Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution gets its first public airing, but it’s not his theory alone.
Scientists knew evolution occurred. The question was, How? The answer, Darwin realized back in the 1830s, was natural selection. It accounted for the biodiversity he’d observed while traveling on the Beagle (see here). He was writing a multivolume treatise to prove his radical new idea.
In June 1858, he received a short paper from naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in Malaysia, proposing the very same theory in slightly different language. Darwin was crestfallen, fearing he would lose credit for two decades of work.
Two scientists who had seen early drafts of Darwin’s work helped arrange for a joint paper to be read at the meeting of the Linnaean Society of London on July 1.
As a reader of this book, you will not be surprised by simultaneous discovery. But this instance is extraordinary in multiple ways:
| 1. | Publication was simultaneous: same place, same day, same presentation. (Darwin’s Origin of Species was not published until 1859.) |
| 2. | Both scientists got the idea from the same place: Malthus’s 1798 essay on population. Malthus observed that in each generation, not every individual would survive to reproduce. After decades of no one else picking up on that, both Darwin and Wallace realized that who did survive would determine evolution. |
| 3. | Both authors acknowledged they didn’t know how successful traits were passed to the next generation. And although Gregor Mendel published his literally seminal work on genetics in 1865 (see here), no one made this connection until three different botanists published on it in 1900. |
| 4. | Finally, it involved not a simple invention or discovery but a complete shift, inventing the reigning paradigm that organizes modern biology—and much of modern science.—RA |