After the Trial The controversy took a toll on participants other than Slade. In 1879 Darwin tried to drum up support for a government pension in recognition of Wallace’s brilliant contributions to natural history. Wallace, he knew, had to earn his meager living by grading examination papers. But when Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, the botanist refused to help. “Wallace has lost caste terribly,” he replied nastily, “not only for his adhesion to Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliberately and against the whole voice of the committee” allowed the paper on mental telepathy at the scientific meetings. In addition, he thought the government “should in fairness be informed that the candidate is a public and leading Spiritualist!”
Undaunted, Darwin replied that Wallace’s beliefs were “not worse than the prevailing superstitions of the country”— meaning organized religion. Darwin and Huxley twisted a few more arms, then Darwin personally wrote to Prime Minister William Gladstone, who passed the petition on to Queen Victoria. In the end, Wallace got his modest pension and was able to continue writing his articles and books; he died in 1913, at the age of 90.
In the years after the trial, Wedgwood and Darwin did not see much of each other. In 1878 a reporter for the journal Light had finally managed to unmask Charles Williams, the medium who had attempted to use Wedgwood to win over Darwin’s family. When the journalist suddenly turned on the lights at a séance, Williams was found to be wearing a false black beard, phosphorescent rags and, as Darwin later put it, “dirty ghost-clothes.”
“A splendid exposure,” crowed Darwin when he read of it. But even then, his brother-in-law’s faith remained unshaken; a few faked performances indicated only that the medium was having difficulty getting through to the other side and was under pressure not to disappoint his sitters. For Darwin, this was the last straw: “Hensleigh Wedgwood admits Williams is proved a rogue,” he fumed, “but insists he has seen real ghosts [at Williams’s séances]. Is this not a psychological curiosity?”
In 1880 Wedgwood sent Darwin a long handwritten manuscript: a spiritualist synthesis of science and religion. Would Darwin read it and perhaps suggest where it might be published? In a melancholy mood, Darwin sat down to reply to his cousin. He may have remembered the times Wedgwood had gone to bat for him many years before: he had helped persuade Darwin’s uncle and father to let him go on the HMS Beagle expedition, and it was to his cousin that Darwin had once entrusted publication of his theory of natural selection.
“My dear Cousin,” Darwin wrote, “It is indeed a long time since we met, and I suppose if we now did so we should not know one another; but your former image is perfectly clear to me.” He refused even to read Hensleigh’s paper, writing that “there have been too many such attempts to reconcile Genesis and science.” The two cousins, who had once been so close, were now hopelessly estranged over the question of science and the supernatural.
That same year Lankester, now a professor of zoology, declined requests to continue ghostbusting. “The Spirit Medium,” he wrote in an 1880 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, “is a curious and unsavoury specimen of natural history, and if you wish to study him, you must take him unawares . . . . I have done my share of the skunk-hunting; let others follow.” He was later appointed director of the British Museum of Natural History.
Ironically, in 1912 Lankester, the nemesis of fakers, was completely fooled by the Piltdown man hoax, one of the most notorious frauds in the history of evolutionary biology. For the next 40 years, scientists accepted the “ape-man” fragments, dug up about 25 miles from Darwin’s home, as remains of the “missing link.” Fired with enthusiasm for the Darwin-Wallace theory, Lankester and the younger generation of evolutionists uncritically embraced this fossil forgery.
Huxley, who died in 1895, knew full well that more than a few scientists were prone to develop their own irrationally held beliefs. While young, he had battled churchmen to establish the scientific approach to unraveling human origins but later quipped to an educator that “we or our sons shall live to see all the stupidity in favour of science”—a fitting prophecy of Piltdown, the ersatz “Stone Age” Tasaday tribe of the Philippines, and cold fusion. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself had urged a skeptical approach to unconfirmed observations; he believed that accepting flimsy evidence is much more dangerous than adopting incorrect theories. “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure,” he wrote. “But false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”
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Add CommentThe idea of evolution by natural selection is provably false; it contradicts the facts. It rests on rampant assumptions, speculation, and extrapolations (such as the peppered moth obsession). It is as much a matter of faith as is creationism. It is not science. Darwinism has nothing to do with evolution. Natural selection works to preserve the species, not change it into something else. The only reason that it continues to bind our minds is that no fact or objective evidence is allowed to refute it. Evolutionists are deliberately blind to any other possible process. Creationist beliefs also have problems. These beliefs rest upon misinterpretations of much of the Old Testament record. An objective analysis of both sides reveals contradictions. An alternative to both is clearly required. The evolutionists, hamstrung by gradualism, will never explain the origin of consciousness or of language. But if we recognize the inefficacy of gradualism, and if we recognize that the Genesis creation account is not all completely literal, and if we consider a new perspective, a rational paradigm presents itself. (Pardon my breathless sentence.) We must revise our world view. Also, Darwins inability to objectively analyze the disaster at the Tower of Babel (i.e., no new languages) doesnt speak well of his credibility. Check out
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Both Charles Darwin & Abraham Lincoln were born on this date 200 years ago, while the NAACP was founded on this date one hundred years ago. All you have to do is to look around, evolution is everywhere. I'm evolving as I write this, we all are, everything is. My favorite saying is, "You don't see any short neck giraffes", is my way of saying, mutation which are counterproductive, cease to exist. Read my full post at www.whatteddsedd.com just search for "Darwin".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd what alternative theory are you proposing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are postulating that the giraffe neck evolved in the first place. Natural selection surely takes place cross-sectionally and longitudinally however the mutation-based evolution of morphologiacally changed species is flawed. Two distinct arguments based on two very differrent processes!
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