin variety ‘sporting in the progeny’. Most importantly, Darwin actually read Matthew’s (1829) account, because his notebook (Darwin 1838 to 1851) – records that he read the Memoirs of the Caledonian Horticultural Society of Edinburgh for the years 1814-32.
Further contrary evidence to disconfirm the myth of Matthew being an obscure writer on an obscure subject of no interest to Darwin, or other naturalists, the literature reveals that pre-Origin, Matthew’s name and his books were advertised and cited on the very same page with the World’s most famous writers – incidentally, some of whom were Darwin’s friends and correspondents. For example:
Far from being obscure in the first half of the 19th century, NTA was extensively and prominently advertised. One such advert takes up three quarters of one of the opening pages of the then extremely influential Encyclopaedia Britannica (1842). This advertisement is particularly pertinent because it informs the reader that NTA is a scientific book about species:
‘Scientific Arboriculture for the use of The British Proprietors. A Treatise on Naval Timber and Arboriculture
By Patrick Matthew
In embracing the Philosophy of Plants, the interesting subject of Species and Variety is considered, – the principle of the natural location of vegetables is distinctly shewn, – the principle also which in the untouched wild “keeps unsteady nature to her law” inducing conformity in species and preventing deterioration of breed is explained, – and the causes of the variation and deterioration of cultivated forest-trees pointed out.
Sample of Venom – “A vulgar, petulant and outrageous abuse” (of recent writers on Arboriculture) To give any idea of the coarseness, the virulence, the malignity, and utter absurdity, of the style of attack that is here opened upon them, is impossible.” – “Waspish spirit”!!!! Edinburgh Literary Journal.
A heart of oak sort of frankness which we richly value and we relish, moreover the characteristic manliness of his style, albeit from turning from analysis to synthesis, he dissects several well known authorities with such keenness, that were their names suspended over our timber nurseries they would act as beacons rather than decoys. The terseness of his language, from its fullness and patriotic bearing, need’s no apology.” –“ In thus testifying our hearty approbation of this author, it is strictly in his capacity of a forest-ranger, where he is original, bold, and evidently experienced in all the arcana of the parentage, birth, and education of trees.” – Mr Matthew successively treats of the wood suitable for plank and for timber, and of the best modes of treating British forest trees so as to procure straight boards, bends and crooks, with a decision evidently conferred by a practical knowledge of the subject. The whole of his advice on these needs will be thankfully received by those who properly estimate the value of durability in vessels destined to buffet the ocean. United Service Journal.
“In recommending this work to landed proprietors we shall therefore only remark that it displays an intelligent and cultivated mind, and an evident practical study of the subject –.” Farmer’s Journal.
“This is a sensible and clever practical work. We find in Part IV. judicious notices of the authors who treat of Arboriculture, who have already appeared before the public on these there are very just comments – Every timber grower will read Mr Matthew’s work to advantage. It is earnestly and rationally written.” – Metropolitan Magazine.’
The ‘books read’ section of Darwin’s (1838 1851) notebook reveals that he read at least five publications that cited, or else had in them, articles about both Patrick Matthew and NTA. They are:
The same notebook reveals that Darwin read at least 10 books on forest trees, fruit trees, olive trees and arboriculture. Namely: Loudon (1838); Eveyln (1664); Boutcher (1775); Forsyth (1791); Barck (1762); Loudon (1822); Knight (1797); Agricola (1721); Head (1829) and Hillhouse (1818). An online search through all the annotations that Darwin pencilled on the books in his personal library at Down[8] reveals that he wrote, either in the margins or elsewhere on the page, at least 62 annotations on the subject of trees. Many of these are notes about fruit trees and hybridization, core themes in NTA.
This data further disconfirms the myth that Darwin missed reading NTA because it was on a different topic to books that he was likely to read. Furthermore, Darwin’s unpublished essay of 1844 reveals his great interest in trees as key to understanding natural selection as an analogue of artificial selection, was remarkably similar to Matthew’s discovery. Matthew, who elsewhere in NTA (p. 280-285, 366) wrote about the relative hardiness of naturally selected crab apple trees compared with artificially selected hybridized apple trees, wrote (Matthew 1831, p. 308):
‘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…’
Eiseley (1979) thought that this replication of ideas alone was sufficient proof that Darwin had read NTA and plagiarised Matthew.[9]
Darwin and his great friend, Joseph Hooker, had almost three decades before the publication of the Origin to respond to the many reviews, advertisements and citations, all of which encouraged those interested in species and economic botany to read NTA. That fact should not be allowed to pass without seeking to weigh the likelihood that either scientist, so obviously interested in trees and species, could avoid reading NTA when their friends and associates, had read it. The evidence is overwhelming: Darwin and Wallace had no reasonable excuse for not reading the book containing the ideas they replicated. On which note, we turn now to Part II of this article in order to reveal the names and examine the relevant details of the seven naturalists who did read NTA. The premise behind the rationale for conducting the research that informs Part II is that the existence of any number of naturalists who read NTA further refutes Darwin’s and Wallace’s excuses for being unaware of Matthew’s ideas. Moreover, the size of that number, connected socially or professionally to either Darwin or Wallace must correspondingly to each, exponentially implicate them as science fraudsters and liars for claiming that neither they nor any other naturalist known to them was aware of Matthew’s ideas pre-Origin.
Part II
The Seven Naturalists who cited NTA pre-Origin: An analysis of their social and professional associations with Darwin and Wallace
The seven naturalists who read NTA before Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers (Darwin and Wallace 1858) were read before the Linnean Society are, in date order of their citing Matthew’s book: Robert Chambers (1832), John Loudon (1832), Edmund Murphy (1834), Cuthbert Johnson (1842), Prideaux John Selby (1842), John Norton (1851) (see Stephens and Norton), and William Jameson (1853).
Robert Chambers
In March 1832 Robert Chambers was the first of at least seven naturalists to read NTA and comment upon Matthew’s unique ideas (Chambers 1832). He cited NTA, on the subject of arboriculture. We can discern that Robert Chambers, rather than his brother William, wrote the column that cited Matthew, because Robert did all the writing for Chambers’ Journal at its inception, before entering into partnership in the journal with William (see Secord 2000).
Chambers is the anonymous author of the Vestiges of Creation (1844). Darwin (1861a p. xv-xvi) and Wallace (1845) acknowledged that the Vestiges was a major influence on their work on organic evolution.
Millhauser, who wrote the authoritative text on the Vestiges, failed to discover that Chambers read and cited NTA, He did, however, think it likely that Chambers knew Matthew (Millhauser 1959, p.82):
‘As for Patrick Matthew, his Naval Timber had involved him in a feud (over methods of transplanting) with Chambers’ friend Steuart of Alanton, whose own work on arboriculture the Journal had reviewed; it is thus altogether probable that he knew Matthew too.’
Chambers (1840) followed Matthew’s later work, citing Emigration Fields (Matthew 1839) regarding the ill-effects of tobacco smoking.
In 1844, the year in which Darwin penned his second unpublished essay on natural selection, Chambers anonymously published the Vestiges – a book described by one great authority on the subject as ‘the most widely discussed work on science ever published’ (Secord 2000, p. 460).
Chambers and Darwin met, conducted personal correspondence and Darwin was fully aware, as early as early as 1847, that Chambers was the secret author of the heretical Vestiges, because Chambers gave Darwin a copy of the book, leading him to ‘know’ that he was its secret author.[10]Darwin (1847) shared that intelligence with Joseph Hooker. Most significantly, Chambers, being a gentleman geologist, was a friend and correspondent of Darwin’s great friend and Geological mentor, Charles Lyell.
Another fact of particular note is that in 1848 Chambers was mentored in his political career by NTA’s Scottish publisher Adam Black (see Secord 2000). Most remarkably, Black, like Chambers, was part of Darwin’s social network. This is established by way of what happened when, in 1845, Darwin’s best friend Joseph Hooker applied for the Chair of Botany at the University of Edinburgh. The professorial appointment that Hooker sought included responsibility for the Royal Botanic Gardens of Scotland, which meant that local politicians had considerable influence regarding who should be appointed. Hooker collected some 153 testimonials to support his application, which the Town Council sought to block since it had not been consulted on the fact that the Crown invited Hooker to apply (see Huxley 1918, pp. 204-205). Professor Forbes, of EdinburghUniversity, sent-on Darwin’s letter of support for Hooker to Adam Black, who was then Lord Provost of the city (Darwin 1845). When Hooker’s application was unsuccessful, Darwin was both shocked and angry (e.g. see: Darwin 1845b).
Of particular note is the fact that Darwin asked Chambers to review the Origin, and in his review Chambers (1859) was apparently the first to second publish Matthew’s unique term ‘natural process of selection’, rather than Darwin’s unique anagrammatical replication: ‘process of natural selection.’[11]
John Loudon
In November 1832 the famous gardener, botanical naturalist, editor, publisher and engineer, John Loudon, wrote a very positive book review of NTA in The Gardener’s Magazine (Loudon 1832). Wainwright (2008; 2011) emphasised the fact that, contrary to Darwin’s claim that Matthew’s ideas went unread, NTA was reviewed at least twice, though anonymously. In actual fact, Matthew’s first letter in the Gardener’s Chronicle informed Darwin that one of those anonymous reviewers was Loudon (Matthew 1860a p.312):
‘…reviewed in numerous periodicals, so as to have full publicity in the “Metropolitan Magazine,” the “Quarterly Review,” the “Gardeners’ Magazine,” by Loudon, who spoke of it as the book…’
In 1803, when Matthew was just fifteen years of age, Loudon drew the plans for landscaping what are now the parklands of SconePalace (Canfield 2002), which bordered Matthew’s aristocratic birthplace of Rome Farm. It seems likely they would have met.
A prolific author and fellow of the Linnean Society, the Royal Society and a corresponding member of the RoyalSwedishAcademy of Sciences, Loudon was a friend and correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks (Canfield 2002) and William Hooker (Loudon 1839). William Hooker’s close friend and fellow economic botanist, John Lindley, greatly assisted Loudon (1829) to compile his Encyclopaedia of Plants (See Holway 2013).
Lindley was a correspondent of Darwin’s (see: Darwin Correspondence Project 2014) and another who was a great friend of William Hooker. Both Hooker and Lindley had their own works reviewed in the same volume in which Matthew’s NTA was reviewed (Loudon 1832). As noted earlier in this article, the review of Lindley’s book was directly above that of NTA, and Lindley (1859, 1853) then went on to write two books that dealt with the topic of naval timber.
William Hooker was a friend of Darwin and was the father of Darwin’s best friend and botanical mentor Joseph Hooker. Moreover, Wallace was a friend, correspondent and supplier of specimens to William Hooker, who kindly wrote a letter of introduction (Knapp, Sanders and Baker 2002. p. 110) for Wallace and his associate Bates:
‘Hooker wrote a letter of introduction for both men to use in Brazil (Bates & Wallace 1848), which would be useful for opening doors that would otherwise be closed to two impecunious young Englishmen.’
It seems quite likely that Loudon would have discussed NTA’s unique ideas on the ‘origin of species’ with Lindley since both were, according to Millhauser, interested in the problem of species. Millhauser (1959, p.72):
‘Four academic botanists – E.M. Fries, James E. Smith, J.C Loudon, and John Lindley – subscribed about 1828, to the opinion that certain plant species might, under environmental stimulus, metamorphose into one another.’
Edmund Murphy
Murphy (1834), landscape gardener, agricultural scientist and journal editor, was the third naturalist to cite NTA. He cited it on the topic of tree pruning. Murphy held appointments as Professor of Agriculture at GallowayCollege and Queens College Cork. He was Editor of ‘The Agricultural and Industrial Journal’ and authored many works, including his “Treatise on the Agricultural Grasses,’ and of ‘The Farmer’s Guide.’ Murphy is perhaps most famous for authoring The Agricultural Instructor in 1849, which sought to connect scientific knowledge with practice in agriculture.
Cuthbert Johnson
Johnson (1842) cited Matthew on the subject of pruning. He was joint founder of the Mark Lane Express and Agricultural Journal. Like Darwin, he was a fellow of the Royal Society. Johnson published many books, including a farming encyclopaedia.
Prideaux John Selby
The ornithologist and wildlife artist Prideaux John Selby cited NTA 23 times in his own book on trees (Selby 1842). Selby went on to edit and publish Wallace’s (1855) Sarawak paper.
Whilst compiling his 1842 book on British Forest Trees, Selby wrote to his friend William Jardine on 19th December 1840 (see Jackson 1992 p.86): ‘Would it be giving you too much trouble to look out for me a copy of Matthew’s treatise of Naval Timber…’ In his own book, Selby, (1842; p. 391) would criticise Matthew’s (1831) notion of ‘greater power of occupancy’, but elsewhere in the tome his many comments about NTA were positive.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Selby sat on numerous committees with Darwin. He, as likely as not, knew Darwin by way of their long-standing mutual senior capacities at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Linnean Society. He was a friend and correspondent of many in Darwin’s inner circle, including William Hooker, (see: Brock and Meadows 1998). Selby was also a friend of Darwin’s great friend and prolific correspondent Leonard Jenyns. What’s more, Darwin’s father was a guest at Selby’s house (Jackson 1992). Selby and Darwin’s good friend Thomas Huxley (AKA Darwin’s Bulldog) were also members of the Ray Society. Selby was an associate of Darwin’s geological mentor Charles Lyell, in the capacity of being an 1831 founding member and Vice President of the British Association, at the time Lyell was a member of its council.
Eight months after Selby edited and published Wallace’s Sarawak paper, Lyell visited Darwin in order to persuade him into publishing his research on natural selection sooner rather than later.
John Norton
In 1851 John P Norton, the agricultural scientist, cited NTA regarding the benefit of growing naval timber in hedgerows in “the Book of the Farm” which he co-authored with the agriculturalist Stevens (Stephens and Norton 1851). In 1846 Norton was Professor of Scientific Agriculture and Vegetable and Animal Physiology at Yale. He produced a series of books including ‘Elements of Scientific Agriculture’ and published many papers. Norton undertook two study tours of Europe whilst working on soil science. For his important contribution to science, a small statue commentating Norton is on the Edmond Amateis bronze doors at WashingtonDC.
William Jameson
In (1853) Jameson cited NTA with regard to economic botany. Jameson was a botanist, Deputy Surgeon-General, and Garden Superintendant for the East India Company at Saharanpur, India, from 1844 to 1875 (see Rose 2009). He enjoyed an international reputation as a first-class natural scientist and administrator, famously pioneering tea planting in India. Jameson published widely, including in the Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (Jameson 1866). He also supplied seeds to William Hooker at Kew. One such particularly important delivery of seeds was notably received by John Lindley (see: Curtis’s 1863)[12].
If William Hooker, whose job at Kew was to keep abreast of knowledge on economic botany for the benefit of the British Empire, had not read NTA pre-Origin, and was unaware of Matthew’s international reputation as a ground-breaking economic botanist, the lapse is somewhat astonishing, because Jameson (1853 p.307) wrote on Matthew’s unique discovery that natural selection, through power of occupancy by other species, actually prevents certain trees from growing in the wild in soil far more suitable to their vigorous growth:
‘This opinion regarding the value of sites where Pine trees are grown is not, we are aware, in accordance with those of many: but we here give facts as exhibited in the Himalayas. Matthew in his treatise on naval timber, states that the Pinus sylvestris, if grown on good or rich soil, attains rapidly large dimensions and its best timber properties.’
In 1854, the year after Jameson cited that unique and valuable commercial forestry information from page 301 of the main body of NTA,[13] William Hooker, who was empowered to make such decisions for the East India Company, refused Jameson’s request for promotion in favour of his own protégée (see Arnold 2006, pp. 161-162).
Overall, the degree of Darwin’s and Wallace’s scientific and social involvement with those who had read that book is damming, so too is the extent of their involvement with other naturalists closely associated with those who read it.
Part III
A Bombshell for the History of Science
Conclusion
Darwin’s and Wallace’s excuses for having no prior-knowledge of Matthew’s work are refuted by an overwhelming number of disconfirming facts. It is difficult to believe, in light of these newly discovered facts, that Darwin or Wallace could have avoided reading the one book in the world that each really needed to read. The number, prominence and content of advertisements for NTA suggest that Darwin and Wallace would have seen them and would have been sufficiently intrigued; particularly since Darwin spent 28 years hunting down and reading related literature in search of any kind of evidence that might confirm, or disconfirm, the theory of natural selection. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he did read at least five publications that mention NTA.
Contrary to currently accepted knowledge, other naturalists, including at least three known personally to Darwin and Wallace, did have pre-Origin knowledge of Matthew’s discovery. Moreover, those three naturalists were at the centre of Darwin’s and Wallace’s involvement in the field of organic evolution. The most influential papers of Blyth, a naturalist who Darwin (1861a) admitted had served him as a most valuable informant and influencer, were edited and published by John Loudon, who read and cited NTA (Loudon 1832) pre-Origin. Robert Chambers (1832), who both Darwin and Wallace freely admitted was a great influence on their work, read and cited NTA pre-Origin. Matthew’s prior discovery of natural selection undoubtedly directly influenced Chambers to write the Vestiges, and from that cause can we be certain that Matthew did, at the very least, indirectly influence Darwin and Wallace to find further evidence to support Matthew’s hypothesis and turn it into a theory. Wallace’s (1855) Sarawak paper’s editor and publisher, Prideaux John Selby (1842), read and cited NTA thirteen years earlier. Moreover, the naturalist William Jardine, co-editor of Wallace’s Sarawak paper, had the book in his possession for some time because he purchased Selby’s copy.
The fact that Loudon, Chambers and Selby, three out of only seven naturalists known to have definitely read NTA pre-Origin, played such dynamic roles at the very core of influence and facilitation of Darwin’s and Wallace’s published work on natural selection can have – beyond seeking to explain it away as a coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence pile-up – only one rational explanation. Namely, that it is now established beyond any reasonable doubt that Matthew’s discovery influenced both Darwin and Wallace. Matthew’s discovery and his influence fulfil both Condition I and Condition II of the protocols and conventions of scientific priority, thereby satisfying all required criteria for Matthew to be awarded full priority over Darwin and Wallace.
On the haunting question of whether or not Darwin and Wallace deliberately plagiarised NTA and then lied to claim independent discovery, the findings presented in this article – together with further evidence regarding other non-naturalist writers who read NTA – has been weighed with a comparative computer-mediated plagiarism analysis of Darwin’s and Wallace’s published and unpublished work. Findings from an analysis of that wider investigation lead me (Sutton 2014) to conclude that Darwin and Wallace committed the World’s greatest science fraud
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[1] Although the actual review was anonymous, in his 1860 letter in the Gardener’s Chronicle Matthew explained that it was penned by Loudon, the magazine’s editor.
[2] In late 18th and early 19th century Scotland, heretics, fornicators and other ‘sinners’ were obliged by the church authorities to stand upon three legged wooden stools, known as cutty, or cuttie, stools, as a mark of shame.
[3] Wallace went on to publish in 1855 his Sarawak paper in this journal.
[4] The Athenaeum was founded by the father of Darwin’s publisher John Murray (Carpenter 2008).
[6] Published by John Murray, the publishers of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
[7] This is the journal of the Gentleman’s club. Of which Darwin had been a member since 1839. Joseph Hooker joined in 1850.
[8] Available at Biodiversitylibrary.org. Click on the Darwin Collection, then on ‘annotations’.
[9] Note also that Matthew’s paragraph is from the main body of NTA, not from its appendix.
[10] This gift is evidence that Chambers knew Darwin was working in the field of the origin of species. Why else would he risk giving Darwin a gift of his anonymously authored book, which covered the same heretical subject?
[11] From an analysis based upon a precise term and date filtered search through the scanned documents in Google’s archive of 30 million publications.
[12] Coincidentally, the relevant edition of that copy of Curtis’s, which is available in Google’s Library, was donated to the University Harvard Herbarium by none other than the US Botanist and friend of Darwin and the Hookers – Asa Gray.
[13] The relevant text is reproduced in Part I of the article you are currently reading,
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New Discovery of World’s Greatest Science Fraud
February 26th, 2014Most people believe that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace discovered the theory of natural selection. But experts in the field know that another published the exact same theory almost three decades earlier.
In 1831 the Scottish laird, botanist, orchardist, farmer, grain dealer and Chartist, named Patrick Matthew. published his discovery of the ‘natural process of selection’ in his book entitled ‘On Naval Timber and Arboriculture’.
Amazingly, 27 years later, in 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace each claimed to have independently discovered the exact same process. Both Darwin and Wallace claimed no prior knowledge of Matthew’s book, and to this day Darwinists and other scientists have simply taken their word for it that they were not lying plagiarizers and science swindlers.
In the third edition of the Origin of Species Darwin (1861) wrote:
‘In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged on in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860.’
Nullius in Verba
The seventeenth century Latin motto of the Royal Society, nullius in verba, means ‘on the word of no one’, which informs us that when it comes to claims of fact that scientists should not credulously take somebody’s word for it that something is true.
Contrary to the Darwinist myth that nobody read it, with hi-tech research methods, I have discovered the hidden books in the library that prove Matthew’s 1831 book was read and cited by at least seven naturalists before Darwin and Wallace each replicated the unique ideas within it. Three of those naturalists were in Darwin’s inner circle and one, Prideaux John Selby (1842) – in the very year Darwin wrote his first unpublished essay on natural selection – cited Matthew’s book many times in his own book on trees and therein commented on his failure to understand Matthew’s unique ‘survival of the most circumstance suited’ notion of ‘power of occupancy’ of certain trees.
Selby later edited and published Wallace’s (1855) first paper on organic evolution, which is known today as the famous ‘Sarawak Paper‘, which laid down his marker in the field of the discovery of natural selection. Moreover, thirteen years before that same famous paper was published, William Jardine, who co-edited Wallace’s Sarawak paper with Selby, also had Matthew’s book in his hands. And he held onto it for some time, because it was Jardine who purchased it in Scotland for Selby (see: Jackson, 1992).
And so the mythical pristine field of Wallace’s claimed independent discovery of natural selection is proven to have been completely and utterly contaminated with prior knowledge by those who both edited and then published his work. If Selby and Jardine had not informed Wallace of Matthew’s unique ideas, then this case would surely be the first scientifically discovered event of paranormal activity, because those ideas were replicated for the very first time in Wallace’s Sarawak paper.
If Wallace’s editors and publishers never told him about Matthew’s ideas, if Wallace never perpetrated a deliberate fraud by having full prior-knowledge of those ideas, and if he had no psychic ability to to read the minds of Selby and Jardine, there is only one alternative explanation. Selby and/or Jardine must have written Matthew’s unique ideas into Wallace’s paper for him. But even if that had been the case, that could not have been done without Wallace’s knowledge and approval.
Although the precise details of whatever actually happened may never be known, this unique and brand new discovery is one of many newsworthy bombshells now blasting to smithereens current mythical Darwinist accounts of the origin of Darwin’s (1859) Origin of Species.
To add to the seriousness of the impact on the history of science of this discovery, Selby’s prior reading and citation of Matthew’s book contaminates also Darwin’s claim to pristine independent discovery of the unique ideas within it.
Darwin’s father was a guest at Selby’s country house, as were many important naturalists in Charles Darwin’s inner circle, and Charles Darwin sat on several important scientific committees with Selby. Equally incriminatingly, Selby – who was right at the center of the scientific community in the mid-nineteenth century – was a prolific correspondent and friend of Darwin’s great friend and corespondent Leonard Jenyns (see: Jackson 1992, p. 124).
And so here we must now see further than the end of Darwin’s fallacious pen to the fact that his 154 year old and lame excuse that no one read Matthew’s book and it’s ideas is exterminated by the hard dis-confirming evidence that Selby did both. Such concrete facts always trump unevidenced rhetoric. ‘Selby’s Citations’ absolutely prove that other naturalists – indeed important and highly influential naturalists, who were closely linked to both Darwin and Wallace – did read Matthew’s ideas and it alone debunks the Patrick Matthew Supermyth.
Read more
If you wish to read more hard evidence about the new discovery of Darwin’s and Wallace’s great science fraud then please click here to visit the BestThinking website.
Reference
Jackson, C. E. (1992) Prideaux John Selby: A Gentleman Naturalist. Northumberland. Spredden Press.
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Fame at Last: Google Finds the Original Google after 110 Years in a Library ‘Wilderness’
December 30th, 2013
By Mike Sutton.
Dysology.orgAttribution
The Google (1913)
Readers of my recent mythbusting work (e.g.here and here) will know that I have developed a research technique called internet dating (so called because it’s remotely like carbon dating the veracity or the published origins of words and phrases). Internet dating as a research technique relies upon efficiently and systematically sifting and synthesizing knowledge inside books, journals, newspapers and other documents scanned by Google. My own recent use of Google to bust a number of etymological fallacies about who said what first and where certain words and phrases originated quite neatly brings me to the theme of this particular peer-to-peer articlette. Namely: what is the origin of the word Google?
Latest Internet Dating News
Last week, I ‘discovered’ the earliest (to date) known publication of the word google by using Google to search on the word google. And I can attest that it’s earliest published use appears as the title of a book. The reference for that book is Hildebrand, A. F. (1903) A Voice from the Wilderness: Meditations of a Google. San Francisco, California (hereafter The Original Google). In its first chapter, Hildebrand reveals that he also wrote and selfpublished an earlier book, in 1901, entitled The Conglomerate de Omniferia; Or, The Meditations of a Hobo under the pseudonym Aristotle Flavius Hillogrates.
It’s something of a duel-mystery why only a single copy of each book appears to be in existence and why they have survived at all. Both were self-published, which leads me to wonder whether perhaps the reason for the rarity of Hildebrand’s work and its survival is that it was perhaps surreptitiously inserted onto several library shelves by the author himself and that the two surviving copies of his unremarked literature survived library fires, librarian purges, merges, thefts and audits long enough to have been scanned as part of Google’s remarkable Library Project . Perversely, one reason for their library survival may be that the books have remained in excellent condition because so few people have read them.
This week, I used the international inter-library loan system to obtain a photocopy of the front cover, title page and the first chapter. You can see them in the image below. (Please note: If you have trouble making out the words on the images, just click on the image and it will enlarge).
Copyright Mike Sutton Dysology.comAttribution Share Alike
Images of The Original Google Book 1903 Taken by Mike Sutton in 2013
I’ve read chapter 1 and I have to say its quasi-philosophical, religious and literary ramblings are not quite to my taste. Experts of English literature might, however find it somewhat amusingly Joycean . What does make the inter-library loan expense amazingly worthwhile is the author’s 110 year old explanation for why he refers to himself as a google. (Hildebrand 1903, p. 7):
“You will probably wonder why I style myself a “google.” Well, you know I had the effrontery to style myself a “hobo” in the “Conglomerate de Omniferia” That was a serious offense-one that it would hardly be safe to repeat. No, there is no class in creation with whom I may safely identify myself. But I need some convenient term whereby to refer to myself, and what more appropriate term could I get than “google”? That’s why I call myself a “google.”
OK, so we now know that the word google is at least 110 years old in 2013.
Next, I examine the official story of the origin of the word google prior to my Google facilitated ‘discovery’ of the Original Google
Unfortunately the free Mirriam-Webster Dictionary is simply not up-to-snuff with knowing anything at all veracious about Google’s curious origins:
“Origin of GOOGLE
Google, trademark for a search engine
First Known Use: 2001”
Brewer’s (2012, p. 585) does a far better job of telling us about the origins of the word google:
‘A US company formed in 1998 that runs the Google internet search engine. Google resulted from a research project in 1996 by two postgraduate students from Stanford University. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Such is its dominance over the other search engines that ‘to Google’ has become a generic verb meaning to search for something or someone on the internet. The story goes that Page and Brin thought they were naming their company after Googol, the vast number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, but got the spelling wrong. Similarly, the company’s headquarters in California is called the Googleplex.’.
The company’s unofficial slogan is ‘Don’t be evil’; however, its detractors have expressed concerns regarding its policies on copyright, censorship and the privacy of personal information.’
Chambers (2012, p. 442), which, incidentally, is owned by the same publishing house as Brewer’s has this to say on the subject of the words googol and Google:
[googol ] ‘…the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes…1940 in Kasmer and Newman’s Mathematics and the Imagination, coined (possibly as a word from children’s vocabulary, perhaps with some influence of the comic strip character Barney Google) by the nine year old nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasmer when the child was asked to name such a large number.’
For his own part in this story here is what Edward Kasner (1938, p. 13) has to say about what a googol is, what a googolplex is and where he got the words from:
“You may want to know where I got the name “googol.” I was walking in the woods with my nephew one day, and I asked the boy to think up any name for the number; any amusing name that entered his head. He suggested “googol.” At the same time, he gave me a name for a still larger number: “googolplex.” A googolplex is much larger than a googol, but it is still finite. Put down one, and then follow it with zeros until you get tired. No, that is a joke, because the googolplex is a specific number. A googolplex is one with so many zeros that the number of zeros is a googol: one with a googol of zeros. A googolplex is certainly bigger than a googol. Is it googol times a googol? No. A googol times a googol would be one with two hundred zeros. I want one with a googol of zeros. You would not have enough room to write them even if they went to the furthest star, putting down zeros all the way there and making a tour of all the nebulae. A googolplex is really an enormous thing.”
Next, let us see what the Google company itself has to say , and you’ll notice that they make no mention of that alleged embarrassing spelling error mentioned by the mighty Chambers dictionary:
‘Our history in depth
[In] 1997: ‘ Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google—a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.’
Mike Sutton Dysology.com and Dysology.orgAttribution Share Alike
Barney Google invented in 1919 – celebrated by the US postal service in 1995
Presumably then we have to believe that the search engine wizards Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the whole of their team, and their PR copyrighters, friends and family oddly never saw a single Barney Google US postage stamp in 1995, which was just two years earlier (see timeline below).
Whatever the actual facts of the case about the Google search engine creator’s explanation – and those of Stanford university eyewitness David Koller , for why they named their superb product Google, of particular interest to etymologists should surely be that contrary to dysological claptrap published on line (e.g. here ) it has nothing to do with googly (a cricket term). Instead, it is etymologically related to Barney Google’s previously earliest known published namesake who is a monster that lives at the bottom of a garden pond in an illustrated 1913 children’s book. Speculatively, that fictional creation may possibly have influenced the naming of Barney Google in 1919. Chambers (2012) go on to speculate that Barney Google’s name may have then influenced the naming of the number googol by maths wizards Kasner and Newman in 1940, via Kasner’s nine year old nephew. Finally, that mathematical word googol is then – according to the story published online by the Google search engine company – meant to have influenced the 1997 naming of their search engine Google. Finally, thanks to an obscure book found by that search engine (reported for the first time in this articlette) we must now add Hildebrand’s original 1903 google into the story.
Perhaps the simplest way to show the origins of Google is to use a clickable timeline of currently known provenance of the word, as I do below:
1. 1903 – A. F. Hildebrand pens and self publishes: A Voice from the Wilderness: Meditations of a google.
2. 1913 – Vincent Cartwright Vickers – penname V.C.V – authors and has published: The Google Book, which is an illustrated children’s story book about a monster named the Google who shares Googleland with a number of exotic bird-like creatures.
3. 1919 – Billy DeBeck gives birth to the comic strip cartoon: Barney Google, which ran throughout the 1920’s and wasbootlegged, at times pornographically, by Tijuana comics throughout the 1930’s
4. 1938 – Kasner and Newman coin the word Googol – after gettng it from Kasner’s nine year old nephew (Kasner 1938). There is no veracious published evidence (to date at least) regarding where Kasner’s nephew actually got the phrase from. Some publications (e.g. Chambers 2012) assert that he may have chosen the name because he was influenced by the Barney Google comic strip.
5. 1995 The US Postal Service celebrates Barney Google with a postage stamp.
6. 1997 Page and Brin rename their BackRub search engine Google just two years after Barney Google postage stamps are in use in the USA. And yet the Google official story is that Google’s founders chose the name Google with no reference to the earlier use of that word but as a deliberate rehash of Kasmer and Newman’s word googol.
Conclusions and the way forward
Several things interest me about this on-going story. Firstly, as an incurable romantic, I’d like to know a little more about the obscure Hildebrand. I think there is a marvelous opportunity here for a little detective work that should perhaps begin by looking for clues in his two books. The fact that he put his thoughts into self-published books suggests that he wanted to influence mankind beyond the grave. I suspect he could have had no idea that it would be the weird title of his book that would bring him to the attention of the world via a once unimaginable technology sharing the same name. But what particularly interests me is:
(1) Whether, due to 21 century knowledge flux (Sutton 2013), Google’s Library project will help us to trace its etymological roots further back than my 1903 Google facilitated ‘discovery’?
(2) Whether we could ever satisfactorily explain the choice of the word by Hildebrand – is it merely because he thought such a childish nonsense word had never before been coined?
(3) While it might be possible, can we ever know for sure – or is it plausible to suggest – that either Vincent Cartwright Vickers and/or Billy DeBeck read Hildebrand’s Original Google of 1903?
(4) Whether anyone at Google. or any of Page and Brin’s friends or relatives ever used the US Postal Service in 1995?
The Hildebrand Hypothesis
I would like to here propose the Hildebrand Hypothesis, which is that:
The unremarked author Hildebrand is remarkable as the Original Google 110 years after self-publishing his book because its subtitle acted causally upon the naming of Page and Brin’s search engine.
To dis-confirm the hypothesis it will be necessary to establish that on the balance of reasonable probabilities that Hildebrand’s Original Google did not influence anyone who influenced Page and Brin’s choice of the word for their search engine.
The hypothesis would be confirmed by the discovery of new evidence that either Vickers, DeBeck, Kasner, Newman or Kasner’s nephew or Page and Brin were directly influenced in the naming of their creations by Hildebrand’s Original Google.
Finally, let’s end on a little further fun
If not the gurgling of an infant from personal observation or perhaps Eugene Field’s famous 19th century verse Googly-Goo , what else might have influenced Hildebrand to call himself a google? How about the term goggle or better still googleeyed?
Dysology.orgAttribution
Googleeyed. Is this the word that influenced Hildebrand the google originator?
Furthermore, that mathematical word googol amusingly appears to appear in print in 1894, in a book entitled: Some Remarks on the Kalyani inscriptions by Toʻ Cinʻ Khui, Bombay : Education Society’s Steam Press,
Postscript 14th April 2013. At the time of writing, Wikipedia currently has only traced the origin of the name Google back to the Barney Google cartoons of 1919. However, Since Wikipedia is currently unethically engaged in deliberately and systematically plagiarizing the unique results of my original myth-busting work published solely here on Best Thinking, and then deliberately refusing to cite me as the originator of this brand new information that is busting decades old pervasive myths and fallacies and poor research, we should expect Wikipedia to edit-out its current text and insert all the results, uniquely discovered by my research, published here in this article, and yet pretend that Wikipedia discovered this new information in order to seek to improve its dreadful reputation for disseminating unreliable information. You can see what they are up to here, and read my arguments for why this is a socially toxic practice. Boycott Wikipedia’s toxic plagiarism !
Do Media Initiatives Change Attitudes in the Desired Direction?
July 27th, 2013
By Mike Sutton.
According to the criminologist Paul Ekblom pickpockets admitted to lurking by signs designed to warn potential victims in order to see where people reassuringly patted their wallets. This then made picking their wallets much easier. This story is mentioned at page 120 of Clarke (1995).
How do we know whether or not attitude change poster and other media campaigns devised by committees, advertising executives – including that old favorite fall-back of the intuitive ‘experts’ that are campaigns designed for young people by young people – actually work in the right direction?
The telling question here is: could they make things worse through backfire, problem displacement, or escalation?
How do we know, for example, that anti-knife crime posters, designed by young people to influence young people, do not make people (young and old) more fearful of knife attacks and lead them to arm themselves for self defence?
Race’ and ethnic prejudice reduction and other attitude change
Uninformed, intuitive, and compellingly plausible good intentions may have the opposite to intended effect in sensitive areas of social policy where ‘race’ and ethnic bias is involved and where prejudice and attitude change is the goal (Sutton et al 2007). Uninformed initiatives can actually increase the prejudice and victimisation that they are seeking to reduce.
Beware, therefore, because letting untested attitude campaigns loose in a social environment may well be worse than ineffective because it may actually increase the very problem that the campaign is seeking to reduce.
First do no harm
A classic example of good non clownmongering practice can be found In a study of vandalism on London buses. In this case, Clarke’s conclusions based on a research study (Clarke et al 1978) enabled him to avoid being a clownmonger, because he observed that, although buses with conductors had less vandalism, they had more assaults against staff (conductors) and so he refused to recommend that London bus companes solve the vandalism problem by employing more conductors. Hence Clarke’s observation of the facts facilitated foreseeable unintended crime prevention consequences. And so crime displacement from vandalism to violence was avoided in this case.
Conclusion
Don’t rely upon un-evidenced intuitive, compelling ‘belief’. Because what works is often counter-intuitive, as is what backfires. Only research can determine the effectiveness of policy. And while clowns don’t do research, research shows that they do backfire quite a bit.
Clarke (1978) showed how just a little further research can reduce clowngering. As another example, I particualrly like the notion seeking to be on the leading rather than the bleeding edge of innovation by seekng out good innovative pratice from one area into your own:here.
Follow Dr Mike Sutton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Criminotweet
http://dysology.org/page3.html
Wikipedia Officially Sanctions Stealth Plagiarism on Grounds that “All Experts are Scum!”
April 14th, 2013By Mike Sutton.
Such is the pervasive success of Wikipedia that if you enter almost any search term into the world’s leading search engine, Google, Wikipedia’s page on the topic will be top of the first ten pages returned. Therefore, any official policies operated by Wikipedia’s army of official editors that might be returning unreliable information warrant serious scrutiny.
Last week I learned, for the second time, that a Wikipedian ‘master’ editor had taken my unique myth-busting research from the sole site where the information is published and used it to correct Wikipedia’s own myth spreading, without making any reference to the site from where it came. Worse, that Wiki editor then deleted the reference that another Wikipdeian had included to cite my original article on the myth busting site. That citation was deleted on the grounds that the site was not citable under Wikipedia’s rules. Consequently, Wikipedia has self-servingly stealth-plagiarized the fruits of several weeks of my research, and all its published results, and has passed that original work off as its own, while concealing its own role in spreading the original myth.
Wikipedia’s practice of stealth plagiarism is designed to ensure that originators of important myth busts are not attributed with busting pernicious myths that orthodox scientists, their publishers, and Wikipedians have been involved in spreading. In effect, Wikipedia’s sanctioned policy on stealth plagiarism makes it look as though Wikipedia is busting the myths it was responsible for spreading.
Wikipedian official editors have published their reasons for engaging in this self-serving institutional stealth plagiarism on two disgraceful grounds: (1) That Wikipedia will take unique information from Websites and plagiarize it on the grounds that while the unique newly discovered information is reliable and valid, the site they got it from is note deemed by them to be so. And (2) That the originators of that unique work should not be cited because Wikipedia’s philosophy is that “all experts are scum”.
If that sounds simply too psychopathically outrageous to be true, then please visit the site where the fully evidenced (with hyperlinks) story is available: here on the Best Thinking Website that Wikipedia is currently raiding as part of its official stealth plagiarism policy. I highly recommend that you to read the comments section of that article on Best Thinking where you can see one of the key Wikipedian ‘master’ editors muddle-headed attempts to rationalize Wikipedia’s plagiarizing policy.
I currently have a triple A-Z of busted pernicious myths that I was entering into the public domain, to speed up the war of veracity over fallacy. Now, due to Wikipedia’s officially sanctioned plagiarism of my work in this area, that important information will not enter the public domain for at least a year because I will have to publish it in traditional print publication books, because – like most rationally motivated hard working scholars – I value my self enough to wish to be attributed with priority, if not payment, for my unique discoveries.
We have known for years that Wikipedia is an unreliable source of information. Now we learn that it is also engaged in hiding that unreliability by engaging in practices that keep veracious new information out of the public domain for longer than is necessary. In effect, Wikipedia’s success in exploiting internet technology is deterring myth busters from using that same technology to release important information into the public domain.
Ancient Persian Nerds Discovered in 1799!
March 16th, 2013By Mike Sutton.
You would think that with all our nerdy skills and knowledge that we nerds would have a pretty good handle on where our moniker came from.
The breaking news is that current etymological nerdlaw is 151 years out.
While all orthodox knowledge claims have had it for decades that the word nerd originated in a 1950 Dr Seuss book the reality is that it occurred in print in 1799 and that nerd is a very ancient game of Persian backgammon.
For years we nerds have mysteriously been unable to find our own namesake. The full in-depth story can be found by clicking here.
The Phrase IS the Concept: Richard Dawkins’ Originator Delusion
March 9th, 2013By Mike Sutton.
A mutual embarrassment of seemingly endless science websites, scholarly books and
journal articles all confidently assert that Richard Dawkins coined the phrase selfish gene and is therefore the originator of the basic concept (e.g here here , here ,here here ,here and here ). However, they are all mistaken.
My unique deployment of the powerful and new internet dating research technique proves beyond doubt that Dawkins did not coin either the selfish gene phrase or invent the basic concept.
Timeline for publication of the selfish gene phrase and basic concept.
The unique critical article on this issue, complete with full Harvard style references, can be found over at the BestThinking website: here
British Nonsense of Justice
January 5th, 2013Deliberate and Systematic British Government Unjust Policy making
To claw back money from the British public in order to try to deal with British Government debt, a
totally unjust policy has been dreamed up by out-of-touch and privileged ministers with no sense of justice.
From the end of January 2013 the British Government is implementing a totally unjust policy whereby traditional British family friendly universal child benefit payments are being totally withdrawn from all families where at least one parent earns over £60,000 per year.
Child benefit is a tax-free payment that is aimed at helping parents cope with the cost of bringing up children
· One parent can claim £20.30 a week for an eldest or only child, and £13.40 a week for each of their other children
· The payments apply to all children aged under 16 and in some cases until they are 20 years old
· The system is administered by HM Revenue and Customs, which pays out to nearly 7.9 million families, with 13.7 million children
Injustice
If one parent earns over £50,000 per year but less than £60,000 then the payment is reduced on a sliding scale to zero depending on how close they are to the £60,000 threshold.
The total and ludicrous injustice of this new policy means that one family with one sole wage earner earning a total income of £50.000 will not only be paying the higher rate of income tax (40% for those earning over 40,000 per year) but will also have the child benefit reduced. Where one wage earner is earning £60,000 a year then a higher rate tax paying family will receive zero child benefit. However another family where there are two parents both working yet both earning, for example, £39,0000 each per year will have a total annual household income of £78,000 yet be paying the lower rate tax (30%) and still receiving the full child benefit allowance. That is ludicrously unfair. And yet the British Government believes it is an acceptable necessity in order to reduce national debt.
To provide another example of British government injustice, from the influential economic think tank The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS):
‘The government has created a dreadfully unjust anomaly, since a two-earner couple with taxable income of £100,000 split equally would retain all child benefit, but a single-earner couple or lone parent, with taxable income of £60,000, would lose all of it.’
That totally unfair policy making by the British government reveals the depths of Prime Minister David Cameron’s and his ministers disregard for justice and the degree to which they are all out of touch with the daily lives of the British electorate.
Only time will tell but perhaps we ordinary British people should fear that this policy could be the thin end of an injustice wedge. Because if we allow our government to do this to its electorate what systematic deliberate injustice will they believe they can get away with next?
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”
Dr Marin Luther King
If true justice is to be restored to the victims of this fiscal unfairness then a reverse of this ludicrous taxing will mean that in the future its victims will be able to claim back all the money from the British government that has been unjustly collected from them – with due interest.
All Rights ReservedUsed only with express written permissionFollow Mike on TwitterYou can follow my crime and criminology and policy work on Twitter (Criminotweet) here ; Dysology here ; Supermyths: here .
You can read further information on the British taxation injustice burden, which is provided here by the BBC
164ft Zombie Rat Myth Bust
December 29th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
Mythbusting the mythbusters and their super myth making
On the 17th December the BBC (Prichard, C. 2012 ) set about debunking the old maxim that “you are never more than six feet away from a rat”.
To make dysological matters worse, that old rural myth is today generally applied to people and rats in urban settings.
In order to come up with a better urban rat proximity figure it looks like a pre-supermyth has been created.
Weirdly homogenizing the diverse complexity of urban Britain in a new calculation that lumps all port towns and cities, medieval cities, and new towns together, Prichard’s BBC article cites calculations by Dr Dave Cowan, leader of Britain’s wildlife programme (civil servant) at the Food and Environment Research Agency to suggest that a better estimate, but one with less of a memorable ring to it, is that we are in fact never more than 164 feet (50 meters) away from a rat.
However, just a little thoughtfulness reveals a massive problem regarding how this new calculation was arrived at. Because the BBC article uses a debunking premise that is very much like the irrational British Civil Service reasoning behind the Zombie Cop Myth (Sutton and Hodgson 2011) in that :
If we distribute the rats evenly across the urban areas, which is clearly unlikely but necessary for the calculation, each rat has a rather spacious 5,000 square metres to roam around in.
Can you smell a rat in the above reasoning?
Looks Like another Zombie Myth.
Just as police do not patrol randomly through an urban terrain where crime is uniformly spread (a premise that was necessary for the Zombie Copy 100 yard Myth calculation See: Sutton and Hodgson 2011) the uniform distribution of rats is an extremely daft premise upon which to build a calculation about rats – given that they are a communal animal. Worse, it’s internally incongruous because the BBC article notes earlier on that :
“Rats are almost completely commensal in Britain, [meaning] they’re associated with human activities. That gives us a start because we only really need to think about how many rats there might be living in close proximity to ourselves.”
Therefore, the new rat proximity calculation is spurious because:
1. Neither humans nor rats are evenly spread out and rats follow human activity
2. Human activities are not evenly spread out
3. Human dwellings are not evenly spread out
4. Urban areas contain many miles of roads, parklands, rivers, railways, shopping centres and gardens etc . They certainly are not comprised entirely of dwellings.
5. Neither humans nor rats wander around randomly like headless zombies. Rats go specifically to and are concentrated in places where human activities create rat friendly environments.
Hence the premise for equally distributed rats that is necessary for the calculation renders it absolute bullony.
To repeat the point made above, if rats are social animals and urban rat location is determined by human activities – and, thankfully, humans are not spread out evenly anywhere in the UK – then it’s utter nonsense to have a calculation of rat proximity to humans based upon the assumption that rats are uniformly spread out over every square mile of urban areas. Moreover, some cities are surely more rat friendly than others, which must make the homogenized Britain part of the calculation yet more spurious.
The popular and ‘expert’ allure of over simplistic-bad science
Unfortunately, the result of the new rat proximity calculation is just as much bullony as the old one. And it serves no useful purpose whatsoever other than to teach us a valuable lesson about how spurious premises, which are necessary for such arithmetical calculations, leave us with nothing more than pre-supermyths (see Sutton 2012) or more precisely braced pre–supermyths.
Braced myths go a stage further than normal supermyths, which are unintentionally created by experts with great irony in the spirit of skeptical e
nquiry Braced myths are supermyths that are used as a tool to bust other myths.
Finally, I would like also to take this opportunity to bust the fallacy that British wheelie bins are RAT proof. The local authority pest control office informed my wife in the summer that a large solitary wandering rat (not one living in our garden) had chewed through the lid of our neighbours dustbin in Nottingham. You can see how it chewed right through the bin lid – left . Consequently, this is disconfirming evidence that either my neighbour or the rat, me or my wife, or the pest control officer, are headless zombies. I’m not so sure about British Civil Servants however.
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References
Full Harvard style references available for this article whre first published Best Thinking.com: here
Wasting Police Time: Ironic Unintended Consequences
December 11th, 2012Sounds like a good idea. Done with the best of intentions and for all the right reasons. What could possibly go wrong?
(Part 1)
Mid November 2012 in Kent, England, once again police officers are arrested under suspicion of committing crimes in order to meet government imposed targets designed to cut crime. How ironic. In 2006, a book, written by a serving police constable from Staffordshire focuses on the various ways that the UK Government’s punishing performance targets cause police officers across England and Wales to adapt by creating complex unforeseeable and inefficient crime fighting, but administration pleasing, stratagems. Moreover, these stratagems take up so much of their time that officers now have significantly less of it to spend on dealing with real crime issues. The ironic title of the book is something that is a criminal offence. Namely, Wasting Police Time . The book, is by PC David Copperfield (his real name is Stuart Davidson).
Copperfield’s fictional Newtown is really Burton-upon Trent.
In 2006, the British New Labour Minister of State for Police, Tony McNulty MP, discussed the book on the floor of the House of Commons and dismissed it as “more of a fiction than Dickens.” Soon after, however, when confronted on national television about his bold claim, McNulty had to concede that in fact the book was an accurate portrayal of police work under his government. Here is a portion the transcript from BBC. PANORAMA (2007)
: VINE: Now back to the minister who didn’t believe PC Copperfield. He’s since decided he was a bit too harsh that day.
TONY McNULTY MP (Home Office Minister) I inadvertently said in the House of Commons one time that it owed more to fiction than Charles Dickens did but I recanted that because I think there is something in what he’s saying about where we’ve got to with policing, only round the edges.
VINE: Oh really, he’s right about some of it?
McNULTY: No, no, I’m not conceding the massive nature of it but round the edges… is there too much paperwork? Yes we agree. Are there better things we can do in terms of bureaucracy? Are there other things we can do to constantly improve the lot of policing and how we police? Yes there are.
VINE: That’s the minister speaking. He and his colleagues now measure the police on almost everything they do. Each force has to prove how well it detects crime, but the really big question is whether the pressure to meet those targets is interfering with the way the police do their job.
STUART Davidson (AKA P.C. David Copperfield) : As a police officer detection culture means that every incident that you attend you’re thinking at the back or your mind: “How can I get a detection out of this?”
Continuing with the theme of performance culture wasting police time, what follows next is a most ironic tale of double-backfire that occurred due to the unintended consequences of both policing and academic performance culture.
(Part Two)
Police Officer: “How can I get a detection out of this?” Academic: “How can I get a citation out of this?”
THE CRACKDOWN CRIMINOLOGY MYTH OF REPORT 113: CROSS CULTURAL FUSION WHERE POLICING PERFORMANCE MEETS ACADEMIC CITATION IMPACT SCORES
US Government website – dedicated to evidence based practice – promotes a British Government’s banned, shredded and incinerated report as veracious and efficacious good practice!
Banned and shredded British Home Office report is published by the US National institute of Justice COPS Office as evidence based good practice in burglary reduction
Most ironically, in the USA, the Department of Justice website for the Government funded COPS Office has published a British Home Office funded report as an example of good practice in reducing burglary (e.g. here ). For example, searching on the actual US COPS Office, Center for Problem Oriented Policing, site itself using the phrase good practice burglary reductionproduces a link to the report (here – on web page 6). Moreover, if you search the same site on anti burglary, for example, the report is top of the list of recommended reading: here . Furthermore, the entire report has been published as a student resource at Loughborough University here .
But why is that ironic? The answer is because, the authors of Police Research Series Report 113 will in the long run, under the influence of academic performance culture, receive career enhancing citation score points for each time their report is cited in other literature – even if they cite it themselves; and what makes that most ironic is the fact that this very UK funded and printed Home Office report was shredded and denied a publication platform because the alleged “good crime reducing practice”, turned out to be contaminated by the ill-effects of police performance culture that led police officers involved in the project to be suspended and investigated for bribing informants with heroin in order to get intelligence to crack down on burglars (Sutton 2011). In short, Home Office Police Research Series Report 113 is banned from all official Home Office publications lists, citations and associated websites because it is busted bullony.
Banned, Shredded and Burned. Yet the authors of this fallacious report are getting cited due to having it hosed by a US Government Website.
As can be seen from this Google screenshot, to add insult to academic and evidence based practice injury, the authors of this report have received 18 academic citations as a consequence – intended or otherwise – of sending it to the unaware US Department of Justice for publication.
A search on Google Scholar reveals exactly who has been citing this British Government banned report as veracious evidence of good crime reduction practice, and in what context – such as two of the authors repeatedly citing themselves! (here, and here ). The harmful impact upon individuals and communities of this citation and subsequent on-going dissemination of Report 113 in other publications as veracious and efficacious crime reduction practice can only be guessed at. Needless to say, any police service using it as a guide to reduce crime runs a high risk of completely wasting scarce crime reduction resources. And the consequences of that could, in a worst case scenario, be as fatal as when ineffective drugs are recommended for disease treatment and prevention (Goldacre, B. 2012).
For cop-grade-heroin bribing reasons, the UK National Archive carries no copy of the banned Report 113 .
You can read more on this dreadfully ironic tale about police performance culture backfire and the results of academic impact performance culture here on Best thinking. See: Sutton 2011).
Brief Discussion of the Crackdown Criminology Myth of Report 113
Failing to address and research the crimes of the police, while choosing instead to pretend the corrupt police victimisation of their own project never happened by sending report 113 to the US Department of Justice – and also publishing it on Loughborough University’s website – as veracious evidence of good practice in burglary reduction, the authors of the report are creating a criminology myth. What they have done cannot be undone and it ensures for them and others the perpetuation of their carefully nurtured social reality of crime (Quinney 1970). They have continued to cast the usual suspects, burglars in this case, as the only criminals worthy of their attention. By such means are the crimes of the more powerful police consciously or else sub-consciously (Mannheiim 1936) edited out of administrative criminology’s scholarly ambitions by those who hold a privileged position in society to portray events and conceal events as they see fit and so can, if they wish, engage in self interested crime myth making.
Normal crime myths (as opposed to at least some examples of the recently discovered phenomenon of supermyths that appear to have inverse characteristics to normal myths) are, according to Kappeler and Potter (2005, p. 23), not unlike Greek mythology in that:
‘…modern crime myths follow certain themes for success. There must be “virtuous” heroes, “innocent” victims, and “evil” villains who pose a clear and present threat to the audience. Only then can a crime myth reach its potential. Characterizations common among myths in crime and criminal justice include: (1) the identification and targeting of a distinct deviant population; (2) the presence of an “innocent” or “helpless” victim population; (3) the emergence of brave or virtuous heroes; and (4) the existence of a substantial threat to established norms, values, values or traditional lifestyles.’
Perhaps the most telling question we need to ask about the modern and normal crime myth making of the scientifically irregular publication of report 113 is why did the authors not take the opportunity to examine the corruption of the police officers who sabotaged their research project? Why choose instead to simply portray the fallacy of the police officers involved as virtuous crime fighting heroes? If the authors of report 113 did not have the lateral thinking ability to enable them to perceive this criminological opportunity to research a crime against their own work on crime prevention then we need to try to understand to where their legendary lateral thinking and imaginations vanished and why?
Could the answer to the mystery of the publication of Report 113 lie in the heroic crime fighting demand for crackdowns in the title of the report itself? Observations made by experts on the social construction of crime myths suggest that it might. Kappeler and Potter (2005; p. 25), for example, cite Goode and Ben Yehuda (1994 p. 31) to argue that those in positions of power demand crackdowns to maintain the conveniently over simplistic and biased construction of a reality where their own straight society is under attack from the demonized anti-social andbent ‘others’:
‘…evildoers pose a threat to society and to the moral order as a consequence of their behavior, and therefore, “something should be done about them and their behaviors” (p.31). The “something” usually means strengthening social controls: “more laws, longer sentences, more police, more arrests, more prison cells. If society has become lax, a revival of traditional values may be necessary; if innocent people are victimized by crime, a crackdown on offenders will do the trick” (p. 31).
Conclusion
To add further irony, and a neat touch of concluding symmetry to this story, the US COPS website, which publishes the busted bullony that is report 113 as though it is good crime reduction practice thereby encouraging police forces across to the world to invest scarce resources seeking to replicate it without knowing that the authors have presented their research stripped of the fact that corrupt police officers supplying cop grade heroin to informers is likely to be the secret ingredient of their claim for burglary reducing success – also hosts Peter Grabosky’s superb book chapter on unintended consequences in crime reduction (Grabosky 1996). Now that the Crackdown Criminology Myth of Report 113 has been revealed, we can in the future re-examine this curious case by applying lessons from the crime prevention literature in order to minimize police corruption (Gorta 2011) and perhaps work towards encouraging a groundswell of skeptical criminology focused upon cracking down on existing crime myths and consolidating against such academic dysology .
Concluding overview in 10 key points
So what exactly are we looking at here in terms of ironic unintended consequences in the case of report 113?
(1) The Home Office impose crippling competitive performance targets on police forces that ultimately impose the burden of need to achieve those targets on rank and file officers.
(2) The Home Office – under the premise that ‘The police alone cannot tackle crime’, which is underpinned in no small part by their own widely cited Zombie Cop Myth (Sutton and Hodgson 2011) – fund academic criminologists to conduct crime reduction demonstration projects in partnership with the police. One such project appears amazingly successful. It is written-up, edited, and ready to publish as Police Research Series Paper 113 (report 113).
(3) Unbeknownst to the academic authors of report 113, police officers assigned to the project – apparently sensing the opportunity to improve performance targets through the project and sensing the opportunity to become the next glorious globetrotting crime busting Bill Bratton’s with a Holy Grail crime reduction best practice project – allegedly break the law by supplying criminals with heroin in order to maximise intelligence gathering about domestic burglars in order to make the project successful.
(4) A British Home Office commissioning editor (yours truly) finds out about the officers suspended on charges of bribing informants with heroin and, on advice from senior civil servants, orders that report 113 not be published for fear that cop-grade heroin is the secret ingredient of the project’s amazing and unique success. Several thousand copies of the report are shredded and incinerated. The commissioning editor informs the authors of this official decision.
(5) At least one of the academics who conducted the research and co-authored report 113 sends the WORD file containing it to the United States Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, where it is published on their COPS website (with zero mention of its heroin tainted past) as veracious and efficacious good practice in reducing crime.
(6) Two authors of the report and several of their close associates then cite report 113 as published on the COPS website. To date, the report is cited at least 18 times in the scholarly press (last count December 1st 2012).
(7) The book chapters and peer reviewed articles that cite report 113 as veracious and effective crime reduction practice are in turn cited many times in other publicatons.
(8) As an unintended consequence of Home Office police performance targets and their drive for evidence based practice, allegedly rogue police officers sabotaged the aims of the academics working with them. The knock-on unintended consequence of that was that academic citation performance culture led to the banned and shredded report being sent by at least one of its authors for publication on a good practice (US Government) website in the USA, and also on a British university website, and then cited (wrongly) as evidence of good practice by at least two of the authors and others in 18 publications. In sum, a double ironic backfire occurred: (a) police officers thwarted the aims of academics looking for evidence of good practice, which led to (b) academics thwarting the aims of other police officers looking for good practice examples.
(9) Authors of report 113 have created yet another administrative criminology myth, which combined with the Zombie Cop Myth (see: Sutton and Hodgson 2011) and Crime as Opportunity (Ratortunity) Myth represents a powerful combination of fallacious forces in support of Crime Opportunity Theory.
(10) Measuring the possible harmful impact of the citation of report 113 will require considerable research.
Full Harvard Style References for this post and recommended further reading on the topic can be found over at the Best Thinking Website: Here
3-Delinquents Here We Come!
November 10th, 2012
By Mike Sutton.
In my article on hi-tech crime I point out the similarities between the ancient mythologies of fire theft with the realities of copyright theft: The owner’s status and earning capacity is undermined even though no physical object is taken away, diminished or even disturbed. The same problem that would have ‘robbed’ our imagined prehistoric “keeper of the sacred fire” by making the technology of fire available to all through the ‘horizontalization of knowledge’ has dogged other owners of intellectual property rights in great numbers since the widespread availability of photo-copying machines followed by digital reproduction and dissemination over the Internet.
Now, for the first time we have object copying machines, known as replicators.
What is being hailed as Industrial Revolution 2 – the ability of home manufacturing for all is here. This may well be what we have been looking for in the Western Industrialized world to re-boot the debt-based economies facilitated by Chinese capital lent to the West to buy on credit the products made cheaply in the East. Now individuals in the West can make products and product components – cleanly and efficiently – in their own homes. I’m talking about 3-D printing. This is an affordable ($1,200+) technology that allows us all make, in metal, ceramic or plastic, working equipment and component parts. At MIT, a working clockwork clock has been made entirely on a 3-D printer.
This could be the thing that changes our lives, changes our culture, changes our entire way of working and living. Because home centered 3-D printing has the ability to take individual creative imagination directly to invention, manufacturing, marketing and rapid innovation by others in ways that are currently unimaginable. Moore’s Law on speed might be one way of imagining how this might turn out. You can read a number of articles on Carrie Kirby’s excellently curated collection on the subject here.
Human imagination should have no bounds.
Our imaginations are now facilitated with home-based physical creation machines that will provide countless ways to improve lives. But beware. Because the history of humanity is that such technology will be exploited by deviant minds for nefarious purposes, often before there is a law in place to make such harmful exploitation of previously unimaginable technology illegal.
My youngest daughter (aged 3½ years) wants to know why her Disney Toy Story Woody doll does not have a six shooter in his empty holster. Whatever the reason for the absence of Woody’s pretend weapon in the movies and the merchandised toys (it’s even been debated at length on the Straight Dope boards ), armed with a $1,200 Makerbot replicator I could make one and have it fit Woody’s holster perfectly. Furthermore, I could then set up a website and start advertising and selling them. What would Disney and the anti-gun lobby make of that? Would it make me rich regardless? What would my students, colleagues and my university have to say about it?
Now let’s shift up a deviant gear
At home someone with a deviant imagination has made a working magazine for a firearm and even tweaked it to contain more ammunition than the standard part. In Germany, simply from a photograph a hobbyist made a working key to fit police handcuffs.
ATM bank card fraudsters are using 3D printing to make precision custom built skimmers to fit ATM machines .
Piracy Machines, Weapons Makers, Concealed Blade Creators (metal and ceramic), Counterfeit Coin Printers, Obscene Model Makers, Toxic Toy Machines, Precision Predator ATM Makers, call them what you will.
Our politicians, mayors, governors, police commissioners, chief constables and policy makers had better start using their foresight to gear up for the 3-D printer crime wave before it hits, or else we will all be back playing the age old game of catch-up with the criminals. Thereafter ‘expert’ criminologists will be uselessly lauded and rewarded by their peers, publishers and students for writing wise after the event post-hoc rhetorical explanations for why it is happening. How to move beyond that in the here and now without killing the goose that prints the golden egg is going to be difficult. But, if we can rationally and plausibly imagine what’s almost certainly going to happen next do we really have to sit back and let it happen before working out what to do simply because predicting the future in chaotic social systems is fraught with difficulty ?
They say that repeatedly performing the same action while always expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. But what about repeatedly doing nothing about new technologies while always hoping they will not be put to deviant use?
As with current ink printers, 3D printing technology will improve remarkably as will the quality of its output while its price falls to just a few hundred dollars or less. Why should we not expect then that in five or six or 10 years from now that everyone who owns an ink printer will own a 3D printer?
Who on Earth would not want an object replicator?
I’ve already imagined a long list of novel ways that home based 3-D printing technology is likely to be exploited for criminal purposes. Not wanting to put those ideas into other heads, that will likely-as-not get them elsewhere anyway, I’m keeping that stuff to myself. Meanwhile, somewhere in a home near you, I suspect the future of 3D deviance will exceed my criminological imagination. And I wish that wasn’t so, because some of the ways that I can see how this technology is going to be exploited are thoroughly dreadful.
Big Secret Behind Britain’s Unit Fines Fiasco Exposed
October 7th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
In 1990 the British Government Department known as the Home Office published its Research and Planning Unit Paper 59. This contained the results of the first trial of unit fines experiments in England and Wales in four magistrates’ courts that were in: Basingstoke, Bradford, Swansea and Teesside.
Essentially these experiments were conducted to gauge whether people could be fined more according to their means. The aim was to reduce imprisonment for fine default for those who were being fined more than they could afford to repay and to fine the rich according to their means so that it would hurt them equally.
This was the first research project that I worked on as a junior researcher at the Home Office. I spent many weeks in Bradford, Teesside, Basingstoke and Swansea collecting court data relating to fines and their outcome in order to get a before and after measure of the effectiveness of the experiments.
Meanwhile, during the experiments my line manager and head of the project, David Moxon along with Brian Gibson – Chair to the Magistrates at Basingstoke spent quite a lot of time directly helping magistrates to understand and implement the experimental system, which at times involved tireless and dedicated work getting dissenters on side and smoothing over frustrations with Moxon’s mathematical formula and other justice qualms.
The problem is that the essential need for Moxon and Gibson’s hands-on sterling work in herding confused and wayward magistrates was not anywhere recorded in Paper 59. So keen were these good men that this equitable fines scheme should go ahead they did not want politicians and policy makers to see a case for refusing to role it out nationally.
So everything in the report looked like rosy good news. Just as intended. The hope was that when the scheme was rolled out across the whole country any problems could be worked through and it would all turn out nicely in the end. Only that’s not what happened when new legislation was enacted in 1992 to introduce unit fines in England and Wales.
What happened was that the magistrates across the land rebelled and the press had a field day (actually a field week), as the Scottish Government summarised the outcome:
“The English and Welsh trial in 1992 was deemed not to be a success and after six months the Home Office discontinued it. This appears mainly to have been because of difficulties in assessing the incomes of offenders and due to the opposition of magistrates to the fettering of their freedom to impose the size of penalty they wished.”
And as the BBC News neatly summarized the fiasco:
“For example, in West Yorkshire, two men convicted over a street fight paid £640 and £64 respectively, based on their income brackets. In another instance magistrates fined a man £1,200 for dropping litter after they assessed him as meeting the top income rate because he had failed to attend court or supply his financial details. The fine was later reduced to £48 on appeal. A number of magistrates stood down in protest over the scheme and another aspect of the act, which stopped them taking into account previous convictions when sentencing.
Eventually, on 13 May 1993, Mr Clarke announced he would use the Criminal Justice Bill then going through Parliament to end the fine system.”
“… Then opposition MP Tony Blair welcomed the statement on the “shambles” of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. He said: “Never have we seen so quick a collapse of government policy, even for the present government.”
Research Bias
The road to political hell can be paved with good intentions. If ever there is a lesson to demonstrate the need for policy oriented research to be honest and completely open about implementation difficulties of demonstration projects, experiments and trials it can be had from the unit fines fiasco. This is why professional, ethical and independent qualitative research is so important.
Both Moxon and Gibson had a bias towards wanting to see unit fines implemented in Britain. The folly of allowing those with such a personal axe-grinding bias – no matter how well intended – to run, evaluate and record the results of policy-oriented demonstration projects is clearly seen in this case.
Had our unit fines report contained a rigorous account of all the varied and prolific problems that Moxon and Gibson had in getting magistrates on board in the first place and how they were required, at times at very short notice, to provide regular in-person advice and assistance to the four courts during the experimental period then one of three things might have happened:
(1) either the government of the time would have decided not to go ahead with national legislation at all, or else
(2) they would have provided a cadre of civil servants to provide the same kind of advice and assistance that Moxon and Gibson provided, or
(3) they would have rolled the scheme out on slower area-by-area basis – providing central Home Office advice and assistance to each court until everything was running smoothly.
One of the biggest impacts of keeping the unit fines research secret is that until now policy makers have been kept in the dark about exactly why it failed at a national level but succeeded in the four experimental areas.
In the future at least, any government wishing to implement unit fines will now have a clearer picture of what English and Welsh magistrates need to help them implement it successfully.
Note: This article was first published on the bad research secrets page at my website Dysology.com.
Visit my crime blog at Best Thinking
Reference
The Unit Fines Experiment in Four Courts
On Veracity: Simple Rhetoric versus Complex Causality
September 19th, 2012
By Mike Sutton.
An article published in the Independent newspaper contains a conveniently plausible and compelling rhetorical explanation for the newly discovered high level British police cover up of the inadequate safety, policing and emergency service provision at the time of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in 1989. The rhetoric stems from the eminent lawyer Michael Mansfield’s remarks about the British government’s sponsored brutality of policing the 1984-5 Miners Strike and his rhetoric “… follows comments by ex-Home Secretary Jack Straw who said Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s created a “culture of impunity” in the police which led to the Hillsborough cover-up.”
The problem is that such seemingly powerful and believable rhetoric does not explain the complex historical reasons why the Police services and Thatcher were so anti-union and anti-football supporter that they saw fit to treat them with such physical and moral brutality. Moreover, all such post hoc ‘experts’, whether they are lawyers, politicians or academics, are only ever wise after the event.
A personal rhetorical explanation for union bashing
Many union members behaved incorrigibly in the 1970s and early 80s.For example, I remember the time when I worked in a factory in the late 70s and an ex-RAF war hero (a bluff Scotsman) – who was a director – ensured that he personally knew the name of every single employee and would greet each of us as we passed one another whilst going about our mutual business. Back then, as a lowly seventeen year old production line worker, my daily greeting from Mr Webster typically comprised a bluff “Morning, Mike. (pregnant pause) … Laddie”, to which I would always reply with a simple: “Morning Mr Webster.” Of course, I thought the “laddie” calling a little unnecessarily as a status marker between us. But then I was not a war hero and company director. If I wished to one day achieve respect of men like Webster I knew I would have to do more than work on a production line in a capitalist society that essentially views such workers as lower caste.
Then one day The Transport and General Workers Union (of which I was a member) called a meeting with the management and under threat of strike they made Mr Webster publicly apologise for demeaning the workforce by his unacceptable patronising behavior, which comprised of nothing more than calling grown men “laddie”.
No wonder the public voted Thatcher into office when such petty martinet union officials and managers alike were on a daily basis making a mockery of common sense, and so creating a culture of impunity within government that allowed them to crush unions and their members and communities. But knowing about such union stupidity at the time did not empower anyone to predict the Miners Strike and Thatcher’s subsequent destruction of working class British communities.
They say a nation gets the government it deserves. I’m no fan of Thatcher, but we need to realise that such powerful people themselves come from somewhere and gain popular support for a multitude of complex intersecting reasons, and possible reasons, some of which some people might believe to be career threateningly too taboo to mention, never mind seek funding to examine.
A personal rhetorical explanation for football fan bashing
To provide another personal reflection, this time of football hooligans and foul mouthed fans: when I attended football matches in Liverpool in the late 1970s (aged 14 and 15) large sections of the crowd standing at one end of the stadium spent the entire match pointing and chanting in synchronized hooliganism at rival supporters at the other end with foul mouthed moronic chants such as: “You’re all gonna get yer fu**in’ heads kicked in!” followed by mass clapping and, “You’re all going home in a fu**in’ ambulance!” No wonder the police and government had no respect for such fans who created a culture of impunity among the police by helping to cause them to stereotype all football supporters as foulmouthed and violent-scum soccer hooligans and morons.
Of course such wise-after-the-event knowledge and compelling rhetoric did not enable me or anyone else to predict the Hillsborough disaster, or the conspiratorial cover-up of the various organisational shortcomings that allowed it to happen.
General rhetoric in the social sciences
Cultural criminologists who write about such tribal football behaviour in the same hardly suppressed glorifying vein as anthropologists describing such events as the Ethiopian stick fighting might understand more about the reasons for and consequences of such behaviour if they tried to understand and better develop ways of seeking to understand the complex causes and consequences of such violent “traditions”. Because compelling and plausible rhetoric is nothing more than an invented subjective cop-out that helps us to understand nothing more than that those churning out such work are producing explanations that are easily swallowed by those with an appetite for pseudo social science and easily digestible sound bites sponsored by credulous ‘believers’ who employ them in universities, attend their lectures, publish their papers and buy their books.
Have anthropologists, criminologists and other academics ever studied in any depth the myth making within their own academic tribes? Not to my knowledge.
Anthropologists have for years waxed lyrical about the stories and traditions of various cultures. However, there is a saying that if you cannot say what something will do next then you don’t understand it at all. Where, for example were the ‘expert’ warnings from expert anthropologists that AK47 automatic weapon ownership among stick fighting tribes would lead to widespread massacres?
In the natural sciences billions of Pounds, Dollars and Euros are being invested in projects such as CERN to discover what makes the physical universe work. Meanwhile we understand very little about what makes society tick. Apologists for this sad state of affairs will tell you that in the complex and chaotic social world that it is impossible to consistently and accurately predict what will happen next.
Humankind in all societies and at all times has created myths ancient and modern in order to bring understanding and to create culturally embedded “truths” to explain what would otherwise be unexplainable random events in nature and unfathomable general patterns of human social behaviour.
Most remarkably, research in the 1960s and 70s proved that many of the ancient myths and fairytales, regardless of where they originated, contain essentially identical core elements, which are to be found from examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the story, rather than from the content of the story itself. Perhaps modern myths and supermyths also have identical core elements, some of which might reflect the core element of religious dogma. In the same way that faith based religions seek to make sense of the world by offering us the thoughts of men dressed up as supernatural ‘truths’, might it be possible that the current orthodox explanation that social behavior is too complex and subject to too many random events and contingencies to be capable of prediction be itself nothing more than a hugely ironic modern myth created in order to ‘know’ that it is impossible to know enough about society in order to reliably predict with significant accuracy what will happen next in the seemingly random nature of human affairs? If so, such a myth does nothing more than insist that we have credulous faith in the skeptical thoughts of others and that we should not commit the ignorant sin of questioning current ‘knowledge’ by raising and testing new hypothesis in this particular area. Have anthropologists, criminologists and other academics ever studied in any depth such myth making within their own academic tribes? Not to my knowledge.
If myths are no longer good enough for explaining natural phenomena why should we continue accepting them when it comes to explaining human behavior?
Perhaps we should be seeking massive investment beyond the scale of CERN if we wish to move beyond current mythical post-hoc rhetorical explanations for cause and effect in our diverse societies? What is more important, after all: (a) discovering interesting, useful and deadly stuff like how to split the atom and the existence of the Higgs Bosun particle or (b) accurately and consistently predicting when the next nuclear strike or holocaust will take place or the next economic disaster will occur unless we know how to effectively intervene? Perhaps predicting the future is not so difficult as we think. One promising route worth exploring further might be to better evaluate the effectiveness of PR, propaganda, public information campaigns and other attitude change initiatives, and to improve evidence-based practice in this area. After all, what do such behavior change initiatives seek to achieve if not to influence the future?
Irrational Fear that Ladybugs Cause Painful Deafness is Weirdly Related to Crime Risk Knowledge
August 18th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
In today’s news in the U.K. Danielle Eccles, a British woman, suffered pain and deafness for three years until she was cured when a perfectly preserved ladybird (ladybug) fell out of her ear. So what? you might ask.
Well, for a start let’s approach this story with rational skepticism, because the very newsworthiness of this story teaches us that the chance that any one of of us who lives in a city, town, village or suburb suffering the same fate is extremely small. But what of those people who are rough sleepers, campers or agricultural workers – are their risks greater?
Danielle Eccles’ husband is a landscaper. Whether the insect entered her ear inside her home is not known. Whether her husband accidentally brought the creature inside the home on his person is also not known – but it is a possibility. Whether the ladybird hitched a lift from Mr Eccles’ person to the inside the family car is not known. Whether agricultural workers or gardeners are more likely to bring insects inside the home is also not known – but it seems like a plausible hypothesis.
So where is this leading? Well, counter-intuitively, it is not a myth that earwigs enter human ears, or that ants may get into your pants, but it is very unlikely to happen to you inside your home or while walking about outside. Hence we tend to say that the risk of either of these events happening to anyone is extremely low. If however you were to fall asleep in a flower bed of dahlias or beside a nest of ants then the risks of personal earwig or ant infestation would be significantly increased. And so it is with crime. The chances of being robbed, burgled or murdered may be relatively low – across the board – at a national level. But the risks faced by individuals living or working in high crime areas will be significantly higher.
Even for those living in high crime areas, the orthodox criminological view, adopted by national governments in the west, that fear of crime is greater than the reality of crime could well turn out to be another super myth that affects thinking and diverts attention away from tackling real problems and from identifying effective crime reduction and policing practice. Muddled academic and official thinking can occur in this area because at a national level, at least in the industrialized western world, the overall level of fear of crime, or incidences of specific anxiety of crime is greater than the actual risk. That said, people living in particularly notorious high crime areas may have an overall level of anxiety or individual incidences of fear of crime that are more commensurate with their actual risk of being victimized.
By failing to sample and survey within real high crime areas the British Government’s message that fear of crime is greater than the reality of risk, and it’s the credulous dissemination of that orthodox ‘knowledge’ in the spirit of skeptical enquiry could well be another supermyth.
More on this topic, and the way forward to see if the irrational fear of crime message is a supermyth can be read on my Supermyths blogspot:
Racists in the Book Pile
August 11th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
History Text on Founding Father’s Fatherhood Found Wanting
Controversy remains and may always remain with regard to the question: Did Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States (1801–1809) and founding father, father children with his slave Sally Hemings? On the basis of all the available evidence it seems that Jefferson as the father is the most likely explanation for the DNA matches between known descendants of both Hemings and Jefferson. At the time of writing Wikipedia (2012) sums it up neatly:
“It is impossible to prove absolutely that no other Jefferson fathered the child. (1) That would be proving a negative, and (2) any male who had the same Y-chromosome as Thomas Jefferson (other descendants of a common male ancestor) could have been the father, provided that this person had relations with Sally Hemings nine months before the birth of Eston Hemings. But, there is no historical evidence that Hemings had more than one partner.”
On the subject of this fascinating controversy, James Loewen ( 2007 p.145), in a most outstanding insightful example of attention to crucial detail nails down a poignant example of subtle racism in a major American history textbook:
‘Instead of analyzing racism, textbooks still subtly exemplify it. Consider a late passage (page 1083!) In Holt American Nation extolling the value of DNA testing: “Since Jefferson had no sons, scientists compared DNA from male-lineage descendants of Jefferson’s paternal grandfather with DNA from descendants of Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings’s youngest son. They found a match. Since the chances of a match were less than one percent, Jefferson very likely was Eston Hemings’s father.” Holt fails to notice that the last five words of the paragraph contradict the first five. Jefferson did have at least one son, Eston Hemings. Changing had no sons to acknowledged no sons would fix the paragraph; surely the awkwardness was overlooked because Jefferson had no white sons, hence no “real” sons.’
References and Further Reading
Loewen, J. W. (2007) Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press.
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account
Wikipedia (2012) Jefferson-Hemings Controversy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson-Hemings_controversy
Rebutter’s Rebuttal: The Next Big Thing Is Here. But Ahh But Ahh…Is It?
July 28th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
Rarely should we make predictions about what will and will not shape the future of mankind, because society is a chaotic system with so many known unknowns and unknown unknowns that something as likely as not changes the course of what happens next. But sometimes, just sometimes, something comes along that instinctively seems to be just what is needed and so could become something very big indeed.
It is common knowledge that on the internet the things of most value are given away for free. Perhaps the greatest example of this fact is that the internet itself and the World Wide Web are free services and products. I think the next big thing to come along has arrived and its called RbutR, ahh but ahh, or Rebutter for long, and thankfully it’s a totally free webpage rebuttal service that could set multimedia academia ablaze in a firestorm of evidence based content linked criticism where the popularity of opposing viewpoints are measured and in fact determined by world-wide open access vote.
I’ve just installed RbutR on my laptop and rebutted my first webpage on Crime Opportunity Theory’s notion that opportunity makes the thief. This easy to use rebuttal service provides subscribers to rbutr with an icon that appears on their Google toolbar, so that anyone with that icon will see how many times any page they access has been rebutted and who rebutted it and on what grounds – with a link to the page that makes the rebuttal argument. It works like a dream, no infuriating geeknosense glitches at all.
Here is what the creators of Rebuttals write about this compellingly simple and free service:
How Does it Work?
Rebuttals are added to rbutr by users like you, using a free web browser plugin. Once registered , anyone is free to connect any webpage to any other webpage at any time and indicate that one is a rebuttal of the other. The rebuttals in the system are then free to be voted on by other members so that articles containing weaker arguments will be pushed down or removed entirely, while quality rebuttals containing stronger arguments will be pushed up to the top where they will receive the most attention.
Visit these sites to learn more.
It’s going to be big, I’d bet on that, but the known unknown is: just how useful will it be in advancing knowledge progression and promoting the dissemination of proven fallacies, busted myths, bad science, pseudoscholarship and other dysologies? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, I’ve been using it to rebut some supermyths with links to my myth busting work here on BestThinking.
Let rebuttal and counter rebuttal begin and may verity win.
Zombie Cops Plague US, UK and Canadian Police Services
July 26th, 2012A Most Embarrassing British Supermyth is Bust
By Mike Sutton. Britain has been in the international news quite a lot recently. Not least for the involvement of some of its citizens and big businesses in unethical scandals. We’ve had the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill mess in the USA, mass involvement of our politicians in submitting fraudulent Parliamentary expenses claims, Barclays Bank in illegally fixing interest rates, News of the World in celebrity and crime victim phone hacking, and HSBC involved in money laundering.
It may not be an unethical scandal, but in the opinion of this correspondent, Britain is involved in another rather embarrassing national and international screw-up. Namely, that many British academics, journalists, politicians, civil servants and senior police officers have been misleading the world for the past 28 years regarding British Government research into police effectiveness.
In the USA, Britain and Canada, national government and individual police force-level policing policy regarding the effectiveness of foot patrol beat policing at tackling and reducing crimes such as burglary has been influenced on how best to fight crime by a mere pencil and paper ‘back of an envelope’ arithmetical exercise, conducted by the British Home Office, which claims that: A patrol officer in London could expect to pass within 100 yards of a burglary only once every 8 years, but might not even realise that the crime was taking place.”
The problem is that not only is this weighty, British Home Office, national government claim based upon a mere ‘back of an envelope’ calculation but also it is based upon three completely unrealistic premises one of which is that, effectively, all foot patrolling beat police officers are headless zombies with less ability to react to stimulus than a single-celled paramecium. This myth busting of the claim is based upon primary source research findings that My colleague Dr Phillip Hodgson and I have published regarding what we have named the Zombie Cop Myth on the Best Thinking website.
Most embarrassingly, a review of the published literature citing the above claim reveals that many influential academic authors, journalists, leading police officers and politicians wrongly, yet credulously, appear to have believed that the British Home Office claim was based upon empirical research involving a real study of real police officers. See: Clarke and Hough 1988 for just one of a multitude of official sources promoting the above claim as important policy-oriented knowledge.
Our published Zombie Cop Myth article currently lists 45 publications that unquestioningly cite the claim as though it is based upon veracious knowledge. We have in fact found a total of 79 at the latest count, and we expect to find many more. Some authors citing the claim appear to be quite prolific. At the time of writing, this same article is undergoing extensive expert academic, line, and police executive open peer review for an international criminology journal.
Further academic papers on the extent of the prevalence of this pathological supermyth will follow. Moreover, we intend to conduct an academic research study to seek to understand why this myth was so widely believed and disseminated.
What is a supermyth?
What sets supermyths such as the Zombie Cop Myth apart from other fallacies and myths serves as a unique and timely warning for those promoting the virtues of skeptical inquiry, because the great irony is that, unlike ordinary myths, supermyths are created by respected orthodox scholars and then credulously disseminated by other experts in the spirit of promoting skeptical enquiry. Readers interested in learning about other supermyths might be interested to learn that that the widely believed criminological knowledge that opportunity is a cause of crime is also founded upon completely irrational premises. See: Opportunity does not make the thief.
The Antiswan On Unpredictable Weather, Crime and What Is and Is Not So
July 17th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
Karl Popper essentially falsified the inductive method of determining what is so. Induction is a now debunked methodology, which once held sway as orthodoxy in the 19th century, comprising the idea that knowledge about something can be obtained from past observations (or events) of it. Famously, Popper put a stop to that idea, in no small part by using the example of what we once thought we knew about swans. If the only swans that had ever been observed by those classifying them were white was it correct to say that all swans are white? No. Because after black swans were discovered in Australasia those previously unimagined swans overturned existing knowledge. Popper essentially demonstrated what is today known as the fallacy of induction.
The impact of the improbable, based on Popper’s (1959) fallacy of induction, is a theme that has been very successfully exploited by many authors. One best selling book on the theme is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Allen Lane/Penguin Books 2007), which develops the black swan example in many areas of life to assert that social science and economic experts essentially know little more about their subject than the man in the street. The reason for this is that they fail to take account of chaos and uncertainty in the world. In the wider social affairs of man there are currently too many possible and complex ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ for us to accurately predict what will happen next. Yet, surely, it seems fair to argue that if you cannot say what something – that is not completely subject to unknowable random forces – will do next then you really don’t understand it at all. This means that a lack of genuine expertise is masquerading everywhere.
For example, at the beginning of 2012 in the UK, following one of the driest winters on record experts were holding forth on national TV and in the press that water was going to become such a scarce commodity that every home would need to be metered and that more reservoirs would need to be dug. Then it seemed to never stop raining. Floods are a major theme on the news this summer and we have had the wettest summer on record. Why? Because the Jet Stream has mysteriously shifted south and is causing us poor rain sodden Brits to experience more severe weather. Nobody knows what will happen next with this phenomenon.
Chaos and unpredictability in weather systems is well known, after all it led to the creation of chaos theory. In the social affairs of mankind unpredictable chaos makes predictability similarly hazardous. Terrorism experts, for example, failed to predict 9/11. Economists failed to predict the economic crash. And in my own field we criminologists all failed to predict the 15 year crime drop in the western industrialized world.
The point of this article then is that I have an issue with Popper’s fallacy of induction. One that the self-admitted black swan obsessive Taleb has, as far as I can tell, failed to see. My issue is that Taleb, among other Popperians, does not allow for the possibility that the entire fallacy of induction would be falsified itself if a methodological mega black swan event came along. Something, for example, as seemingly improbable today, as progress in quantum computing serendipitously making it possible to accurately predict future ‘black swan-type events’ in the affairs of man by analyzing past events in detail never before imagined possible. My argument here is that the fallacy of induction is in fact, ironically, based on induction because the falsification of induction is itself based on past knowledge of the failure of the inductive method to know the present and predict the future. If a new discovery does overturn existing methodological orthodoxy so that induction becomes a good method of knowing the future we should perhaps be prepared to name such an event: The First Coming of the Antiswan.
Acknowledgement
References
Are the Internet and Gaming Reducing Crime?
July 7th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
Since the Routine Activities Theory (RAT) is a theory of how crime shifts and changes in relation to changes in society – and according to Felson and Boba (2010) the key to such changes is the technology of everyday life – then a significant amount of online activity and games console playing at home might be keeping people off the streets for significant periods every day and reducing the amount of hourly availability of victims and offenders in the offline world, while ensuring homes are occupied more. If it is, and yet that is not responsible for the currently unfathomable 15 year decline in violent crime, car crime and burglary in the Western world then routine activities alone may be nothing like as a good an explanation for high volume crime as its adherents think it is. Of course, the 15 year crime drop in the offline world may be taking place in a direct inverse relationship with online facilitated offending such as fraud, stalking, virus spreading, hacking and copyright theft etc – which RAT would explain. This appears to be an important issue with huge implications for criminology and crime reduction policy making.
Today many people routinely spend hours in cyberspace as part of their everyday lives. Could the huge popularity of the Internet and other interactive hi-technology environments, facilitated by mobile communications equipment and games consoles, be responsible for the 15-year fall in crime?
Marcus Felson’s excellent and classic criminology book: “Crime and Everyday Life” is without doubt, and deservedly so, one of the best selling criminology texts of all time. Now in its fourth edition (Felson and Boba 2010), the book provides an explanation of, justification for and a toolkit to implement crime reduction initiatives using Felson’s Routine Activities Theory (RAT).
What is RAT?
RAT is, according to Felson and Boba (2010), a “…theory of how crime changes in response to larger shifts in society. The key to such change is the technology of everyday life, which organizes where we are, what we do, and what happens to us. That technology governs how crime carves its niche into everyday life.” According to Willison (2000): “This theory has its intellectual roots in the human ecology work of Amos Hawley, which recognises the importance of the timing of different activities by hour-of-day and day-of-week for understanding human society. This last point is central to routine activity theory, which addresses changes from moment to moment and hour to hour in relation to what people are doing, where they are, and the consequences of these as a result.”
The unexplained fall in crime
Crime has been falling, pretty much across the board, in the UK and USA since 1995. And as yet there is no particularly compelling or well evidenced cause.
NetCrime: More Change in the Organisation and Disorganisation of Offending
With the advent and increasing popularity – indeed, necessity – of the Internet and the huge rise in mobile communications technology, we might have expected crime to rise dramatically from 1995 as a whole new environment called cyberspace opened up for people to exploit in criminal ways old and new. Felson’s RAT (Felson and Boba 2010 p.111) certainly sees that it should be that way: “The age of speedy Internet communications provides new options for youths to break laws, often operating out of their homes. They can produce their own pornography. They can view pornography by others. They can sell themselves as prostitutes. They can make sexual liaisons with those of their own ages or well beyond their own They can send and/or receive threats via the Internet and buy or sell contraband goods. They can, at a young age, learn how to hack the computers of others or distribute computer harm in various ways. They can participate in cyber chat rooms to discuss all of this.”
Is the RAT in the NET?
Strangely, Felson appears not to have considered that his own RAT would suggest that all this time spent online must equate to less time on the street leading to less potential offending time and a smaller population of available victims of violence and robbery.
Outside the X-Box
Last week as I walked through the high street in Nottingham in England at around 5pm, two teenagers of about 14 years of age stopped me in my tracks. They asked if I would go with them into a local store called “Game” and just stand there pretending to be their grandfather (grandfather!) so that they could exchange a new video game for one that was rated (18) – adult only. I felt some sympathy for them but let them know that as I was no relative of theirs that I would not help them out as it would be illegal.
That encounter got me thinking.
Two teenagers – full of the kind of spirit that can get a young man into trouble with the law – wanted nothing more than to sit at home and no doubt spend hours playing some violent and exciting interactive game. Could the rise in game playing of this kind on Playstations, X-Boxes, Nintendo. PCs and online be a major cause of what criminologists are saying is an unfathomable drop in crime? And if not then why not – since RAT would predict that if a substantial number of young people are not on the streets either as victims or offenders then overall high volume crime “opportunities” would diminish, resulting in an overall drop in high volume crime rates. Myself and my colleague Paul Hamilton were discussing this today. We have no idea yet whether what we might call the “game substitution hypothesis” is plausible. So we thought we would set out some ideas that support it as something possibly worthy of further exploration:
Taking a Routine Activity Approach, it would seem that an increase in computer gaming might feasibly lead to a rise in the illicit market for stolen PC’s and games consoles. But there might be fewer thieves to supply it if:
Jeff Ferrell’s Cultural Criminology paper on boredom does not examine this issue. Instead he focuses upon how boring modern life is caused by workplace and urban planning that forbids spontaneity. Spontaneity leads to friction with the criminal justice system. The “system” offers us places of entertainment such as shopping malls, cinema and night clubs – all to be used only in proscribed ways, which leads therefore to expressive offending or else boredom that is one cause of drug misuse leading to addiction.
But gaming is a manufactured entertainment virtual space. Ferrell’s argument might explain why virtual vandalism is committed. Mathew Williams’ excellent paper:Understanding King Punisher and his Order is a good example. But Ferrell does not consider how a manufactured environment – online or offline – might reduce crime.
Routine Activities Theory and the Crime Substitution Hypotheses
Since the Routine Activities Theory (RAT) is a theory of how crime shifts and changes in relation to changes in society – and according to Felson and Boba (2010) the key to such changes is the technology of everyday life – then a significant amount of online activity and games console playing at home might be keeping people off the streets for significant periods every day and reducing the amount of hourly availability of victims and offenders in the offline world, while ensuring homes are occupied for more hours every day. If it is, and yet that is not responsible for the currently unfathomable 15 year decline in violent crime, car crime and burglary in the Western world then routine activities alone may be nothing like as a good an explanation for high volume crime as its adherents think it is. Of course, the 15 year crime drop in the offline world may be taking place in a direct inverse relationship with online offending such as fraud, stalking, virus spreading, hacking and copyright theft etc – which RAT would explain. This appears to be an important issue with huge implications for criminology and crime reduction policy making.
How might Crime Substitution and Crime be Researched?
Very tentatively (back of an envelope stuff this afternoon) we thought researchers might:
A quick Google search reveals that a few other thinkers are making similar speculations:
We now need to research this issue to test the Crime Substitution Hypothesis.
Another thing that may have reduced crime, through people spending more time at home, is public smoking bans.
I am currently researching this area further with Professor David Wall, Professor Mark Griffiths and Jordan Cashmore. This article was first published at BestThinking.com
Spin@ge II: Does the United States Department of Agriculture’s Publication of Spuriofacts Have its Origins in a Perverse Scientific Paper Written in 1937?
June 30th, 2012By Mike Sutton.
In an earlier article, Spin@ge (Sutton 2011), I revealed how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is irrationally promoting spinach as a good source of iron. This article provides some additional historical context for the USDA’s dissemination of harmful spuriofacts on spinach, iron and vitamin C.
Does current USDA erroneous advice that spinach is a good source of iron have roots in a perverse paper published by the American Medical Association’s Council on Foods in 1937 (hereafter referred to as “The Spinach Paper”)?
The Spinach Paper noted that improvements in biochemistry techniques had debunked earlier overestimates in the iron content of spinach. However, in 1937 science had not yet discovered that it was not a particularly good source of dietary beta-carotene, which the human body converts to vitamin A (Sutton 2011b). And so The Spinach Paper authors recommended that dried, frozen, fresh and canned spinach were all excellent sources of vitamin A. This is perfectly understandable, but I argue that what they concluded regarding the importance of spinach as a good dietary source of iron is not understandable at all.
In the teeth of conflicting evidence, contained even within The Spinach Paper, that spinach is not a good dietary source of iron, the US Council on Foods perversely concluded that it was.
The Spinach Paper noted how studies by Schlutz, Morse and Oldham (1933), and Stearns and Stinger (1937), with infants aged 9 to 54 weeks, found that a diet containing spinach had no significant impact upon infant iron retention. And the Council on Foods knew why; because by this time science had discovered that spinach contained significant quantities of the iron blocker oxalic acid. They wrote:
“The evidence now is clear, however, that not all the iron in spinach is available to the organism. Tests for inorganic iron by the dipyridyl method have shown that only 20 per cent of the total iron is ionisable or “available” iron.” [1]
Given this finding one has to ask how they could have possibly written what came next in the paper:
“It may be concluded from these observations that, as far as its practical usefulness as a source of iron in the feeding of infants is concerned, spinach is of negligible value because little of it can be fed. However, even though all the iron of spinach may not be available, the total iron content is great enough for spinach to rate as a good source of iron for older children and adults. But direct experimental evidence is not now available to enable one to arrive at any conclusion regarding the precise value of spinach as a source of iron for persons beyond the age of infancy.”
If the incongruence has not already jumped out from this page, it helps to break things down. The first sentence makes perfect sense. My main concern is with the second sentence.
Today we know that nowhere near 20 percent of iron can be absorbed from eating spinach (see Sutton 2011), but what was known about that issue in 1937?
In 1937, ‘knowledge’ was that less than 20 percent of iron in spinach was available.
The authors of the Council on Foods paper knew that on average100g of fresh spinach contains a mere 0.5 percent dietary available iron. Which means that on the basis of Peterson and Elvehjem’s (1928) data, spinach has less than the 0.6mg of iron per 100g that was found in fresh tomatoes, less than 0.6 mg in red peppers, less than 0.7 mg in plums, and less than 0.6 mg in oranges. In fact, in 1937, even if as much as 20 percent of the iron in spinach could somehow be miraculously absorbed by a human being, knowledge at the time places spinach in the same unremarkable iron league as pears (0.46), lettuce heads (0.42) and gooseberries (0.47). A fact that could be further supported by research (Tisdall e.t al in 1937), which did find that cooked spinach, drained and ready to serve, contained no more available iron than canned tomatoes.
The choice of the words “may not” in the second sentence is peculiar, because the authors would have known from the research of the world leading University of Wisconsin scientists, reported two years earlier by science journalists in The Science News Letter (1935), that around 75-80 percent the iron in spinach “was” not available. And the use of the word “precise” in The Spinach Paper is also strange because, as the paper itself reported, fresh spinach – according to their knowledge at the time – contained on average 2.5 mg of iron per 100g, of which they thought they “knew” only some 20 percent was available.
Clearly then widely held expert knowledge at the time was that only some 19-25 per cent of iron from spinach was available. This means that it was known in 1937 that spinach is not a good source of iron when compared, for example, to the then “known” figures of 2.4 mg per 100g for turkey (Peterson and Elvehjem 1928) and 26 mg per 100g for beef liver[2] (Kohler, Elvehjem and Hart 1936). Yet, incredibly, the Council on Foods wrote in their conclusion of The Spinach Paper:
“Evidence regarding the amount of the iron of spinach that is available to older children and adults has not been reported at the present time.”
Accepting the fact that studies on babies at the time found the Wisconsin scientists were correct, while relying on the fact that no studies on older humans had at the time been undertaken, the Council on Foods perversely chose to claim that spinach remained a good source of iron for older children and adults.
In which case, and in light of all the most recent, orthodox and authoritative evidence available to them at the time – regarding what was then accepted ‘knowledge’ that at best only some 19 percent of the iron in spinach is available to anyone of any age (Kohler, Elvehjem and Hart 1935) – how could they possibly justify writing of spinach that:
“…the total iron content is great enough for spinach to rate as a good source of iron for older children and adults.”
Speculation and Conclusion
One might wonder whether perhaps external or internal organisational pressures forced the anonymous authors of The Spinach Report to protect spinach growers and the related food industry in 1937?
At the time The Spinach Report was published, the great depression of the late 1920’s was not a distant memory. In late 1935 through to 1936 things picked up. But in 1937 another economic depression hit the USA. . That same year, in the so called spinach capital of the world – Crystal City in Texas – the farmers erected a Popeye statue in honour of his creator E.C. Segar for his promotion of spinach – the fast food success behind Popeye’s strength.
We may never know what influenced the authors of The Spinach Report to write their seemingly irrational promotion of spinach as a good source of iron, but one possible reason is that they were in one way or another influenced by the economic plight of the spinach farmers. Quite why the USDA continues to claim, in the teeth of all the scientific evidence, that spinach is a good source of iron is an unsolved mystery. Perhaps the USDA is worried about the poor spinach farmers rather than the significant number of women in the USA, and elsewhere in the world who are low in iron and rely, along with their expert advisors, upon influential USDA advice for rational dietary choices? Or perhaps the continuing erroneous promotion of spinach is simply a coincidence and the USDA has just made an embarrassing mistake? Whatever the answer is, this most influential US government scientific department needs to get its facts straight.
And to end on that very theme, if you have read this far and you suspect that the real reason the USDA continues to this day to erroneously promote spinach as a good source of iron may have something to do with that most famous story of bad data impacting upon policy making, where a misplaced decimal point in 19th century analysis of the iron content of spinach exaggerated its iron content ten fold and influenced 20th century nutrition advice regarding spinach and iron, then I’m afraid you’ve been had. Because that entire story has been busted as a supermyth (See: Sutton 2010a; 2010b; 2010c).
References
Council on Foods (1937). Nutritional Value of Spinach. Journal of American Medical Association. Vol. 109. No. 23. p.1907-1909.
Kohler, G. Elvehjem, C. and Hart, E. 1936. Modifications of the Bibyridine Method for Available Iron. Journal of Biological Chemistry. Vol. 113. pp 49-53.
Peterson, W. H., and Elvehjem, C. A. (1928) The iron content of plant and animal foods. Journal of Biological Chemistry. Vol. 78. p. 215.
Schlutz, F. W. Morse, M. and Oldham, H. (1933). Influence of Vegetable Feeding upon Iron Metabolism of Infants. Journal of Pediat. 3: 225. July.
Sterns, G. and Stinger, D. (1937). Iron Retention in Infancy. Journal of Nutrition. 13. 127. February.
Sutton, M. (2011) SPIN@GE USA Beware of the Bull: The United States Department of Agriculture is Spreading Bull about Spinach, Iron and Vitamin C on the Internet. Bestthinking.com. Available online:http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/spin-ge-usa-beware-of-the-bull-the-united-states-department-of-agriculture-is-spreading-bull-about-spinach-iron-and-vitamin-c-on-the-internet
Sutton, M. (2010a). Spinach, Iron and Popeye:Ironic lessons from biochemistry and history on the importance of healthy eating, healthy scepticism and adequate citation. Internet Journal of Criminology (Primary Research Paper series).http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popeye_March_2010.pdf
Sutton, M. (2010b) Discovery of Braced Myths. Supermyths blog. September 24th. Available online: http://super-myths.blogspot.com/search/label/Discovery%20of%20braced%20myths
Sutton, M. (2010c) The Spinach, Popeye, Iron, Decimal Error Myth is Finally Busted. Bestthnking.com .Available online:http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/the-spinach-popeye-iron-decimal-error-myth-is-finally-busted
The Science News Letter. (1935). Spinach Over-Rated as Source of
Iron Vol. 28, No. 749. Aug. 17, p. 110
Tisdall, F.F. Drake, T.G.H. Summerfeldt, P. and Jackson, S. H. J (1937). The comparative value of spinach and tomatoes in the child’s diet. . Pediat. 11: 347.
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[1] See Kohler et al (1936)
[2] Of which, 69 percent was “known” to be available.