Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and lots of rejoicing is taking place around the world. And it should be celebrated – The Origin of Species fundamentally changed the way humans understand life on this planet. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but it’s frustrating to me how many times I’ve heard people refer to Darwin as the “inventor” of the theory of evolution.
He didn’t invent the theory of evolution.
His ideas didn’t spring fully-formed out of his skull like Athena, they developed over time, based on the work and comments of others. Darwin himself would have been the first to point this out, and I don’t think it cheapens his work at all to be reminded of this. Based on the work of others, he developed a testable hypothesis, and then gathered data to confirm or refute it. In so doing, he established 2 significant facts: The theory of evolution holds up quite well based on all available evidence, and the scientific method is capable of reaping very significant results.
But Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his means of establishing evidence for it weren’t unique to him, and this is another oversight in the current celebration: It ignores one of the other great characters of this era, Alfred Russel Wallace.
Wallace is mostly known (if he’s known at all) as “The Father of Biogeography”. As the story goes, Wallace came to his own theory of evolution independent of Darwin, based on his observations of flora and fauna in what is now Indonesia, where he was working as a specimen collector. He noticed that the organisms on the archipelago from Bali west bore a striking similarity, while the organisms to the east bore a significant but different similarity. This line is now known as the Wallace Line. It’s an excellent illustration of how evolution works: On one side of the line, life evolved from a common set of Asian species (tigers, rhinos, etc); on the other side of the line, life evolved from Australian species. They had adapted to a similar environment (the distance between Bali and Lombok is less than 18 miles at its narrowest), but were quite different from each other based on their evolutionary roots.
After making this key observation, Wallace wrote a letter to Darwin (whom he’d been corresponding with for about 2 years), sent along a copy of his just-finished essay “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type”, and went back to collecting frogs.
Darwin, who had spent the better part of two decades testing out his theory of evolution, was in the uncomfortable position of being delivered a paper that summarized most of his ideas before he had published them. (As an interesting aside, although we think of the visit to the Galapagos as his “AHA!” moment, Darwin was actually trying to establish evidence of variation through domestication, not geography) Previous to receiving that paper, Darwin had been at work on what was to be a massive tome presenting all of his accumulated data as well as the theory itself. The scope of that book was huge, and ultimately probably unrealistic. Since Darwin wanted the credit for establishing the theory of evolution (credit he deserves), colleagues of his had one of his essays on the subject and Wallace’s paper read together at the Linean Society (Darwin was in mourning over his son, so others attended to his affairs).
Since Wallace was still in Indonesia, nobody bothered to tell him until well after his paper had been read. The next year, Darwin rushed out the relatively slim tract, On the Origin of Species, and fame ensued. Wallace was acknowledged, but regarded as something of a footnote.
I think the fact that Wallace needed to work for a living (and the stratification of British society at the time) has a lot to do with why most people don’t know who Wallace is. Darwin was a celebrated member of the scientific community from a good family, Wallace was an amateur naturalist who collected specimens in far-flung parts of the world to make ends meet. The existing scientific community was committed to seeing Darwin be The Man, and had been setting him up as such for years. For some bug collector to bumble in and snatch away that prize at the last minute was simply unacceptable.
In the end this was probably a good thing. While Darwin initially had no interest in discussing the evolution of human beings (the subject was too controversial, and he had no interest in fighting that fight), Wallace did. And Wallace was convinced that evolution couldn’t account for math, art, and higher consciousness generally, so therefore a divine influence was responsible. Wallace was a Spiritualist, a popular cult at the time, that believed in a single god, but also that the spirits of the dead could be contacted. He believed in phrenology. He was, in short, committed to several unscientific ideas. Imagine a world where the theory of evolution had been intertwined with the divine, the world in which Darwin had gone down his domestication rabbit hole and Wallace had established the theory of natural selection. Euch.
Ultimately, Wallace was a keen observer, and Darwin was a scientist. While I do wish there was more discussion of Wallace in the celebrations going on today, I’m glad he isn’t the one being mistakenly referred to as the inventor of evolution.