William Carruthers, a botanist and paleobotanist in Scotland, England.
Research shows that Charles Darwin was troubled after reading articles critical of evolution published in The Times.
William Carruthers, a contemporary of Darwin who works at the British Museum, said recently discovered plant fossils cannot be explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution, “natural selection,” The Times reported Jan. 27. Carruthers is a Scottish botanist and paleobotanist.
At the Time, Darwin considered any opponent who denied his theory of evolution to be an “abomination,” but Carruthers’ attempts to undermine his “findings” further angered him. This still unsolved biological mystery was “abhorrent”.
Richard Buggs is the author of a paper published in the American Journal of Botany. Here,” he said, “Darwin encountered a very prominent scientist, a very qualified person, who was very openly opposed to his [Darwin’s] view [of evolution], [Carruthers] basically saying that God created dicots [dicotyledons], and Darwin didn’t have the answer, and Darwin’s followers didn’t have the answer. It was an awkward question for Darwin.”
Darwin, who lived in Victorian times, is known to have been troubled in his later years by the sudden appearance of multiple flowering plants in the Cretaceous (about 100 million years ago) fossil record.
This was difficult to explain because Darwin’s theory of evolution, as set out in The Origin of Species, implied that there should be fossil evidence of the gradual development of such plants over tens of millions of years, dating back to the Jurassic period or beyond. in 1879, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, saying. “As far as we can judge, the rapid development of all higher plants during the most recent geological period is an abominable mystery.”
In a speech to the Geological Society, the head of the British Museum’s Botany Department, Carruthers traversed the fossil evidence and said, “The facts of paleontology are antithetical to the theory of evolution.”
While Carruthers acknowledged that fossils do “prove development” to some extent, he said it is more consistent with creation than evolution, adding, “Development is not the province of evolutionists; in fact, Moses’ claim that the oldest creation plan —- attributes all of nature to a supernatural creator of the world.”
In his paper, Professor Baggs, senior research leader in plant health at the Royal Botanic Gardens, noted that Darwin had been in the habit of reading The Times after lunch, and that he came across Carruthers’ 1,300-word article in the November 6, 1876, issue of The Times. He also found that Darwin kept a newspaper clipping of the article in the Gardeners’ Chronicle. He discovered that the discord between Darwin’s circle of friends and Carruthers dated back several years.
In 1874, after Carruthers objected to changes in the constitution of the Linnaean Society of London, Hooker criticized Carruthers’ criticism of Darwin, who replied, “What an odious man he is.” The Linnaean Society of London is a society for the study of biological taxonomy.
Professor Burgess said that Carruthers’ lecture at the Geological Society and the publicity it generated were irritating to Darwin, who spent the last decade of his Life shifting his research focus to botany to avoid the controversy that would inevitably arise from discussions of animal evolution.
Although the “abominable enigma” refers to the sudden appearance of all angiosperms, or flowering plants, Professor Burgess says Darwin was really referring only to dicotyledons, the flowering plants considered to belong to the larger of the two groups.
Recent Comments