1 Edited Transcript of a Talk at the Symposium 'Wallace and Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection 150 Years On

1 Edited transcript of a talk at the symposium 'Wallace and Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection 150 years on - current views', hosted by the Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, 11 July, 2008 (the proceedings of the symposium are to be found at http://www.rsbs.anu.edu.au/WallaceDarwin/index.php) A Trumpery Affair How Wallace stimulated Darwin to publish and be damned Ian Cowan On July the first, one hundred and fifty Next, there are the two eminent friends years ago, a theory was unveiled to a of Darwin: Sir Charles Lyell, author of small select audience in London that Principles of Geology, populariser of profoundly affects the way many of us the doctrine of uniformitarianism, and think about ourselves today. Let us "one of the brightest ornaments of the resurrect the drama of that occasion nineteenth century;” 2 and Joseph and the events that surrounded it. Dalton Hooker, the leading botanist of his day, assistant to his father, Sir The actors are four. First among three William Jackson Hooker, Director of equals, chronically unwell Charles the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Darwin - the antithesis of his ebullient, Hooker, like Darwin, had made a long worldly, polymath grandfather, voyage of exploration by sea: on HMS Erasmus - is working on his “big Erebus with Captain Ross’s expedition book” in Down House, Kent. It is to the South Magnetic Pole from 1831 twenty-two years since he returned to 1836. He is completing the Flora from his voyage on the Beagle; sixteen Tasmaniae, the third great work since he had allowed himself "the deriving from his botanical studies satisfaction of writing a very brief during that expedition. abstract of my theory in pencil in thirty-five pages,” to be enlarged two years later, in 1844, into one of 189 pages 1. But he has not yet published anything on the subject of evolution. Sir Charles Lyell Joseph Dalton Hooker Last, almost 8,000 miles away, Alfred Russel Wallace, a lone, little known, self-employed collector of natural history specimens, first in the Amazon and now in the Malay Archipelago, "the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise,” is recovering from malaria in Ternate, a volcanic pimple in the Moluccas, a Spice Island, for centuries the source of the world trade Charles Darwin c. 1854 in cloves. 2 the foot of civilised man had never trod. There was the country of the cassowary and the tree-kangaroo, and those dark forests produced the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth - the varied species of Birds of Paradise.” 6 His essay, trans-shipped in Batavia, proceeds to Singapore. The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company transports it to Colombo, and thence to Suez. It goes on by train to Alexandria, by ship again to Marseilles, overland to Paris, and by boat-train to London. When it arrives at Down House, Wallace is settled in the village of Dorey, "fairly established Mount Gamalama, the volcano that as the only European inhabitant of the dominates the island of Ternate. vast island of New Guinea." For the Eleven years earlier, after a day in the time being we may leave him there. It British Museum bemused by the huge will be another four months before he numbers of beetles and butterflies on learns what had befallen his “Ternate display, Wallace had written to Henry Essay”. Walter Bates, soon to be his It is now early summer in England. But companion on the voyage to the the atmosphere in Down House is Amazon, "I begin to feel rather gloomy. Two of Charles' and Emma's dissatisfied with a mere local children are ill, the infant Charles collection; little is to be learnt by it. I Waring mortally so. And suddenly, should like to take some one family to Darwin is struck by the fear that his study thoroughly with a view to the theory, his theory, conceived so long theory of the origin of species. " 3 ago and nurtured in secrecy, is also to Now, in Ternate, still feverish, an idea be taken from him. comes to him, as all ideas seem to do, "in a flash." 4,5 He sets it out in the form of a publishable essay, "On the Tendency of Species to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type", and posts it, together with a covering letter, to Charles Darwin, Down House, Kent. The packet leaves on the Dutch inter- island mail steamer in March, 1858. Wallace himself embarks on a trading schooner, the Hester Helena, for his Downe House, as it is today "long-wished for voyage to the mainland of New Guinea." Soon he is He had been warned. Beginning with a looking “with intense interest on those request for specimens, he had already rugged mountains, retreating ridge corresponded with Wallace and learned behind ridge into the interior, where something of his interest in evolution. 3 Moreover the “Ternate Essay” was not Now Darwin writes to Lyell, “Some the first fruit of Wallace’s thoughts on year or so ago, you recommended me that subject. In February 1855, while to read a paper by Wallace in the the guest of Sir James Brooke, the Annals, which had interested you & as “White Rajah” of Sarawak, he had I was writing to him, I knew this would written what became known as the please him much, so I told him. He has “Sarawak Essay.” 7 Published later that today sent me the enclosed & asked me year, it had impressed Sir Charles to forward it to you. It seems to me Lyell and given him the premonition well worth reading. Your words have that Wallace was hard on Darwin’s come true with a vengeance that I heels. It argues that, “Every Species should be forestalled. You said this has come into existence coincident when I explained to you here very both in space and time with a pre- briefly my views of “Natural existing closely allied species;” and Selection” depending on the Struggle likens phylogeny to a tree, “a for existence. I never saw a more complicated branching of the lines of striking coincidence; if Wallace had affinity, as intricate as the twigs of a my MS sketch written out in 1842, he gnarled oak or the vascular system of could not have made a better short the human body…the stem and main abstract! Even his terms now stand as branches being represented by extinct Heads of my Chapters.” He is in no species of which we have no doubt as to the proper course of action: knowledge, while a vast mass of limbs “Please return me the MS, which he and boughs and minute twigs and does not say he wishes me to publish, scattered leaves is what we have to but I shall, of course, write to him at place in order.” The paucity of the once and offer to send [it] to any fossil record and the significance of journal.” Darwin cannot refrain from vestigial organs are discussed. There lamenting the emotional cost: “So all are speculations on geographical my originality, whatever it may speciation, including that in the amount to, will be smashed....” Galapagos Islands. This last must have enhanced Lyell’s concern on Darwin’s But Darwin does not write to Wallace behalf. The following year, he urged at once. Instead, a week later, he writes Darwin to publish at least “some small again to Lyell. Honour is the problem. fragment of your data, pigeons if so It will be cited five times before you please & so out with the theory & matters are resolved. “I am very very let it take date & be cited & be sorry to trouble you, busy as you are, understood.” 8 “I rather hate the idea in so merely personal an affair; but if of writing for priority,” Darwin you will give me your deliberate replied. That was not the only reason opinion, you will do me as great a for his reluctance. Many years earlier, service as ever man did, for I have in 1844, when first apprising Hooker entire confidence in your judgment and of his theory, he had remarked that, “it honour...” Then comes a plan of action. is like confessing a murder.” Of what “There is nothing in Wallace’s sketch or of whom one might ask: his own which is not written out much fuller in respectability or the human soul? It my sketch copied in 1844, & read by was probably both. Nevertheless, at Hooker some dozen years ago. About a Lyell’s behest, Darwin set about year ago I sent a short sketch of which writing what he described as a “sketch” I have a copy of my views …. to Asa of his views. By the time Wallace’s Gray [the leading botanist in the letter from Ternate arrives, the U.S.A. and a friend of Darwin], so that “sketch” has become “my big book,” I could most truly say & prove that I and comprises some million words. 9 take nothing from Wallace. I should be 4 extremely glad now to publish a sketch Piccadilly. There, at a meeting on the of my general views in about a dozen first of July, the Secretary of the pages or so. But I cannot persuade Society reads a paper, the authorship of myself that I can do so honourably…. which is attributed jointly to Charles This is a trumpery affair [my Darwin Esq., FRS, FLS, and FGS, and emphasis] to trouble you with, but you Alfred Russel Wallace, Esq.

Load more