Something really fishy: A brief look at the coelacanth, the ‘living fossil’

In one of my more previous frivolous blogs (‘The beast inside: What does your favourite animal say about you?’) I wrote that my favourite animal is the coelacanth. It’s been my favourite animal ever since I did a junior school project on it when I was nine-years old. At that age I was fascinated by dinosaurs, fossils, and paleontology. Like many boys in my class, I devoured books on dinosaurs. One of the ‘dino-books’ I read talked about a fish called the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish that lived on earth during the late-Devonian period (known as the ‘age of fishes’) dating back 360 million years. What grabbed my attention was mention that a living coelacanth had been caught in the Chalumna River off the east coast of South Africa in 1938. According to fossil records, coelacanths had died out and become extinct 65 million years ago (having lived 200 million years before dinosaurs had even come into existence). I found the idea of a real life coelacanth unbelievable. Although my passion for psychology overtook paleontology in my late teens I still love all things coelacanth. It’s probably one of the subjects I would pick if I ever appeared on the Mastermind television show. I rarely read academic papers outside of psychology but for ones on coelacanths I make exceptions. I must have watched every documentary and video clip on YouTube (and in my opinion, the 2001 Equinoxe documentary ‘The Fish That Time Forgot’ is an excellent primer on the coelacanth. You should also check out the more recent ‘Diving With Dinosaur Fish‘).

The coelacanth has often been dubbed a ‘living fossil’ (in simple terms referring to an organism that closely resembles another organism that is only known from fossil records) and the name ‘coelacanth’ derives from both Greek and modern Latin and means ‘hollow spine’ (one of the fish’s interesting anatomical features). According to Wikipedia, there are two key characteristics of something defined as a living fossil (and some scholars have added a third):

“The first two are required for recognition as a living fossil stasis but some authors include the third. They (i) are members of taxa [a group of one of more organisms] that exhibit notable longevity in the sense that they have remained recognisable in the fossil record over unusually long periods; (ii) show little morphological divergence, whether from early members of the lineage, or among extant species, and (iii) tend to have little taxonomic diversity”.

Based on such characteristics, there are dozens of ‘living fossils’ on the planet including reptiles (e.g., crocodiles, various turtles), birds (e.g., pelicans, magpie geese), many types of shark, and mammals (e.g., aardvarks, red pandas, okapis), as well as bony fish such as the coelacanths and African lungfish. Just as an aside, in 2018, I co-authored a paper (published in the journal Social Sciences, see ‘Further reading’ below) with Dr. Mike Sutton debunking the assertion that Charles Darwin coined the phrase ‘living fossil’. The Oxford English Dictionary claims Charles Darwin (1859) coined the term ‘living fossil’. Using the ‘internet date detection’ method, we highlighted that the term ‘living fossil’ first appeared in the literature at least 147 years earlier in the work of a Welsh Botanist Lhwyd (1712). He used it in Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society of London (which was also thefirst ever peer-reviewed scientific journal).

It could be argued that the twentieth century history concerning the coelacanth was due to one man’s obsession, namely Professor James Leonard Brierley Smith (but known to all in the field as ‘J.L.B.’ Smith and who was an ichthyologist at Rhodes University). For those who don’t know, ichthyology is the branch of zoology that concern itself with the scientific study of fish. (And as another aside, when I worked in the University of Plymouth’s psychology department [1990-1995], one of my colleagues [Dr. Phil Gee] described himself – at least at the time – as an ‘ichthyopsychologist’ and published a paper in 1994 from his PhD entitled ‘Temporal discrimination learning of operant feeding in goldfish’ in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior). Smith is credited with formally identifying the coelacanth that was caught in 1938 but the story actually began with Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator at the East London Natural History Museum, who spotted a strange looking blue-finned fish among the catch of a local fisherman (Hendrick Goosen) on December 23, 1938. She made a sketch of the 1.5-metre fish and contacted her friend Smith who instantly knew he was looking at something history-changing. It actually took nearly two months before Smith actually saw the fish in the flesh (he lived over 500 miles away and finally visited Courtenay-Latimer on February 16, 1939).

Courtenay-Latimer had tried to preserve it as best as she could but all the internal organs were disposed of (she had sent it to a taxidermist) before Smith was able to examine the specimen (the refrigeration facilities were poor in the 1930s so she had the fish skinned and mounted). The specimen was eventually named after Courtenay-Latimer and the river where it was found (genus name Latimeria chalumnae). Coelacanths were actually known to the local fishermen who called them ‘gombessa’ or ‘mame’.

Smith knew the importance of the find and spent years trying to find a second West Indian Ocean coelacanth. He distributed leaflets for thousands of miles all along the East African coast and offered a large financial reward to any fisherman who caught one. Fourteen years later, a second coelacanth turned up in the Comoro Islands (followed by over 80 other specimens up to 1975 including catches off the coasts of Tanzania, Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique). Smith managed to persuade the South African Prime Minister (Daniel Malan) to get the military to fly him to the Comoros (islands that were actually owned by France). Smith subsequently began the first ever dissection of a coelacanth and concluded it was different in many ways from all modern fish (see bullet point on ‘Body characteristics’ below).

One of the most interesting features of coelacanths are its fins. They are almost limb-like and because of this anatomical feature, Smith (wrongly) believed that the coelacanth was evidence of the evolutionary ‘missing link’ between fish and land-walking mammals (in fact on December 30, 1952, the New York Times front-page article was headlined ‘14-Year Hunt Yields ‘Missing Link’ Fish’). Much of Smith’s post-1952 career was spent writing about and researching the coelacanth (most notably his 1956 book The Search Beneath the Sea – The Story of the Coelacanth also known as Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth).

Remarkably, the story of the coelacanth didn’t end in the east coast of Africa. In September 1997, a different species of coelacanth was identified at a local market in Sulawesi (Indonesia) by Dr. Mark Erdmann (a coral reef ecologist) who was on honeymoon with his wife. Erdmann took photographs but someone bought the fish so was unable to carry out any research on the specimen. Erdmann subsequently returned to Indonesia and in July 1998, local fisherman caught a second Indonesian coelacanth (and was subsequently given the genus name Latimeria menadoensis). The fish was known to local Indonesian fisherman as ‘raja laut’ (king of the sea). So what else do we know about present-day coelacanths? Here’s my brief bluffer’s guide to coelacanths.

• Maximum size and weight: Coelacanths can be as long as six feet and weigh up to 200 pounds, and females are bigger than males.
• Life expectancy: It is estimated coelacanths can live up to 80 to 100 years based on the growth rings in the ear bones (called otoliths).
• Body characteristics: Coelacanths have thick (almost armour-like) scales and a tiny brain (comprising 1.5% of the cranial cavity). They have hinge in their skull (i.e., an intracranial joint) that allows them to open their mouths wide to consume their prey, and instead of a spine they have an oil-filled hollow pressurized tube called a notocord. They also have very primitive hearts described as the most primitive in the vertebrate world. In their nose they have an electro-sensory system (a rostral organ comprising a jelly-filled cavity) that has been speculated to help sense its prey (similar to that found in some sharks – in fact coelacanths and sharks have almost identical blood chemistry). The East African species is blue in colour whereas the Indonesian species is brown in colour.
• Body metabolism and diet: Coelacanths are carnivorous and also have the lowest metabolism of any fish its size. It is speculated that it is this feature that may have allowed them to survive on earth for so long. They feed on small fish and occasionally squid, eels and small sharks. The low metabolism means they don’t need much food to survive and they live in relatively low-food environments.
• Number of species: Historically there were over 120 species of coelacanth identified by fossil records but only two extant species have been verified.
• Movement: J.L.B. Smith speculated that coelacanths ‘walked’ on the sea bed but the four (almost limb-like) facilitate a form of locomotion that is similar to tetrapods (four-legged animals) but ‘walk’ in the water not on the sea bed (Smith described their fins as “paddles”).
• Habitat: During the daytime they tend to be relatively stationary (inside underground caves and crevices up to 700 metres below the water’s surface although some coelacanths live in shallower depths of 90-150 metres such as those found in Sodwana Bay off the South African coast) and are nocturnal and move around (up to 8 km) during the night. The fact they live so deep underwater means they cannot live in captivity so almost everything known about coelacanths comes from dead specimens or study in-situ.
• Reproduction and giving birth: Very little was known about how coelacanths until a pregnant coelacanth was dissected in 1975 (at the American Museum of Natural History in New York) and five fully-formed coelacanth ‘pups’ were found inside the female. The gestation period has been estimated to be around 13 to 15 months (the longest among any living fish and some papers claim a gestation period of up to three years) and they give birth to live offspring (i.e., ovoviviparous – producing offspring via eggs which are hatched within the body of their mother). Coelacanth eggs are larger than any other fish (around the size of tennis balls) and are full of nutrients to help the growing embryos. It is thought that coelacanths can give birth to between five and 25 pups. Coelacanths become sexually active at around 20 years of age. However, as far as I am aware, no-one has ever seen coelacanths mate. However, a paper published in a 2013 issue of Nature Communications carried out analysis on pregnant coelacanths and concluded that coelacanths appear to be monogamous and that offspring do not appear to mate with each other.
• Edibility: Because of the excessive amounts of oil and wax esters within their bodies, they are slimy, ooze a mucus-type substance, coelacanths have a foul flavour (and because of the high urea content in their body they can also smell and taste of urine). In fact, people can become sick after eating coelacanth.
• World population – It is estimated that there are approximately 350 coelacanths living on the planet and it is now classed as an endangered species which although better than extinct, could still mean they become extinct within a few generations. A genetic study of the two different extant species estimated that they had diverged 30-40 million years ago.

In my research for this article, I did come across a 1997 paper by Hans Fricke (in the Marine Ecology Progress Series) that had a whole section on the psychology of coelacanths. He noted:

“The long evolutionary existence and unchanged appearance of coelacanths since the Devonian provides spiritual insight into our own comparatively short human existence on earth. Furthermore, coelacanths are of interest not only because of their long evolutionary history but also because they remain for the public – and also for many scientists – the nearest living relatives close to our own tetrapod roots. This makes the coelacanth unique among living fossils. We appreciate the timeless existence of this ‘old cousin’ which provides a window into the past. This existence value was nicely expressed in a German youth magazine. Youngsters selected a hit list of reasons ‘Why it is worthwhile living this week’. One entry contained the statement ‘…that coelacanths still exist’.”

The paper also talked about how humans can become emotionally and strongly affected after seeing films about coelacanths. I can attest to this. I was gripped as an adult in my thirties when I first saw a coelacanth on film (and I have never lost that feeling). Their existence is quite simply life-affirming and life-enhancing.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Amemiya, C. T., Alföldi, J., Lee, A. P., Fan, S., Philippe, H., MacCallum, I., … & Organ, C. (2013). The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution. Nature, 496(7445), 311-316.

Bates, M. (2015). The feature creature: 10 fun facts about the coelacanth. Wired, February 3. Located at: https://www.wired.com/2015/03/creature-feature-10-fun-facts-coelacanth/

Fricke, H. (1997). Living coelacanths: values, eco-ethics and human responsibility. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 161, 1-15.

Gee, P., Stephenson, D., & Wright, D.E. (1994). Temporal discrimination learning of operant feeding in goldfish (Carassius auratus). Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 62(1), 1-13.

Holder, M.T., Erdmann, M.V., Wilcox, T.P., Caldwell, R. L., & Hillis, D.M. (1999). Two living species of coelacanths? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(22), 12616-12620.

Inoue J. G., Miya, M., Venkatesh, B., & Nishida, M. (2005). The mitochondrial genome of Indonesian coelacanth Latimeria menadoensis (Sarcopterygii: Coelacanthiformes) and divergence time estimation between the two coelacanths. Gene, 349, 227–235.

Johanson, Z., Long, J. A., Talent, J. A., Janvier, P., and Warren, J. W (2006). Oldest coelacanth, from the early Devonian of Australia. Biology Letters, 2(3), 443–446.

Lampert, K. P., Blassmann, K., Hissmann, K., Schauer, J., Shunula, P., El Kharousy, Z., … & Schartl, M. (2013). Single-male paternity in coelacanths. Nature communications, 4, 2488.

Lavett Smith, C., Rand, C. S., Schaeffer, B., and Atz, J. W. (1975). Latimeria, the living coelacanth, is ovoviviparous. Science 190(4219), 1105–1106.

Pouyaud, L., Wirjoatmodjo, S., Rachmatika, I., Tjakrawidjaja, A., Hadiaty, R., & Hadie, W. (1999). A new species of coelacanth. Genetic and morphologic proof. Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences. Serie III, Sciences de la Vie, 322(4), 261-267.

Smith, J.L.B. (1956). The Search Beneath the Sea – The Story of the Coelacanth. New York: Holt.

Sutton, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2018). Using date specific searches on Google Books to disconfirm prior origination knowledge claims for particular terms, words, and names. Social Sciences, 7, 66. doi:10.3390/socsci7040066.

Selective memories: Charles Darwin, obsession, and Internet dating

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘obsession’ as “(i) a state in which someone thinks about someone or something constantly or frequently especially in a way that is not normal; (ii) someone or something that a person thinks about constantly or frequently, [and] (iii) an activity that someone is very interested in or spends a lot of time doing”. By these definitions my good friend and work colleague Dr. Mike Sutton would himself admit that he has had (for the last three or four years) an obsession with the work of English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Scottish landowner and fruit farmer Patrick Matthew (1790-1874). Dr. Sutton is a criminologist and we have published various articles and book chapters over the last 15 years on various topics including emails with unintended consequences, far right wing groups on the internet, and (most recently) the crime substitution hypothesis (which I’ve covered in a previous blog).

Over the past few years, I can’t think of a single conversation that we have had that both Darwin and Matthew’s didn’t get talked about at some point. In 2014, Sutton published his book Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret (“Nullius in verba” is Latin for “on the word of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it”) and as a result of it has experienced a torrent of verbal abuse on social media. So why has Dr. Sutton been the victim of such abuse? In a nutshell, Sutton has asserted that Darwin is a fraud and that his main thesis on natural selection was stolen from Matthew without any acknowledgement. Furthermore, using a new methodological technique that Sutton developed, he believes Darwin lied about his knowledge of Matthew’s work.

Over the last few years, I have read over a dozen of Sutton’s online articles about Darwin and Matthew, and I was also one of the first people to read Sutton’s book before it was published. Sutton’s work is meticulous, rigorous, and fully referenced. Most of his critics have never read (or simply don’t want to read) his book. Instead they appear to take potshots at his research and reputation without bothering to read the original source.

The first thing to note concerns Sutton’s methodology. His method – sometimes referred to ‘internet dating’ in his articles (but nothing to with people meeting up online, so apologies if the use of the words ‘internet dating’ in my article lured you to read this blog on false pretences) but called ‘Internet Date-Detection’ (ID) in his book – relies on the 30+ million books and documents that the Google Books Library Project has digitized and dating back centuries. Using the ID method, Sutton has used a search engine to track down obscure books, articles, and letters (and short phrases within these documents) to work out who published what and when with pinpoint accuracy. (For instance, back in the 1990s, I thought I had first coined the word ‘screenager’ but Sutton used his ID method and proved that others before me had used the word in print prior to my own articles).

The second thing to note is that all Darwinists concede that the process of natural selection was first written about in Patrick Matthew’s 1831 book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (written 28 years before Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection). However, Darwin claimed he had never read the book (which might be the case) but also claimed in 1860, 1861, and in every edition of the Origin of Species thereafter, that no other naturalist, and no one at all, in the preceding 28 years had read Matthew’s original ideas on macroevolution by natural selection because it was buried away in the book’s appendix. Darwin claimed he had independently formulated the theory of evolution through natural selection. At around the same time as Darwin, the naturalist Alfred Wallace (1823-1913) also (independently of Darwin and supposedly of Matthew) developed a theory of natural selection and together their papers were read on their behalf before the Linnean Society, and then published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London in 1858.

Using 21st century search engine technology via his ID method, Sutton originally discovered that – as opposed to the various claims of Darwin and the world’s leading Darwin scholars that no naturalists (or no one at all) read Matthew’s (1831) original ideas before 1858 – in fact Matthew’s book was cited 25 times before that date, seven of whom were naturalists, four of whom were known to Darwin and Wallace, and three that played major roles and had major influence on the exact same topic (botanist Prideaux John Selby, publisher and geologist Robert Chambers, and botanist John Loudon).

Like Sutton, a number of recent scholars – most notably the microbiologist Dr. Milton Wainwright – have researched some of the same historical ground as Sutton (arguing that Darwin and Wallace were beaten to a theory of macroevolution by Matthew). Whereas Wainwight wrote his papers after reading some of the original key texts from the early 1800s, Sutton used the ID technique to collate every single book, article and letter written by anyone in the period up to 1859 that had been digitized in the Google Books Library Project. What Sutton found is fascinating and does seem to indicate that Darwin lied about his knowledge of Matthew’s work. Darwin certainly lied after 1860 by claiming that no naturalist had read Matthew’s ideas because Matthew had twice written to inform Darwin that the opposite was true. Using the ID method, Sutton conclusively demonstrated that:

• Matthew’s original (1831) theory concerning the “natural process of selection” was only slightly different to Darwin’s (1859) the “process of natural selection”. Darwin also used the same analogy as Matthew had written in the opening chapter of Origin of the Species when discussing artificial versus natural selection, but claimed the analogy as his own without citing Matthew.
• Matthew’s prior-published conception of macroevolution by natural selection was not unread by naturalists and biologists before Darwin and Wallace replicated it. In fact, seven people cited the book in the pre-1859 literature, and Darwin and Wallace (and their influencers) knew four of these people well.
• Matthew’s conception of natural selection was not just contained solely in the appendix of his 1831 book but was also in the main text. In fact, Matthew even referred Darwin to some of the relevant extracts in the main text of his book (something that Darwin admitted in a letter to his closest friend Joseph Hooker [1817-1911], the botanist and explorer). In short, Darwin lied when he asserted that Matthew’s ideas were only contained in the appendix of his book.

Sutton has been trying to get the Royal Society to acknowledge Matthew as the originator of the macroevolution by natural selection. Sutton notes in his essay on Rational Wiki:

“As Robert Merton (1957) made clear in the classic and authoritative text on priority in science, the Royal Society has not officially changed its position on the rules of priority since those rules were established in the first half of the 19th century. Since that time, the Arago Effect (Strevens 2003), is the rule that has always been seen as a totally inflexible principle and has been followed as such in all other disputes over priority for discovery in science, except in the Matthew, Darwin and Wallace case. The Arago Effect, described by Merton, and also by Strevens, as a norm in cases of scientific discovery, is that being first to publish to the public, and most importantly in print, is everything when it comes to deciding who has priority for an idea or discovery in cases where one scientist claims to have made the same discovery independently of another”.

In the same essay, Sutton then discusses Richard Dawkins‘s reasoning for not giving Matthew priority of scientific discovery (i.e., that his work went “unnoticed”):

“Totally ignoring the Arago Effect convention of priority for scientific discovery, Richard Dawkins (2010) has built upon prior rationale for denying Matthew full priority over Darwin by creating a new, unique in the history of scientific discovery, ‘Dawkins’s Demand Rule’. Effectively, Dawkins demands that Matthew should not have priority over Darwin and Wallace based upon the recently proven fallacious premise (Sutton 2014) that Matthew’s unique views went unnoticed. Moreover, Dawkins demands also that Matthew should have ‘trumpeted his discovery from the rooftops’. However in making this post-hoc demand, Dawkins does not, as other writers (e.g. Desmond and Moore 1991; Secord 2000) have done with regard to the fears and difficulties of writing on natural selection at this time, which faced Darwin and Chambers, explain that the first half of the 19th century was a time of great social unrest, tension and violent rioting, which made writing on the topic of natural selection a great threat to the social controlling interests of natural theology. Is Dawkins willfully ignorant of the fact that in the year 1794 Pitt passed his notorious Two Acts against ‘Seditious Meetings’ and ‘Treasonable Practices’? In particular, the former curtailed topics of discussion at institutional scientific societies by requiring them to be licensed and proscribing discussion of either religion or politics (Sutton 2015). Perhaps it is for reasons of historical ignorance that Richard Dawkins, whilst holding forth as an expert on the history of science, fails also to address the issue that Matthew’s Chartist political ideas were in his book and that he linked these seditious ideas quite clearly to the implications of his heretical natural selection discovery. Consequently, it should go without saying, that this meant his unique ideas were especially both seditious and heretical in the 1830s and 1840s. How then was Matthew meant to trumpet his discovery when he had effectively silenced himself from doing so under the scientific conventions that followed in the wake of the laws of the land? Matthew explained this very fact to Darwin in 1860, in his second letter in the Gardeners’ Chronicle”.

My own reading of all Sutton’s work is that there is no good reason for Matthew not to be credited with being the originator of the theory of macroevolution by natural selection and that Matthew has full priority over Darwin and Wallace.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Darwin. C.R. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London. John Murray.

Darwin, C.R. & Wallace, A.R. (1858) On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London.

Dawkins, R. (2010). Darwin’s five bridges: The way to natural selection. In Bryson, B (ed.), Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society. London: Harper Collins.

Desmond, A. & Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London. Penguin Books.

Griffiths, M.D. & Sutton, M. (2013). Proposing the Crime Substitution Hypothesis: Exploring the possible causal relationship between excessive adolescent video game playing, social networking and crime reduction. Education and Health, 31, 17-21.

Griffiths, M.D. & Sutton, M. (2015). Screen time and crime: The ‘Crime Substitution Hypothesis’ revisited. Education and Health, 33, 85-87.

Matthew, P. (1831) On Naval Timber and Arboriculture; With a critical note on authors who have recently treated the subject of planting. Edinburgh. Adam Black.

Matthew, P. (1860). Nature’s Law of Selection (Letter). The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 7 April, pp. 312-313.

Matthew, P. (1860). Nature’s Law of Selection (Letter), Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 12 May, p. 433.

Merton, R.K. (1957) Priorities in scientific discovery: A chapter in the sociology of science. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 635-659.

Secord. J.A. (2000). Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Strevens, M. (2003) The role of priority in science. Journal of Philosophy, 100, 55-79.

Sutton, M. (2014). Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret. Thinker Books.

Sutton, M. (2016). On knowledge contamination: New data challenges claims of Darwin’s and Wallace’s independent conceptions of Matthew’s prior-published hypothesis. Filozoficzne Aspekty Genezy (Aspects of Origin), 12: Located at http://www.nauka-a-religia.uz.zgora.pl/index.php/pl/czasopismo/46-fag-2015/921-fag-2015-art-05

Sutton, M. (2016). Patrick Matthew: priority and the discovery of natural selection. Located at: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Patrick_Matthew:_priority_and_the_discovery_of_natural_selection

Sutton, M. (2016). Darwin’s Greatest Secret Exposed: Response to Grzegorz Malec’s De Facto fact denying review of my book. Filozoficzne Aspekty Genezy (Aspects of Origin), 13, 1-10. Located at: http://www.nauka-a-religia.uz.zgora.pl/images/FAG/2016.t.13/art.01.pdf

Sutton, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2002). Far Right Groups on the Internet: A new problem for crime control and community safety? The Criminal Lawyer, 123, 3-5.

Sutton, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2003). Emails with unintended criminal consequences. The Criminal Lawyer, 130, 6-8.

Sutton, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2004). Emails with unintended consequences: New lessons for policy and practice in work, public office and private life. In P. Hills (Ed.). As Others See Us: Selected Essays In Human Communication (pp. 160-182). Dereham: Peter Francis Publishers.

Wainwright, M. (2008) Natural selection: It’s not Darwin’s (or Wallace’s) theory. Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences, 15(1), 1-8

Wainwright, M. (2011). Charles Darwin: Mycologist and refuter of his own myth. FUNGI, 4(1), 13-20.