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| Charles Darwin (L) and Alfred Russel Wallace (R) |
ScienceDaily, March 8, 2012
A National University
of Singapore. study has traced historical shipping records and vindicated
Darwin from accusations of deceit.
For the past four
decades, Charles Darwin had been accused of keeping the essay of fellow
naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace for a fortnight, thereby enabling him to
revise elements of his theory of evolution, before jointly announcing the
theory of evolution by natural selection in July 1858. Just recently, two
researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), supported by a
private donation, reconstructed the route taken by Wallace's letter to Darwin
from Ternate and provided evidence that Wallace sent the letter a month later
than historians had always assumed, thus clearing Darwin of the accusations
against him.
Dr John van Wyhe, a
historian of science and Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Biological
Sciences & History at NUS and his collaborator Dr Kees Rookmaaker,
published their study, titled "A new theory to explain the receipt of
Wallace's Ternate Essay by Darwin in 1848," in the Biological Journal of
the Linnean Society in December 2011.
The controversy
Alfred Russel
Wallace, the naturalist who spent eight years in Singapore and South East Asia
between 1854 and 1862, discovered evolution by natural selection independently
of Charles Darwin. Wallace had a dramatic eureka moment while living on the
island of Ternate in the Moluccas (now Indonesia). He wrote up his ideas in an
essay which he sent in 1858, to Charles Darwin, for him to pass on to noted
geologist Charles Lyell. Darwin's accusers claim that he waited two weeks to do
so, lying about the date of receipt to give himself time to revise his own
ideas in the light of Wallace's.
Wallace's essay was
published together with an essay by Darwin in 1858 and marks the first
publication of the theory of evolution which then resulted in one of the
greatest revolutions in the history of science.
How the mystery
began
In 1972 a
researcher found another letter from Wallace to a friend named Bates that was
sent on the March 1858 steamer from the island of Ternate in modern Indonesia.
The letter still bore postmarks from Singapore and London which showed that it
arrived in London on 3 June 1858 -- two weeks before Darwin said he received
the essay from Wallace. Thus began the mystery -- how could two letters from
Wallace leave Ternate on the same steamer and travel along the same mail route
back to London but Darwin received his two weeks later than Bates did? This
mystery has led to numerous conspiracy theories. For example, several writers
have claimed that Darwin stole ideas from Wallace's essay during the time he
kept the letter secret. But most other evidence suggests that Darwin received
the letter when he said he did.
So did Darwin
receive the letter when he said he did, or not?
"I initially
assumed that it was impossible to solve since so many historians had examined
it before. But it occurred to me that we really have no contemporary evidence
of when Wallace sent the essay to Darwin, only his much later recollection that
he sent it by the next post after writing it in February. That suggested that
the essay was sent in March 1858. But this recollection from years later seemed
to me not very reliable as evidence of what really happened at the time. The
other evidence that Darwin received it on 18 June 1858 seemed more likely. All
of his correspondence changed dramatically after that date for example. Since
that side of the correspondence was all one really had to go on, it occurred to
me to trace the letter from Darwin's end, rather than Wallace's," said Dr
van Wyhe.
If Darwin really
received it on 18 June- how could it get there? It had come to his house in the
countryside from London the day before, the 17th.
Dr van Wyhe then
found that a steamer arrived in England the day before, the 16th with mail from
India and South East Asia. This was surely not a coincidence -- Wallace's
letter must have been on that ship. Dr van Wyhe then had to trace back the
remainder of the 9,240 miles of the journey from England, through the
Mediterranean, across Egypt, to Sri Lanka, Penang, Singapore, Jakarta and so
on. His assistant on the Wallace Online project, Dr Kees Rookmaaker, who speaks
Dutch, was an invaluable help as he was able to check the ship arrival and
departure times in the Dutch newspapers and sources for the Dutch East Indies,
while Dr van Wyhe went through the English newspapers. It was an exciting
detective story tracing the connections that mail batch took from London to
South East Asia.
"Eventually
our mail itinerary was completed all the way back to Ternate and we were
astonished to find that there was an unbroken series of mail connections to
Ternate -- not in March as all other writers before had assumed, but in April
1858! My further research has clarified why Wallace mailed it later than we
assumed and many other parts of this famous, but misunderstood chapter in the
history of science," added Dr van Wyhe.
"First of all,
we now know that Wallace was replying to an early letter from Darwin- and that
letter from Darwin arrived in Ternate on the March steamer. We have assembled
the first complete collection of all the surviving Wallace correspondence from
Ternate and nearby islands. These reveal that he never replied to a letter on
the same steamer which delivered it. Apparently the turn over time was too
short. Therefore this is an additional reason to doubt that Wallace could have
sent the famous letter to Darwin in March as so long assumed," said Dr van
Wyhe.
Dr van Wyhe is
currently completing a major new book on Wallace in South East Asia which aims
to radically revise the traditional story of Wallace and his famous independent
discovery of evolution.
Dr van Wyhe is the
Director of the research project in Singapore -- Wallace Online, a website
which aims to be the definitive and reliable source of Wallace's work. It will
contain all of Wallace's books and article, as well as a complete collection of
his specimens collected from South-east Asia, and much more, such as a revised
itinerary of his whereabouts during these years and his notebooks edited for
the first time to modern scholarly standards. The website will be launched in
2013, the centenary of the death of Wallace.
This
study was supported by a generous private donation to the Darwin Online-Wallace
Online projects.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by National University of Singapore, via AlphaGalileo.
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