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Everyone knows the name Charles Darwin.
He was the father of evolution, the first
to come up with that whole natural selection,
survival-of-the-fittest thing.
Right?
Actually, Darwin doesn’t deserve all the
credit.
While Darwin was puzzling over the beaks of
Galapagos finches, another naturalist working
in what’s now Indonesia was reaching the
exact same conclusions.
His name was Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin gathered the observations that led
to the theory of natural selection while traveling
the world on the H.M.S. Beagle in the 1830s.
After he returned to England, he spent decades
developing his ideas and slowly working on
a book about them.
Wallace, who was born in 1823, was 14 years
younger than Darwin.
He was also less wealthy and less well-connected.
While Darwin was methodically shaping the
theories that would make him famous, Wallace
was doing some globetrotting of his own, studying
natural history in South America
and the Malay Archipelago.
In 1858 he wrote a letter to Darwin -- already
a well-known scientist at the time -- outlining
in detail his ideas about how species changed
through time.
Needless to say, Darwin was pretty shocked
to get a letter from some young nobody who’d
come to the same conclusions about evolution
that he had.
Darwin had been working on this book for a
long time and he didn’t want Wallace to
publish first and get all the credit, so he
and his friends quickly threw together a meeting
of the Linnean Society of London, an association
of biologists.
In the meeting, the secretary of the society
presented the ideas of both men at the same time.
Wallace wasn’t even at the meeting, because
he couldn’t exactly commute from the remote
islands in the Indian Ocean where he was working
at the time.
But … neither was Darwin, because his one
and a half year old son had died just a few
days beforehand.
Only around 30 people actually showed up at
the Linnean Society to hear the papers be
presented, and no one seemed to realize the
significance of what they were hearing at
the time.
So why is Darwin so famous today while Wallace
is so obscure?
Well, for one thing, Darwin had been working
on his theory for decades.
By a year after the Linnean Society meeting,
he was ready to publish a pretty comprehensive
book he’d written on evolution, On The Origin
of Species.
You might’ve heard of it.
The book made a huge splash and everyone pretty
much forgot about that other weird young guy
no one had ever heard of.
Remember, Darwin was already pretty famous
-- he’d written a wildly popular account
of his travels called The Voyage of the Beagle
over a decade before.
It took Wallace another decade to publish
his own book on natural selection, and by
that time the theory was already widely known
as “Darwinism.”
And when Wallace published another book on
natural selection later on,
he put the word “Darwinism” in the book’s title.
That probably didn’t help.
As the years passed, Darwin and Wallace had
a polite but complicated relationship.
Wallace believed that natural selection couldn’t
explain human intelligence on its own, arguing
that some sort of higher power must be involved.
Darwin and his friends didn’t agree.
But, when Wallace ran into money troubles
later in life, Darwin helped arrange for him
to get a government pension in recognition
of his scientific contributions.
Today, Wallace is mostly just a historical
footnote for non-scientists.
An effort to raise money to build a bronze
statue of him to commemorate the 100th anniversary
of his death in 2013 only made it halfway
to its goal.
But poor Wallace hasn’t been totally forgotten.
He’s considered to be the father of biogeography
-- the study of how species are distributed
across the planet.
His observations of how Asian and Australian
species intermingled in Indonesia and New Guinea
kickstarted scientific interest in
how plants and animals end up living in specific places.
The Wallace Line -- the surprisingly sharp
boundary between islands with plants and animals
more like those of Asia and plants and animals
more like those of Australia
still bears his name.
And in the end, they did make that statue
of him, which was donated to
London’s Natural History Museum.
Maybe it’s just as well that Darwin’s
the one who got permanently associated with
the theory of natural selection because “Darwinism”
is a lot easier to say that “Wallace-ism.”
But the contributions of Darwin’s lesser-known
frenemy Wallace still deserve to be remembered.
Not least because he maybe inspired Darwin
to get going on finishing the book.
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