The Friends of Charles Darwin

One-hundred and fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin first went public with his theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection, when his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker read out a hastily compiled paper to the Linnean Society. The recent death of his youngest son prevented Darwin from attending.

Darwin was finally forced into publication as a result of a letter he received from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was exploring the Malay Archipelago. Confined to his tent with a fever, Wallace had independently come up with the same idea as Darwin. Unlike Darwin, who had kept his great idea secret, and had spent the last twenty years gathering evidence in support of it, Wallace dashed off a quick letter to Darwin, explaining his idea in full. Darwin was devastated: Wallace was about to scoop him.

At this point, conspiracy theorists are in the habit of claiming that Darwin did the dirty on Wallace by going quickly to press before Wallace could return to Britain. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Darwin stole Wallace's idea—a claim which is manifestly bollocks. Wallace himself later expressed complete satisfaction in how he had been treated.

Lyell and Hooker, who both already knew about Darwin's great idea, urged their friend to publish. They suggested a joint paper, based on an earlier draft of Darwin's theory and the text of Wallace's letter to Darwin. They read it before the Linnean Society on 1st June, 1958 under the snappy title of On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.

Nobody at the Linnean Society batted an eye-lid. It was an almost a total non-event.

I'm not going to get bogged down in a detailed analysis of the Darwin-Wallace paper, other than to say that Wallace's contribution to it is a wonderful piece of prose which reads far more clearly than Darwin's. It contains one particularly haunting section which sent shivers down my spine the first time I read it:

Perhaps the most remarkable instance of an immense bird population is that of the passenger pigeon of the United States, which lays only one, or at most two eggs, and is said to rear generally but one young one. Why is this bird so extraordinarily abundant, while others producing two or three times as many young are much less plentiful? The explanation is not difficult. The food most congenial to this species, and on which it thrives best, is abundantly distributed over a very extensive region, offering such differences of soil and climate, that in one part or another of the area the supply the supply never fails. The bird is capable of a very rapid and long-continued flight, so that it can pass without fatigue over the whole of the district it inhabits, and as soon as the supply of food begins to fail in one place is able to discover a fresh feeding-ground. This example strikingly shows us that the procuring a constant supply of wholesome food is almost the sole condition requisite for ensuring the rapid increase of a given species, since neither the limited fecundity, nor the unrestricted attacks of birds of prey and of man are here sufficient to check it.

Wallace could not have chosen a more poignant example of an immense population of animals impregnable to the attacks of birds of prey and man: fifty-six years later, the very last passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati Zoo.

Her name was Martha.