11.20.05

Wallace’s 100 days

Posted in Evolution at 4:37 pm by nemo

FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED DAYS, until his manuscript reached Down, Alfred Russel Wallace stood alone in the world as, in our time, Neil Armstrong stood on the moon in 1969, and Charles A. Lindbergh sat, isolated in the cabin of his tiny airplane over the vastness of the mid-Atlantic less than a generation earlier. Wallace was the first individual in history to set out a complete view of man as a creature of evolution, descended from a closely allied species in both time and space, his descent and diversity modified by the process of natural se- lection. Unknown to the thirty-five-year-old Wallace, this was the supreme moment of his life. There were no trumpets, no flags, no headlines, nothing to show for it except the new way he looked at the living world around him.

From Brackman’s A Delicate Arrangement

As the Natural History exhibit gets underway it might be nice to recall the sordid history of the beginnings of Darwinism, in the tale as recounted by Arnold Brackman, in his A Delicate Arrangement. This was follow by Brooks’ Just Before the Origin, and then Michael Shermer’s damage control In Darwin’s Shadow. The public deserves to grasp that it was Wallace not Darwin who first proposed a theory of (micro) evolution, and to be aware of the conspiracy surrounding Wallace’s contribution, and the rapid composition of Origin by Darwin, in the wake of the famous Ternate letter. The work of Brackman is a first rate investigation, although the issue of whether Darwin copped the theory of divergence from Wallace is perhaps unknowable at this point. Whatever the case, the record of deception, and missing letters, for whatever reason, exhudes a bad odor to this day, a preposterous situation amid all the peans for Darwin. So from the moment Wallace mailed his famous essay from Ternate, to the time of its receipt by Darwin, we have Wallace’s 100 days.

If, as the record makes plain, Wallace was a copilot on the epic flight toward a revolutionary understanding of the development of the human species, why is he unknown today? The question is compounded by evidence that Wallace, not Darwin, first wrote out the complete theory of the origin and divergence of species by natural selection-the theory which is today universally ascribed to Darwin.
The explanation for Wallace’s disappearance from history is basically
!threefold. In part, he was the victim of a conspiracy by the scientific aristocracy of the day and was robbed in 1858 of his priority in the proclaiming of the theory. “This delicate arrangement,” Huxley’s son Leonard termed the incident. “This delicate situation,” Darwin characterized it in a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the great botanist and intimate friend of Darwin.
In part, the explanation for Wallace’s disappearance from history is also found in his relatively lowly social status at a time-the Victorian period-of which rampant snobbery was a hallmark.
And in part, Wallace’s subsidence sterns from the nature of his own character. He turned the other cheek.
What follows is the largely untold story of the conspiracy against Wallace and its cover-up, and the story of Alfred Russel Wallace himself. It is also the tale of the strange relationship between Wallace and Darwin. For without Wallace there would have been no Darwin. And without Darwin, Wallace’s story may have had a different ending.

From Brackman again.

A delicate arrangement: The strange case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (Unknown Binding)
by Arnold C Brackman

Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution (Paperback)
by John Langdon Brooks
In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace : A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (Hardcover)
by Michael Shermer