THE SECRET VIOLIN SHOP's WORKSHOP
To enquire about violins for sale email drmikesutton@hotmail.com
Dr Mike Sutton
I am retired as a Home Office, London, criminologist and senior university academic. For many years I have been restoring and collecting antique violins. I am now an Associate Artist at City Arts, Nottingham where I continue to undertake all violin, viola and cello repairs completely free of charge for Nottingham Music Service, The Music Hub, Nottingham and the Robin Hood Youth Orchestra.
The Secret Violin Shop, founded in 2025 blends my interests in violin restoration and collecting with a lifelong ambition to start and enjoy working as an innovative artist and artisan in my own small arts and craft based business.
Mike Sutton, Associate Artist, City Arts Nottingham
Coming soon "The Violin Soundpost Crack" fallacy
Towards a science of veracity
Understanding and reducing the power of fallacies, myths and lies.
Dysology is the study of orthodox bias, academic blind spots, irrationality, pseudo scholarship and fraud influencing bad social science research, bad science, bad policymaking, quackery, counterknowledge, 'voodoo histories', 'voodoo criminology', 'flat earth news', unevidenced claptrap, truisms dressed up as causalities, de-bunked beliefs, and other ignorance.
The Dysology Hypothesis
Letting scholars get away with publishing fallacies and myths signals to others the existence of topics where guardians of good scholarship might be less capable than elsewhere. Such dysology then serves as an allurement to poor scholars to disseminate existing myths and fallacies and to create and publish their own in these topic areas, which leads to a downward spiral of diminishing veracity on particular topics.
Supermyths
When respected skeptics deploy a myth to bust another, or else to support one, they create deeply entrenched fallacies known as supermyths.
The Darwin Supermyth is bust
It is a proven fallacy that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace (1858/59) were each first to independently conceive the full theory of evolution by natural selection. This is because top Darwin experts such as Richard Dawkins and Darwin medal winners Sir Gavin de Beer and Ernst Mayr (to name just a few) write that Patrick Matthew (1831) was in fact first into print with the entire theory. The myth that Darwin should have priority for Matthew's prior published theory is based on the falsehood knowingly spread by Darwin that no single person read Matthew's theory. In fact Darwin's and Wallace's influencers and their influencers, among others also newly discovered, had read and cited Matthew's book. For these facts and many more in this story read the book Science Fraud.
More than one artificial intelligence system finds Charles Darwin guilty of knowingly lying about Matthew's (1831) prior readership. Hence the Supermyth of Darwin being an honest originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection is busted by the empirical data and logical reasoning based on it.
See the empirical data on this topic Here
Robert Merton (1968) coined the term “The Matthew Effect in Science” to explain by biblical analogy how famous scientists are sometimes credited more than those who are lesser known but more deserving. Leading Darwin scholars have admitted Patrick Matthew (1831) originated the theory he uniquely called the “natural process of selection”, which Charles Darwin (1859) re-named “process of natural selection”. The current consensus among many Darwin scholars is that Matthew cannot have priority for his theory because he failed to influence anyone. According to Darwin and all Darwin scholars thereafter, neither he nor anyone else read Matthew’s theory before 1859. However, new research has shown, contrary to what has been taught, that Matthew’s book in fact was read and cited by at least 30 scholars before Alfred Wallace’s and Darwin’s replications of 1858 and 1859. These included (i) Robert Chambers (Wallace’s admitted greatest influencer) who met and corresponded with Darwin pre-1858, (ii) John Loudon, an associate of Darwin’s associates, and (iii) Prideaux John Selby, Chief Editor of Wallace’s 1855 Sarawak paper on evolution of species. With a focus on the story of Matthew, Darwin, and Wallace, this chapter addresses the ethics of taking the step to reveal errors of fact in the publication record that have been used to misinform history.
Read the book chapter by the criminologist Dr Mike Sutton and psychologist Professor Mark Griffiths HERE
SupermythsWhen respected skeptics deploy a myth to bust another myth, or else to support one, they create deeply entrenched fallacies known as supermyths.
Science Fraud, the book.
Readers of this website can buy a copy of Science Fraud at a 40% discount off the current retail price. The book provides all the independently verifiable data, supported by academic references to sources, that proves both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace plagiarised the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Visit the publisher's websiteCurtis Pressand use the code suttonsites24 to get this deal at checkout before paying.
Visit PatrickMatthew.com for evidence of Darwin's plagiarizing of a prior published theory
Felson's paradigm of crime opportunity is a mere description of the data of a successfully completed crime or completed attempt.
Descriptions can not explain themselves. For that, we need a testable hypothesis that is either right or wrong. Felson's theory s a mere truism masquerading as causality.
Good explanations in science, including the social sciences, are those that are capable of being disproven and are hard to vary if so disconfirmed.
The myth that opportunity is a cause of crime
Many criminologists, 'crime scientists', national and local government departments and police forces believe that Marcus Felson's notion of crime opportunity shows that such 'opportunity' is a cause of crime. In fact Felson’s causal notion of crime opportunity is simply a truism masquerading as causality.
The Crime Opporttunity Myth has been bust in the following peer reviewed publication:
Free peer-to-peer articles on this subject can be accessed here:
- Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief: Busting the Myth that Opportunity is a Cause of Crime (Here)
- Contingency Makes or Breaks the Thief: Introducing the Perception Contingency Process Hypothesis (Here)
- Crime Opportunity and the Art of War and Driving: Thieves and Dealers in Stolen Goods are Like Warmongering Invaders and Motorists at a Juncture of Appropriate Circumstances for Aggressive Action (Here)
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Routine Activity Theory’s ‘Mindless’ Chemistry Meme Masquerades as a Theory of Crime Causation (Here)
Where crime is concerned, a potential offender can have a pre-crime accident, get injured or otherwise thwarted during a criminal attempt. The capabilities of any guardian can never be fixed (known) in advance of a crime happening. Even the Little Piggy in the house made of sticks might have leaped out of his demolished home at the very last minute and poked the Big Bad Wolf in the eye with a broken twig. Check out the hundreds of newspaper stories of have-a-go heroes (archived) if you doubt this. My criticism along these lines is included by my colleague Roger Hopkins Burke 2014 within the pages of his excellent best-selling text book "Explaining Criminological Theory" - pp.69-70). Similarly, Critical Criminologists Jeff Ferrell, Keith Haywood and Jock Young provide criminologists with my no punches pulled criticism of what's wrong with RATortunity (Ferrell, Hayward and Young 2015, pp 69-70) in the second edition of their excellent book Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Furthermore, as yet another editorially peer-reviewed and in-print source for those looking for scholarly sources to cite these ideas, my original explanation for why the RAT notion of opportunity (Ratortunity) is a mere truism masquerading as causality is published in a peer-reviewed essay in the Springer Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice (here).
Marcus Felson's Routine Activity Theory (RAT) crime opportunity theorem is wrong because it does not represent an opportunity.
A barrier to more effective crime reduction knowledge progression has been thrown up by two criminology theories/approaches: Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) and Routine Activities Theory (RAT). The problem is caused by the policy oriented popularity of SCP and RAT that is likely due in no small part to their simplistic and easily comprehendible, compelling, yet ultimately illogical weird focus upon describing the data of crime in ever more complex ways so that simple truisms about the scenes of successfully completed crimes and failed attempts (crimes of attempting to commit a crime) are placed in the spotlight and presented as a root cause of crime. Felson's simplistic notion of opportunity is, in fact,merely the very data that a true testable theory of causation could explain. Click here to read my online article that explains why.
My explanation for why the RAT notion of opportunity (Ratortunity) is a mere truism
masquerading as causality is published in a peer reviewed essay (here). An earlier, very detailed, open access peer-to-peer article can be read here.
Felson's versus Sutton's Crime Opportunity Explanations.
A useful blog using the Wolf and the Three Little Pigs as an explanatory analogy can be read here
Supermyths are myths about myths
Supermyths have very specific components:
1. The creation of a fallacy, myth or error by an orthodox expert.
2. Being used by another expert who in turn promotes it as being ‘true, and whilst still thinking that it is true either promotes it as a good example of the need to be healthily skeptical of bad scholarship, or else:
3. compounds the myth by using it as a premise upon which to build one or more supporting myths.
Articles on my spinach mythbust
My Mythbusting articles on spinach and iron
Spinach, Iron and Popeye: Ironic lessons from biochemistry and history on the importance of healthy eating, healthy scepticism and adequate citation (Sutton 2010) (here and here and also here)
The Spinach, Popeye, Iron, Decimal Error Myth is Finally Busted (Sutton, M. 2010) (here)
Did Popeye Really Increase Spinach Consumption and Production by 33 percent in 1936? (here) (Original Best Thinking blog post archived in full here)
SPIN@GE USA Beware of the Bull: The United States Department of Agriculture is Spreading Bull about Spinach, Iron and Vitamin C (Sutton 2011) (Here)
Spin@ge II: Does the United States Department of Agriculture’s Publication of Spuriofacts Have its Origins in a Perverse Scientific Paper Written in 1937? (Sutton, M. June 2012) (here and archived here)
How the spinach, Popeye and iron decimal point error myth was finally bust (Sutton 2010) (Here and also here)
I am delighted to see the importance of the Spinach Supermyth, which I (Dr Mike Sutton) discovered in 2009, is now positively affirmed as a problem in the British Medical Journal in 2023. The free PDF of that important article is available to download HERE The BMJ page on it is HERE (archived HERE)
Visit Supermyths.com to keep up to date with the latest supermyths discovered.
Click HERE to access historic dysology pages
This website is owned and operated by Dr Mike Sutton