CHARLES DARWIN AND THE

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

1858

IMAGINE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN DEVOTING your principal energies for nearly twenty years to a Very Big Idea – a concept so revolutionary that it will transform the way the human race looks at itself. And then one morning, you open a letter from someone you scarcely know (someone, to be honest, that you never took very seriously) to discover that he has come up with exactly the same idea – and that he has picked you as the person to help him announce it to the world.

This was the dilemma that confronted Charles Darwin in June 1858 as he opened a thin, well wrapped package from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies. He could recognise the handwriting of Alfred Russel Wallace, a railway surveyor-turned-naturalist who made his living selling specimens to richer collectors – a year or so back Darwin had asked him to track down some Malayan poultry skins for him.

But on this occasion, Wallace was not peddling specimens. He was asking Darwin to read a short, handwritten essay about natural selection. During a bout of malaria that February, the naturalist had got to thinking about the life-and-death struggle between existence and extinction in beasts and plants; about the need to adapt; about the selective breeding of domestic and farmyard animals to improve or alter their characteristics, and about the way that species diverge into different forms – all the ingredients of what would come to be known as ‘evolution’.

‘I never saw a more striking coincidence!’ exclaimed the mortified Darwin. ‘If Wallace had my MS [manuscript] sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract [summary].’

In June 1842, Darwin, then thirty-three, had sketched out his own ideas about evolution. Dinosaur discoveries and other geological research had pushed him towards the concept of the earth undergoing long, slow changes over the millennia. A five-year journey in his twenties on the research vessel Beagle had shown him how different forms of life adapted to different environments, most notably in the Galapagos Islands. And then in 1838 he had first laid eyes on an ape, an orang-utan, at London Zoo, and had started to make notes on her human-like emotions.

But the young man could see the bitter controversy towards which his thinking was leading – the idea that mankind was not created by God in a single day as the Bible described, but was, rather, shaped gradually in a long chain of descent that linked human beings to other species, including apes. Darwin himself found the idea deeply shocking – ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ he told a friend – and he reflected on the persecution handed out to the early astronomers who had dared to suggest that the earth revolved around the sun.

Such fears had held Charles Darwin back for nearly twenty years. He kept delaying publication, looking for one more piece of evidence to protect himself and his theory from the widespread outrage he anticipated – and now Wallace’s essay meant, as Darwin wrote to the great geologist Charles Lyell, that ‘all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed’.

Wallace had asked Darwin to forward his essay to Lyell if he approved of it, and, despite his disappointment, Darwin did the honourable thing. He could have destroyed the letter and pretended it had never arrived. He could have delayed doing anything, while rushing ahead with his own publication. Instead he passed it on – ‘I hope you will approve of Wallace’s sketch,’ he wrote, ‘that I may tell him what you say.’

Honour was rewarded. Lyell conferred with the botanist Joseph Hooker who decided that the groundbreaking ideas of both Wallace and Darwin should be presented side by side as soon as possible – at the very next meeting of the Linnean Society.^* Alphabetically and chronologically, Darwin took precedence in the memorable double presentation of 1 July 1858 – one of the great moments in the history of science – and some have claimed that this was a fix. Lyell and Hooker were both old friends of Darwin, and had been pushing the reluctant author to publish for years.

But when, weeks later in the Far East, Wallace found out that Lyell and Hooker had, without consulting him, assigned him the role of junior co-discoverer, he was all generosity, graciously thanking Hooker for the presentation that was ‘so favourable to myself’. If he felt any resentment, he never once betrayed it. At the age of thirty-five the former railway surveyor, who had started his studies in the free libraries of Welsh mechanics’ institutes, continued his researches to embark on a public career that would make him one of the best-known naturalists of his time – ‘the Grand Old Man of Science’, as he was often described. He also campaigned for socialism, spiritualism, the reform of the House of Lords and the Church of England, votes for women, the proper design of museums, the redistribution of land through the breaking up of the great noble estates, early ‘green belts’ (as we would call them) and the protection of historic monuments. Seldom short of a provocative and forward-looking idea, Wallace suggested that rather than going on strike, disgruntled employees should club together to buy out their bosses and prove they could do a better job themselves.

Darwin went on to become the grand old man of evolution, pushed by Wallace’s challenge finally to write his masterpiece The Origin Of Species,^* which was published in November 1859 and has never been out of print since. Sharing so many ideas, the two men who might have been fierce enemies actually became warm friends, treating each other with genuine respect. As the principal protagonists of what came to be known as the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory, with all its competitive, dog-eat-dog connotations, Darwin and Wallace illustrated how generosity can be the cleverest survival technique of all.