Alfred Wallace Discovers Evolution

I'll just mention that a review covering a couple books on Alfred Russel Wallace (Nature, v. 431, 7 Oct. 2004, p. 630) has some interesting material.

It notes that Wallace's "flash of insight" about natural selection as the "mechanism" by which "organisms must have evolved from earlier forms" came to him while he was "Lying ill with fever." Evolution or 'species transmutation' had been on his mind for 13 years, and three years before this bout of fever in 1858, he'd published an argument for evolution.

He'd also written to Darwin on occasion, but "Unknown to Wallace, Darwin had in fact discovered natural selection some 20 years earlier." Darwin, however, was keeping his "heretical theory" under wraps while, under the nagging of Charles Lyell, writing a giant book to make his case. Realizing the essay Wallace had sent him would give Wallace the claim to priority if published, Darwin "was thrown into a state of confusion and despair."

Lyell and Joseph Hooker got together and arranged (without Wallace knowing) for "an abstract of an unpublished manuscript" written earlier by Darwin to be "read at a meeting of the Linnean Society" along with Wallace's essay. When published together, Darwin's little abstract, dated to when it was originally written in a letter to Asa Gray, was arranged first. Topped off with his book "On the Origin of Species" (just an abstract of the huge work he never did complete) a year or two later, and with men like Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley backing him, Darwin got a lock on the fame (or infamy) of having discovered evolution in the common misconception.

As with Darwin, Wallace's education was not the best "(he left school aged 13)." He did a lot of field work (collecting) and eventually wrote a lot of books. One of these new books about him describes his "forays into spiritualism, socialism, antivaccinationism, and other unorthodox" movements.

I just thought I'd...uh... just mention that...

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump