Charles Clement Coe (8 February 1830 – 1 April 1921) was an English Unitarian minister and writer who advocated non-Darwinian evolution.[1][2]

Charles Clement Coe
Born8 February 1830
Died1 April 1921
OccupationUnitarian minister

Coe was born in King's Lynn and was educated at Manchester College, Oxford. He was President of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society (1862-1863) and was Minister of the Unitarian Great Meeting chapel in Bond Street, Leicester.[1] His was minister at Bank Street Unitarian Chapel in Bolton, Lancashire, from 1874 to 1895, when he moved to Bournemouth.[3]

It was while at Bolton that Coe wrote a large volume, Nature Versus Natural Selection: An Essay on Organic Evolution (1895). He defended evolution but rejected natural selection.[1][4][5] The biologist J. Arthur Thomson gave the book a positive review, commenting that it is a very interesting critique of natural selection written with much skill.[6] It was also positively reviewed in the The Lancet journal.[5]

Coe was an early writer to use the term neo-Darwinism in 1889.[7]

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Notes edit

  1. ^ a b c "Rev Charles Clement Coe". Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society. Archived from the original on 1 October 2015.
  2. ^ "Obituaries of Unitarian Ministers". Unitarian Historical Society.
  3. ^ Bank Street Chapel (1896). Bank Street Chapel, Bolton, Bi-centenary Commemoration 1696-1896 (PDF). Philip Green (London); H. Rawson & Co. (Manchester). p. 141.
  4. ^ Schiller, F. C. S. (1886). "Nature Versus Natural Selection: an Essay on Organic Evolution by Charles Clement Coe". The Philosophical Review. 5 (3): 437. JSTOR 2175511.
  5. ^ a b "Nature Versus Natural Selection: An Essay on Organic Evolution by Charles Clement Coe". The Lancet. 2: 791–792. 1895.
  6. ^ Thomson, J. Arthur (1896). "Nature Versus Natural Selection: An Essay on Organic Evolution by Charles Clement Coe". International Journal of Ethics. 7 (1): 132. JSTOR 2375400.
  7. ^ Pearce, Trevor. (2020). Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. p. 203. ISBN 978-0226720081
  8. ^ Hardman, Malcolm. (2017). Global Dilemmas: Imperial Bolton-le-Moors from the Hungry Forties to the Death of Leverhulme. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. p. 207. ISBN 978-1611479034

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