[_ Old Earth _] DARWIN/MACROEVOLUTION HYPOTHESIS AND THE OCCULTIST FIT/FEVER

[kendemyer]

DARWIN/MACROEVOLUTION HYPOTHESIS AND THE OCCULTIST FIT/FEVER


MACROEVOLUTION HYPOTHESIS AND ALFRED WALLACE AND SPIRITUALISM AND DARWIN

Here is what once source says about Darwin and Wallace:

In 1858, after working twenty years on his "descent with modification" theory, Darwin received a letter and manuscript from Wallace. No doubt with disbelief, Darwin read the enclosed essay which outlined a scientific explanation for the evolution of species remarkably similar to his own interpretation of the mutability of plant and animal forms on the earth. Although Darwin had been working for two decades on his proposed multi-volume work on the evolution of life, he had continuously postponed the publication of such a book because of the inevitable controversy that would surround his theory of descent.

taken from: http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/re ... arwin.html

Here is what Henry Morris wrote about the Ternate essay in regards to Wallace and he takes quite of bit of the material from Wallace himself:

Wallace was an interesting person. He was an anarchist and a spiritualist. In fact, he was one of the leaders in the spiritist revival in England at the time....He wrote this testimony in a book called The Wonderful Century:

"I was then (February 1858) living at Ternate in the Moluccas and was suffering from a rather severe attack of intermittent fever, which prostrated me every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits. During one of these fits, while again considering the problem of the origin of the species, something led me to think of Malthus' Essay on Population."

Malthus talked about the survival of the fittest and human populations and he had been quite influential in Darwin's thinking, too. "It suddenly flashed upon me," Wallace said in another book, "that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain - that is, the fittest would survive. Then at once, I seemed to see the whole effect of this. Returning to the first quote, he said that "the whole method of species modification became clear to me, and in the two hours of my fit, I had thought out the main points of the theory. That same evening, I sketched out the draft of a paper; and in the two succeeding evenings, I wrote it out and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin .

When he received the draft, Darwin was just astounded. He told his friend, Lyell, that Wallace had anticipated everything that he had poured 20 years of research into in preparation for his big book. So Darwin had to come out with a book right away in order to establish priority. He never did publish his big book, and probably never would have published a book at all had it not been for Wallace sending him this information stating that he had discovered the theory not during 20 years of research among the leading scientists in England, but during two hours of a fit in Malaysia jungles. Loren Eiseley, a great historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an article about Wallace: "A man pursuing birds of paradise in a remote jungle did not yet know that he had forced the world's most reluctant author to disgorge his hoarded volume or that the whole of Western thought was about to be swung into a new channel because a man in a fever had felt a moment of strange radiance. Make what you want out of that, but I cannot help thinking that there is more there than meets the eye. This may well have been the beginning of the modem battle in Satan's long war.

taken from: http://www.raptureme.com/terry/james20.html

It does appear as if Wallace obtained his ideas that he forwarded to Darwin while he was suffering from a fever:

And this is how Wallace says he hit upon the principle while suffering a bout of fever in Ternate:

One day something brought to my recollection Malthus' "Principles (sic) of Population" which I had read about twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of the "positive checks to increase" - disease, accidents, war, and famine - which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of more civilized peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous ... it occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. (Wallace 1908: 190).....

Wallace, Alfred Russel....
1908 My Life: a record of events and opinions. 2nd revised and condensed edition, London: Chapman and Hall.

WALLACE AND THE OCCULT


Wallace was well known to be strongly involved with spiritualism/occult.


Here is a source regarding Alfred Wallace:

http://www.strangescience.net/wallace.htm


Here is what another gentleman says about the Wallace/Darwin/Evolution and the occult/satanic:

http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/whostarted.htm



BBC ON DARWIN'S RELUCTANCE

Here is what the BBC says about Darwin's extreme procrastination in regards to publishing his hypothesis (I do not afree with everything here. For example, I believe the macroevolutionary position is a hypothesis and not a theory):

He not only sat on his theory. He took it away with him. In 1842 he and Emma escaped from London to live in a former parsonage in Downe, in the Kent countryside. Down House was at the 'extreme verge of world', and that's where he was happiest, away from questioning voices. But he was sure of the power of his theory: in 1844 he wrote Emma a letter suggesting that, if he died, she should pay an editor £400 to publish his work posthumously. It was as though he wanted to die first.....

Thus did twenty years pass for the closet evolutionist. Through the decades he declined to stay in other people's houses or attend many social events. the anxiety showed in his swimming head, depressions and sickness, for which he visited spas and experimented with diets and quack cures. Darwin's social perceptions and evolution's use by the rioters - to smash Anglican thraldom - provide the telling backdrop to this illness and publishing delay. Loss of social standing was a very real threat to a Victorian gentleman.

But the 1850s brought quieter and more prosperous times for the country. Darwin felt more secure after winning the Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1853. Moreover a rising group of secularists was professionalizing academic science. Led by T.H.Huxley,....they promised a better reception for evolution. Darwin invited Huxley to Downe in 1856. Immediately afterwards Huxley started challenging 'Creation' in his lectures at the Government School of Mines in Piccadilly, while Darwin finally - the years of procrastination over - began a huge tome, projected at three volumes, which he called Natural Selection.

Then on 18 June 1858 came a letter from a specimen-collector Alfred Russel Wallace from the Malay Archipelago, detailing a similar theory. It frightened Darwin into starting a shorter book to retain priority. Darwin's and Wallace's papers were read jointly at the Linnean Society on I July 1858 to a resounding silence. Darwin, his eighteen-month-old retarded son having just died, stayed away - but it was the kind of absenteeism that would mark his last years. His hastily-finished popular book, one to go over the heads of the experts - On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection - was published by John Murray in November 1859.

taken from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/darwin/l ... esmond.htm

Darwin died 23 years after the publising the Origin of the Species. Who knows when he would have finished his book if it were not for Wallace.


TERNATE ESSAY



Here is some more information regarding the Ternate essay:

In 1856, urged by Lyell, he began the preparation of a third and far more expanded treatise, and had completed about half of it when, on the 18th of June 1858, he received a manuscript essay from A. R. Wallace, who was then at Ternate in the Moluccas. Wallace wanted Darwin's opinion on the essay, which he asked should be forwarded to Lyell. Darwin was much startled to find in the essay a complete abstract of his own theory of natural selection. He forwarded it the same day, writing to Lyell, "your words have come true with a vengeance -- that I should be forestalled." He placed himself in the hands of Lyell and Hooker, who decided to send Wallace's essay to the Linnean Society, together with an abstract of Darwin's work, which they asked him to prepare, the joint essay being accompanied by a preface in the form of an explanatory letter written by them to the secretary. The title of the joint communication was " On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection." It was read on the 1st of July 1858, and appears in the Linn. Soc. Journal (Zoology) for that year.

taken from: http://www.gennet.org/facts/darwin.html

SUMMARY

To be fair to Darwin, he disapproved of Wallace's spiritualism. Also, just because a man involved with spiritualism/occult appears to have strongly influenced Darwin in regards to his final hypothesis and its timing as far as its release does not necessarily mean Darwin was wrong in regards to his hypothesis although I do believe he was wrong (see: http://www.christian-forum.net/index.php?showtopic=180 ).


ADDENDUM

Below is something I read which is interesting and I have done some fact checking although I have not fully corroborated its veracity:

Indeed, Creationists such as the British theologian William Paley and the British chemist Edward Blyth had a far more scientifically-tenable view of the biological significance of natural selection than Darwin. Like other Creationists, both Paley and Blyth saw natural selection as a mechanism for eliminating unfit individuals which differed from the created type. Thus, while Darwin preferred to believe that the elimination of unfit individuals was a mechanism for somehow evolving new and improved species, the Creationists saw elimination of unfit individuals as mechanism to preserve the stability of existing Created kinds.

taken from: http://www.gennet.org/facts/metro22.html

Another source goes farther and says:

Before continuing with this narrative, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to the late Professor Loren Eiseley.

I had been working on this subject for quite a time - a year or more - and had written the comment (at the end of my notes) that:

"It seems fair to say that Darwin's main role was as a compiler of facts rather than as an innovator in the field of evolutionist thought. But where did it all come from? His own explanation doesn't ring true." .....

Was the "theory of evolution by means of natural selection" really Darwin's theory, or did it originate from another, quite unexpected source? ......

Know Thy Place

This part of Charles Darwin - The Truth? addresses two more fundamental questions relating to the origin of The Origin of Species and Eiseley's discovery of 'the Blyth Connection':

Why didn't Blyth speak up on his own behalf when Darwin laid claim to his ideas?

If Darwin took his central ideas from Blyth's papers rather than from the sources named in the Darwin myth, how did Alfred Wallace manage to come to the same conclusions using the texts referred to in the "Darwin Myth"?

Loren Eiseley was well aware, when he raised the issues covered in his original paper and the subsequent book, that there was something odd about the fact that Blyth had never challenged Darwin's use of his ideas in The Origin. It is my perception that Eiseley was himself a man of generous spirit, which would explain the answer he offered to this conundrum:

"Being both generous and modest, perhaps he never saw any relation between his youthful cogitations and the great change in human thinking which ensued a quarter of a century later. ... Or perhaps he thought the old conception common."1

An interesting thought, and it is by no means impossible that Blyth might have "thought the old conception common". Desmond and Moore, in their biography of Darwin (1991) offer the observation that:

"The tree was the key. By the 1850's it was an accepted metaphor among naturalists ... Even from Calcutta, ... Edward Blythe [sic] ... compared life to a tree that 'branches off, & still divides & subdivides & resubdivides.' It was Darwin's image exactly: he had long visualised nature as 'irregularly branched.'"2
(Italics added for emphasis)

And is that really so surprising that Darwin's image fitted "exactly" with Blyth's metaphor, given that it was Blyth himself who, in his two papers of 1836 had described the spread of species by 'indefinite radiation'. It was a metaphor which Blyth had been using as far back as the 1830s, a metaphor that Blyth himself had borrowed from the famous French naturalist Lamarck. And Lamarck had first used it some 30 years earlier still, a fact that could hardly have escaped Darwin's notice!

But there's more to it than that.

In 1871, you may remember, Blyth wrote to tell Arthur Grote:

"I am now preparing [a work] on 'The Origination of Species', a subject upon which I think I can throw some light."3
Had Blyth really failed to recognise his own work as the basis for Darwin's ideas? Did he really intend publishing a book with an almost identical title on a mere whim? It is surely clear beyond reasonable doubt that by 1871, if not earlier, Blyth recognised that Darwin had been feeding from him, as from so many others, like some intellectual leech. And he chose to keep silent.

This action, while it may appear quite ludicrously self-effacing today, made perfectly good sense in the context of Victorian England.

It should be noted, for example, that the 'middle classes' which now make up such a large proportion of the population, only began to develop as a distinct social group during the Victorian era. At the time when The Origin was published the middle classes were barely established, and were often hard to distinguish from the upper end of the lower or working classes from which they had so lately emerged. Moreover, where notions of class may be regarded as irrelevant or even destructive today, in Victorian England social status was a paramount influence in all walks of life....


References

1. Darwin and the Mysterious Mr X., Loren Eiseley. op. cit. p.79.

2. Quoted in Darwin, A. Desmond and J. Moore. Michael Joseph:London:1991. p.419.


taken from: http://www3.mistral.co.uk/bradburyac/dar1.html
and http://www3.mistral.co.uk/bradburyac/dar10.html

Here is the whole online book cited above:

Charles Darwin - the Truth? by Andrew J. Bradbury
http://www3.mistral.co.uk/bradburyac/dar1.html

 

[Barbarian]

Darwin's primacy in evolutionary theory was in discovering how it worked, and in documenting it's action in nature.

In other words, he actually set out a series of hypotheses, and tested them to get a working theory.

For that, he and Wallace (who independently discovered the way it works) are honored as the founders of evolutionary theory.

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

Why bother Barbarian? He/She isn't reading what you post, they don't care, they're just mindlessly pasting all of this stuff in. I've half a mind to report a bot.

 

[kendemyer]

TO: Barbarian

You spoke about "evolution" and I presume you meant the macroevolutionary position. I do not want to get into the validity of the macroevolutionary hypothesis. This is more of a history of science thread. Needless to say, I think the experimental evidence in the fruit fly experiments shows that the macroevolutionist speculations are not valid (see: FRUIT FLIES SPEAK UP at: http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/10mut10.htm ).

Thank you for your Wallace comments though.

 

[Barbarian]

The question of macroevolution was settled by 1908 when the first documented macroevolutionary event was reported.