Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret, a book by UK criminologist Mike Sutton, has just been published as a Kindle edition. Mike aims to tell the world that Scottish fruit grower Patrick Matthew published the theory of evolution by natural selection in his 1831 book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture - a full 27 years before Wallace and Darwin published the idea in their landmark paper of 1858. Not only that, but Mike claims that a number of Darwin and Wallace's colleagues read the book and passed the information about natural selection on to them - so his argument is that Darwin and Wallace did NOT independently discover natural selection, but lied that they had....
That Pattrick Matthew discovered and published natural selection before Darwin and Wallace is very old news (yawn!) - it has been much discussed in the literature and is indeed the subject of an earlier badly written and repetitious book by Dempster (1983) [see a review HERE]. I remain unsure as to whether Matthew did indeed truly discover natural selection a la Darwin and Wallace - certainly his idea was not presented as a new theory and it was so poorly and briefly explained that I wonder whether Matthew actually understood the idea in the way that Darwin and Wallace clearly did. Anyway, I and many other evolutionary biologists are happy to credit Matthew as one of the important early pioneers in this field - perhaps even more if someone with a detailed knowledge of evolutionary theory can domonstrate that Matthew did indeed discover the full theory of natural selection.
What is novel about Mike's new book is not that Matthew discovered natural selection, but his multiple accusations that Darwin and Wallace did not independently devise this theory, but in fact that they plagiarized it from Matthew's book. Does Mike have actual evidence that they did this? the answer is NO he doesn't! His claim of plagiarism is constructed on baseless allegation that people who read Matthew's book, passed on information about natural selection to Darwin and Wallace, who then claimed that they had discovered it - independently of each other and independently of Matthew.
References
Dempster W. J. 1983. Patrick Matthew and natural selection: nineteenth century gentleman-farmer, naturalist and writer. P. Harris. Edinburgh.