Alfred Russel Wallace and natural selection: the real story.

Abstract

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was a largely self-educated British naturalist, who co-published the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin in 1858, fifteen months before Darwin’s book Origin of Species was released. Some have suggested that Wallace’s independent discovery of natural selection in Indonesia in February of that year was merely fortuitous, but in fact it was the culmination of a concerted 10 year personal quest to understand how evolutionary change takes place. Although Wallace was showered with prestigious honours and awards for his great discovery, and in spite of the fact that he became one of the famous people in the world towards the end of his life, his intellectual legacy was rapidly overshadowed by Charles Darwin’s after his death.

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Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace and the Wallacea
Wakatobi - Indonesia, 10–13 November 2013
120 TAPROBANICA VOL. 07: NO. 03
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE AND NATURAL SELECTION:
THE REAL STORY
George W. Beccaloni*
* Department of Life Sciences, The Natural History Museum, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD,
United Kingdom; E-mail: g.beccaloni@nhm.ac.uk
Abstract
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was a largely self-educated British naturalist, who co-
published the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin in 1858, fifteen
months before Darwin‘s book Origin of species was released. Some have suggested that
Wallace‘s independent discovery of natural selection in Indonesia in February of that year
was merely fortuitous, but in fact it was the culmination of a concerted 10 year personal quest
to understand how evolutionary change takes place. Although Wallace was showered with
prestigious honours and awards for his great discovery, and in spite of the fact that he became
one of the most famous people in the world towards the end of his life, his intellectual legacy
was rapidly overshadowed by Charles Darwin‘s after his death.
Key words: Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Linnean Society, Malay Archipelago
Evolution of an evolutionist
Alfred Russel Wallace OM, LLD, DCL,
FRS, FLS was born in Llanbadoc near Usk,
Monmouthshire, England (now part of
Wales) on January 8th, 1823 to a middle
class English couple, Thomas Vere and
Mary Ann. He was the eighth of nine
children, three of whom did not survive to
adulthood. The family had moved to
Llanbadoc from London a few years earlier
in order to reduce their living costs.
Although Alfred‘s father had trained as a
solicitor, he had never worked, thanks to
inherited wealth, but his finances became
increasingly strained as his family grew. In
1828 when Wallace was five, he and his
family left Monmouthshire and moved to
Hertford, England, and it was there, at
Hale's Grammar School, that he received
his only formal education.
TAPROBANICA, ISSN 1800–427X. May, 2015. Vol. 07, No. 03: pp. 120–125.
© Research Center for Climate Change, University of Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia
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Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace and the Wallacea
Wakatobi - Indonesia, 10–13 November 2013
120 TAPROBANICA VOL. 07: NO. 03
Serious family financial problems forced
Wallace to leave school aged only fourteen
and a few months later he took a job as a
trainee land surveyor with his elder brother
William. This work involved extensive
travel in the English and Welsh countryside
and it was at this time that his interest in
natural history developed.
Whilst living in Neath, Wales, in 1845
Wallace read Robert Chambers'
anonymously published book Vestiges of
the natural history of creation (Chambers,
1844) and became fascinated by the
controversial idea that living things had
evolved from earlier forms. So interested in
the subject did he become that he suggested
to his close friend Henry Walter Bates, that
they travel to Amazonia to collect and
study animals with the aim of investigating
how evolution (then called species
transmutation) operates (see preface of
Bates, 1863). Duplicate specimens of the
animals they collected would fund the trip.
They left for Brazil in April 1848, but
although Wallace made many important
discoveries during his four years in the
Amazon Basin, he did not manage to solve
the great ‗mystery of mysteries‘ of how life
evolves.
The Malay Archipelago (1854–1862)
Wallace returned to England in October
1852, after surviving a disastrous
shipwreck in the mid-Atlantic which
destroyed all the thousands of natural
history specimens he had painstakingly
collected during the last two and most
interesting years of his trip. Undaunted, in
1854 he set off on another expedition, this
time to the Malay Archipelago (Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia and East Timor),
where he would spend eight years
travelling, collecting, writing, and thinking
deeply about evolution (Costa, 2013b,
2014). He visited every important island in
the archipelago and sent back 109700
insects, 7500 shells, 8050 bird skins, and
410 mammal and reptile specimens
(Wallace, 1869a), including probably more
than five thousand species new to science
(Beccaloni, 2013).
In Sarawak, Borneo, in February 1855,
Wallace produced one of the most
important papers written about evolution up
until that time (Costa, 2014; Wallace, 1855).
In it he proposed a ‗law‘ which stated that
―Every species has come into existence
coincident both in time and space with a
pre-existing closely allied species‖. He
described the affinities (relationships)
between species as being ―…as intricate as
the twigs of a gnarled oak or the vascular
system of the human body‖ with ―...the
stem and main branches being represented
by extinct species...‖ and the ―...vast mass
of limbs and boughs and minute twigs and
scattered leaves...‖ living species (Wallace,
1855). The eminent geologist Charles Lyell
(who was an anti-transmutationist at that
time) was so struck by Wallace‘s paper that
in November 1855, soon after reading it, he
was moved to initiate what grew into a
series of seven notebooks on the species
question (Wilson, 1970). Notes on
Wallace‘s paper fill the first pages of
Lyell's first notebook.
In April 1856 Lyell visited Charles Darwin
at his home, Down House in Kent, and
Darwin confided that for the past twenty
years he had been secretly working on a
theory (natural selection) which explained
how evolutionary change takes place. Not
long afterwards, Lyell sent Darwin a letter
urging him to publish before someone beat
him to it (he probably had Wallace in mind),
so in May 1856, Darwin, heeding this
advice, began to write a ‗sketch‘ of his
ideas for publication. Finding this
unsatisfactory, Darwin abandoned it in
about October 1856 and instead began
working on an extensive book on the
subject.
Wallace's greatest discovery
The idea of natural selection came to
Wallace during an attack of fever (probably
malaria) whilst he was on a remote
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Wakatobi - Indonesia, 10–13 November 2013
120 TAPROBANICA VOL. 07: NO. 03
Indonesian island in February 1858 (it is
unresolved whether this epiphany happened
on Ternate or neighbouring Halmahera, but
probably the latter). As soon as he had
sufficient strength, he wrote a detailed
essay explaining his theory and sent it
together with a covering letter to Darwin,
who he knew from earlier correspondence,
was deeply interested in the subject of
evolution.
Wallace asked Darwin to pass the essay on
to Lyell (who Wallace did not know), if
Darwin thought it sufficiently novel and
interesting. Darwin had mentioned in an
earlier letter to Wallace that Lyell had
found his 1855 paper noteworthy and
Wallace must have thought that Lyell
would be interested to learn about his new
theory, since it neatly explained the
evolutionary ‗law‘ which Wallace had
proposed in that paper1.
Darwin, having formulated natural
selection about 20 years earlier, was
horrified when he received Wallace‘s essay
and immediately wrote an anguished letter
to Lyell asking for advice on what he
should do. ―I never saw a more striking
coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S.
sketch written out in 1842 he could not
have made a better short abstract! ... So all
my originality, whatever it may amount to,
will be smashed.‖ he exclaimed (Darwin,
1858a). Lyell teamed up with another of
Darwin's close friends, botanist Joseph
Hooker, and rather than attempting to seek
Wallace's permission, they decided instead
to present his essay plus two excerpts from
Darwin‘s writings on the subject (which
had not been written with publication in
mind2) to a meeting of the Linnean Society
of London on July 1st 1858. The public
presentation of Wallace's essay took place
only 14 days after its arrival in England.
Darwin and Wallace's musings on natural
selection were published in the Linnean
Society‘s journal in August that year under
the title ―On the Tendency of Species to
Form Varieties; And on the Perpetuation of
Varieties and Species by Natural Means of
Selection‖ (Darwin & Wallace, 1858).
Darwin's contributions were placed before
Wallace's essay, thus emphasising his
priority to the idea3. Hooker had sent
Darwin the proofs to correct and had told
him to make any alterations he wanted4,
and although he made a large number of
changes to his part of the text (Burkhardt &
Smith, 1991), he chose not to alter Lyell
and Hooker‘s arrangement of his and
Wallace‘s contributions.
.
__________________________________________________________________________________
1 Wallace greatly admired Lyell's 1835 book Principles of geology, but strongly disagreed with Lyell's
creationist views. He had been systematically dismantling Lyell's arguments in both his unpublished
and published writings since the beginning of his expedition to the Malay Archipelago (Costa,
2013a,b, 2014).
2 These were an extract from Darwin‘s unpublished essay on evolution of 1844, plus the enclosure to a
letter dated 5th September [1857], which Darwin had written to the American botanist Asa Gray
(Darwin, 1857).
3 Publishing another person‘s work without their agreement was as unacceptable then as it is today.
Publishing someone‘s novel theory without their consent, prefixed by material designed to give
priority of the idea to someone else is ethically highly questionable: Wallace should have been
consulted first! Fortunately for Darwin and his supporters, Wallace appeared to be pleased by what
has been called the ‗delicate arrangement‘.
4 In a letter from Joseph Hooker to Darwin dated 13th and 15th July 1858 (Hooker, 1858), Hooker
stated ―I send the proofs from Linnæan Socy— Make any alterations you please...‖
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120 TAPROBANICA VOL. 07: NO. 03
Lyell and Hooker stated in their
introduction to the Darwin-Wallace paper
that ―…both authors… [have]…
unreservedly placed their papers in our
hands…‖ (Darwin & Wallace, 1858), but
this is patently untrue since Wallace had
said nothing about publication in the
covering letter he had sent to Darwin 5.
Wallace later grumbled that his essay
―…was printed without my knowledge and
of course without any correction of
proofs…‖ 6 (Wallace, 1869b).
As a result of this ethically questionable
episode (Rachels, 1986), Darwin stopped
work on his big book on evolution and
instead rushed to produce an ‗abstract‘ of
what he had written so far. This was
published fifteen months later in November
1859 as On the origin of species by means
of natural selection: a book which Wallace
later magnanimously remarked would
―…live as long as the 'Principia' of
Newton‖ (Wallace, 1860).
Fame and awards
In spite of the theory‘s traumatic birth,
Darwin and Wallace developed a genuine
admiration and respect for one another.
Wallace frequently stressed that Darwin
had a stronger claim to the idea of natural
selection than himself, and he even named
one of his most important books on the
subject Darwinism (1889)! Wallace spent
the rest of his long life explaining,
developing and defending natural selection,
as well as working on a very wide variety
of other (sometimes controversial) subjects.
He wrote more than 1000 articles and 22
books, including The Malay Archipelago
(1869a) and The Geographical Distribution
of Animals (1876). By the time of his death
in 1913, he was one of the world's most
famous people (Smith, 2014).
During Wallace‘s lifetime the theory of
natural selection was often referred to as
the Darwin-Wallace theory and the highest
possible honours were bestowed on him for
his role as its co-discoverer. These include
the Darwin–Wallace and Linnean Gold
Medals of the Linnean Society of London;
the Copley, Darwin and Royal Medals of
the Royal Society (Britain's premier
scientific body); and the Order of Merit
(awarded by the ruling Monarch as the
highest civilian honour of Great Britain). It
was only in the 20th Century that Wallace‘s
star dimmed while Darwin‘s burned ever
more brightly. So why did this happen?
Overshadowed by Darwin
Beccaloni (2009) proposed the following
explanation for why Wallace‘s fame
decreased markedly after his death: in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, natural
selection as an explanation for evolutionary
change became unpopular, with most
biologists adopting alternative theories such
as neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis, or the
mutation theory. It was only with the
modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s
and ‘40s that it became widely accepted
that natural selection is indeed the primary
driving force of evolution. By then,
however, the history of its discovery had
largely been forgotten and many wrongly
assumed that the idea had first been
published in Darwin‘s On the origin of
species. Thanks to the so-called ‗Darwin
Industry‘ of recent decades, Darwin‘s fame
has increased exponentially, eclipsing the
important contributions of his
contemporaries, like Wallace.
__________________________________________________________________________________
5 In a letter from Darwin to Charles Lyell dated 18th [June 1858], Darwin (1858a), who was referring
to Wallace's essay, says ―Please return me the M.S. [manuscript] which he does not say he wishes
me to publish...‖ and in a letter from Darwin to Lyell dated [25th June 1858], Darwin (1858b) states
that ―Wallace says nothing about publication...‖
6 That Wallace would have appreciated the opportunity to correct the proofs is evident from the
corrections he made to his personal copy of the published paper (Beccaloni, 2008).
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Wakatobi - Indonesia, 10–13 November 2013
120 TAPROBANICA VOL. 07: NO. 03
A more balanced, accurate and detailed
history of the discovery of what has been
referred to as ―…arguably the most
momentous idea ever to occur to a human
mind‖ (Dawkins, 2007) is surely long
overdue.
Acknowledgements
This paper is a condensed and referenced
version of the keynote speech I gave at the
Second International Conference on Alfred
Russel Wallace and the Wallacea ―Defining
the Wallacea‖ in November 2013. I thank
the Indonesian Academy of Sciences for
inviting me to speak and for subsidising my
trip. I am grateful to Jatna Supriatna and
Uswatul Chabibah, and especially to
Sangkot Marzuki, for all their help with
arranging my trip. I am also indebted to the
British High Commission in Singapore
(Tom Crawley in particular) for
considerable financial and logistical
support. I also thank Hugua, the Regent of
Wakatobi, and his wife, for their kindness
and assistance whilst in Wakatobi.
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