Where’s Wallace?

With Darwin’s birthday in just two days, colleges around the United States are doing various activities to commemorate “Darwin Day.” Columbia is no exception; Bwog sent our resident Darwin expert/ Saturday daily Henry Litwhiler to check out Western Carolina University Professor James Costa’s perspective on Darwin.

When most people contemplate—as they often do—the early days of evolutionary theory, they envision a single man, inspired by observations on a heroic voyage, fighting the religious and scientific establishment in a quest for enlightenment. The truth is somewhat muddier. James Costa, Darwin historian and biology professor at Western Carolina University, swung by Columbia last night to set the record straight and to promote his new book, Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species.

Technical difficulties kept the sparsely-attended talk casual (Costa’s lecture slides never materialized) and quiet (no microphones, either). The event ran like an open conversation between Costa and Columbia biology PhD candidate Daniel Duzdevich, who is himself something of an expert on the history of Darwinism, having published a “translation” of On the Origin of Species last year.

The subject of the talk was not Darwin but British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently conceived of natural selection roughly a year before the publication of On the Origin of Species.

Costa devoted a great deal of attention to the differences between Wallace and Darwin. Wallace, the eighth of nine children, grew up a poor transient in socioeconomically stratified 19th century Britain. Lacking much in the way of formal schooling, he found work as a surveyor before moving to South America, where he worked as an insect collector—a valid profession at the time, it would seem—while hoping to solve “the species question” by tenacity alone.

Darwin, the son of a well-known poet, received a first-rate education at Cambridge and rapidly made his way into the scientific elite. His legendary journey on the Beagle challenged his beliefs about the divine creation of all species, but he was not the iconoclast that Wallace was: his first move was to publish the tale of his travels and a few papers on his observations, not to overturn conventional thinking on speciation (i.e., that it didn’t exist at all).

Wallace, meanwhile, lost roughly half of his valuable notes and insect collections when his ship caught fire en route back to England. Undeterred, he set out 18 months later for Southeast Asia, having deemed the Amazon too crowded. It was during a bout of what many historians believe was malaria that Wallace hit upon the idea of natural selection to explain the specialization he observed in the fauna of the Malay Archipelago. He quickly penned an essay explaining his theory and sent it to Darwin, an established scientist who could comment on and bring legitimacy to the thoughts of a scientific outsider.

It’s at this point in the story that conspiracy theories flourish, but Costa is skeptical. There isn’t any evidence that Darwin stole any particular insights from Wallace’s work: he had it published alongside his own articles and gave it such reasonable weight that the resulting theory was known as the Darwin-Wallace Theory for years afterwards. Indeed, Costa’s research revealed that Wallace held sincere admiration for Darwin, even after he saw Darwin’s legacy eclipse his own.

Costa and Duzdevich agreed that the story of Wallace and Darwin should be seen as a triumph of science as much as an injustice. Wallace became a footnote because of Darwin’s social status and because Darwin was understandably loath to give him much credit in On the Origin of Species. Remembering Wallace brings to mind the collaborative nature of the scientific process and beats back the idea of the lone, heroic luminary leading knowledge forward.

Photo courtesy of Henry Litwhiler