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Samuel Butler’s letter “Darwin among the Machines” (The Press, Christchurch, 13 June 1863) concludes that every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species, stopping the mechanical development that the letter says is producing humanity’s successors. Copy claim link
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Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source
Date 1863-06-13 · publication Records dated 1863 → Role Contesting, Earliest located Register (kind of text) Satirical Engagement Engages a premise. Gives a reason against advancing mechanical development: that it produces machines that will hold supremacy over humans. Scope and limits Concerns the machinery of an 1863 letter, not present computing systems; recorded as satirical, as the dataset’s other record of the letter is. The same passage is recorded on W02. Earliest located means the earliest text found by the collection’s searches, the cross-family re-check of 2026-11-02 and the archive retrieval of 2026-11-02, not a first statement.
The evidence 01 primary source Supports the claim
Darwin among the Machines ↗ The Press (Christchurch) · 1863-06-13
Archived copy, captured 2026-08-26: Darwin among the Machines ↗
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Source excerpt “Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.” Location in source Page 1, paragraph beginning “Our opinion is that war to the death”, sentence 2; image segment 5 of 6
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-11-02
Source details and check notes Authors Cellarius (Samuel Butler) Version Papers Past article text (marked user-corrected) in the Internet Archive capture of 2026-08-26; quoted passages compared with the archived column images of the printed page (captured 2024-06-12). Papers Past returned a bot-protection page to scripted requests. A later check on 2026-10-06 verified the article text but could not retrieve the column images (HTTP 403). Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-10-06 Language English (en) Archive copy Open archived copy, captured 2026-08-26: Darwin among the Machines ↗ . Captured 59609 days after the recorded publication date. An archive copy shows only what the archive retrieved on 2026-08-26. It does not prove what the page said earlier, and it can differ from the copy checked on 2026-10-06.Attribution The Press (Christchurch), 13 June 1863, via Papers Past (National Library of New Zealand). Reuse Public domain (published 1863; the author died in 1902). Papers Past: no known copyright (New Zealand).. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each) under Selekoa’s quotation policy. Public-domain text. Check notes Quotation as given verbatim by the archive retrieval of 2026-11-02 (research/archive-fetch-held-2026-11-02/report.md, role 122), which read it in the raw replay of the capture of 26 August 2026 (timestamp 20260826113039; SHA-256 d1a56b294d108dbd09a5661222660a98879ddffe250520974d89d01029bac27d of the response body as served, before gzip decoding). That retrieval, by a model of another family, is the cross-family read of this passage; the session applying the decision could not reach the archive and took the passage from the report. The quoted passage was compared with the archived column images of the printed page (captured 12 June 2024), not only with the Papers Past transcription. The cross-family re-check of 2026-11-02 (review/earliest-located-recheck-2026-11-02.md, role 122) proposed this text for this proposition and role. Admitted by the maintainer’s decision of 2026-11-02. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Machine-checked . Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
Relation. A passage of the document disputes the proposition or a premise it depends on. The record documents the text’s position, not who is right.
Date. The Press (Christchurch), vol. III, issue 192, p. 1, 13 June 1863, as Papers Past’s issue record gives it; the issue masthead was not inspected.
Record ID ht-w08-butler-1863-darwin-among-the-machines