Charles Clement Coe Explained

Charles Clement Coe
Birth Date:	8 February 1830
Birth Place:	King's Lynn
Death Date:	1 April 1921
Death Place:	Bournemouth
Occupation:	Unitarian minister

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

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 Lancet journal.^[5]

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

Publications

• Outlines of a Christian Faith (1862)
• The Law of Parsimony and the Argument of Design (1882)
• General Gordon in a New Light: The Cause of War, and the Advocate of Peace (1885)^[8]
• Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism (1889)
• Nature Versus Natural Selection: An Essay on Organic Evolution (1895)

Notes and References

1. Web site: Rev Charles Clement Coe . Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society . https://web.archive.org/web/20151001184100/http://www2.le.ac.uk/hosted/litandphil/presidents/president-profiles/1862-rev-charles-clement-coe-1862-63 . 2015-10-01.
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20220627115354/https://unitarianhistory.org.uk/ministerobit4.html "Obituaries of Unitarian Ministers"
3. Book: Bank Street Chapel . Bank Street Chapel, Bolton, Bi-centenary Commemoration 1696-1896 . Philip Green (London); H. Rawson & Co. (Manchester) . 1896 . 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. 2175511.
5. 1895. Nature Versus Natural Selection: An Essay on Organic Evolution by Charles Clement Coe. The Lancet. 2. 791–792.
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. 2375400.
7. Pearce, Trevor. (2020). Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. p. 203.
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.