June-July 2008

The 150th Anniversary of the Evolution Theory jointly proposed by Charles Darwin & Alfred Wallace

150 years ago in the lecture room of the Linnean Society in London, Sir Charles Lyell read on behalf of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace their joint paper “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection”. It was presented to the Linnean Society by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker on the 30th June and read out at the meeting on 1st July, 1858, by Lyell.

In reality, this momentous communication was not a single paper, but a section of a manuscript on Species by Darwin (1839-44 when it had been read by Hooker who discussed it with Lyell) and an abstract of a letter by Darwin to Professor Asa Gray (1857), and an essay written by Wallace (February 1858). [C. Darwin & A. Wallace (1858) J. Proc. Linn. Soc. Zool. 3: 46-50]

Lyell & Hooker prefaced the joint communication with their own letter to the Society which began:

“My Dear Sir, - The accompanying papers which we have the honour of communicating to the Linnean Society, and which all relate to the same subject, viz. the Laws which affect the Production of Varieties, Races and Species, contain the results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr Charles Darwin and Mr Alfred Wallace.

These gentlemen, having independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers of this important line of enquiry; but neither of them having published his views, though Mr Darwin has for many years past been repeatedly urged by us to do so, and both authors having now unreservedly placed their papers in our hands, we think it would best promote the interests of science that a selection from them should be placed before the Linnean Society.”

It was the arrival through Darwin's letterbox early in 1858 from Wallace of his essay, with the request that if he thought it merited to pass it on to Sir Charles Lyell. Darwin wrote to Lyell that Wallace's permission should be sought to have the essay published as soon as possible. This placed Lyell in an awkward position, who agreed Wallace should publish, as long as “Mr Darwin did not withhold from the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr Wallace), the memoir which he had himself written on the same subject “with which Lyell & Hooker had been “privy to for many years”. He gave permission for them to do what they thought proper following their explanation to him “that we are not solely considering the relative claims to priority of himself and his friend (Wallace), but the interests of science generally.”

Darwin had withheld from earlier publication fearing an outcry to the apparently revolutionary theory, but when this did not occur to the publication of this paper, he pressed ahead and published a hefty abstract of his manuscript as “The Origin of Species” the following year in 1859, but once it was before a wider public the earnest debate he had feared ensued.

Amazingly the scientific community’s response to the joint paper was so muted, that in his Presidential Address in May of the next year the Society's President noted that 1858 had not seen “any striking discoveries”! No wonder Darwin felt it safe to proceed.

Darwin's fame in his lifetime was not just based on evolutionary theory, but also for his publications as the naturalist on HMS Beagle. Wallace became recognised as the 'father of biogeography' for while in the Malay Archipelago, including Borneo, he proposed the Wallace Line, that separated the Wildlife of Australia from that of Asia.

He first noted this line in his paper 'On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago' also presented to the Linnean Society (1859). He noted for example that while marsupials were to be found in the Moluccas they were absent from Borneo, and overall that “The Asiatic and Australian regions finding in Borneo and New Guinea respectively their highest development”.

Both of these British naturalists were triggered into their conceiving on a mechanism for the origin of new species by natural selection on reading Thomas Malthus' essay on populations.

[The British Naturalists’ Association has an unusual link to Darwin in that its’ founder, the naturalist E Kay Robinson was invited to meet Darwin at Cheltenham College, where EKR was at school. The schoolboy escorted the great man around the school unexpectedly being asked by Darwin for his views on evolution! BNA Chairman Roger Tabor was in Borneo in June, where he had the opportunity to examine some of Wallace’s specimen’s at the Sarawak Museum in Kuching].