It is really the sesquicentennial of natural selection, but I like saying “evolution” in the style of Marlon Hoek [Untamed World script].
Wired | July 1, 1858: Darwin and Wallace Shift the Paradigm
… Darwin was still working on his magnum opus when in June 1858 he received a letter from an English naturalist working in Malaysia. Alfred Russel Wallace was young and brash. When he conceived of natural selection, he didn’t plan a 10-volume lifework. He just dashed off a quick paper on the subject and mailed it to the author of The Voyage of the Beagle, asking him to refer it for publication if it seemed good enough.
Darwin was crestfallen. Was he about to lose credit for two decades of work? … Darwin wrote to [Charles] Lyell and [Joseph] Hooker, and they arranged for a joint paper to be read at the forthcoming meeting of the Linnaean Society of London.
… Sociologist Robert K. Merton postulated that “multiples” in science and invention are frequent, naming examples like the calculus, natural selection, the telegraph, the telephone and the automobile. He suggested that many more innovations and advances go unheralded because primacy of publication or patent deters many others from being submitted to the public. Instead, researchers will seek a new and often related line of advance.
The saga of Darwin and Wallace, though, remains an extraordinary example:
- * It involved not a simple invention or discovery but a paradigm shift, inventing the reigning paradigm that organizes modern biology — and in some sense all modern science. (Maitri’s note: I don’t think the idea of evolution on its own re-organized modern biology and science as much as it integrated and shoved into the limelight the previous, shelved work of Mendel and Malthus, that gave scientists facts, i.e. actual physical and biological mechanisms for the evolution of species, with which to revisit problems, as this article itself notes.)
- * The work of two scientists who worked independently was announced at precisely the same date and place, in a joint paper.
- * It’s a multiple example of “multiples,” spread across the entire globe and an entire century.
Wallace gets little credit for discovering his eponymous line, on either side of which exist two distinct biogeographic provinces and their attendant fauna and flora. This juxtaposition generated Wallace’s ideas on natural selection and had future implications for paleo sea levels as well as plate tectonics, other nascent theories on the evolution of the earth. On the other hand, Darwin gets more credit for disocovering the mechanism of evolution – Darwinian is synonymous with natural selection – than he does for his tenacity and continued reasearch to further the theory.
Science, like most other life endeavours, requires labor, idea synthesis, intra- and inter-disciplinary cooperation and good timing as well as intellectual inspiration. That is what I choose to celebrate today.
