Charles Clement Coe | |
---|---|
Born | 8 February 1830 |
Died | 1 April 1921 |
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]