Wednesday 31 December 2014

Clearing the mess about Patrick Matthew

Here is a website with resources on Pattrick Matthew I can only recommend to anybody interested in this third discoverer of natural selection as a mechanism of evolution.

It's called The Patrick Matthew Project and run by Michael E. Weale.

This preprint is also recommended.The following quote says it all:

"What little discussion there has been of Patrick Matthew has centered on the rather unedifying question of whether he deserves intellectual priority (Dawkins, 2010; Dempster, 1996; Wainwright, 2008; Wells, 1973). To me, this is missing the point. It is not that Matthew unfairly lost out to Darwin and Wallace — their intellectual contributions were much greater. Rather, we are the ones who are losing out by disregarding Matthew's work. It merits our interest precisely because it is distinct from that of Darwin or Wallace. It is time for a reappraisal of Matthew's version of macroevolution by natural selection."

Chapeau to Mike Weale!