Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

Darwin’s manuscript might have remained locked away till his death but for an alarming blow that arrived from the Far East in the early summer of 1858 in the form of a packet containing a friendly letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace and the draft of a paper, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type , outlining a theory of natural selection that was uncannily similar to Darwin’s secret jottings. Even some of the phrasing echoed Darwin’s own. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” Darwin reflected in dismay. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract.”

Wallace didn’t drop into Darwin’s life quite as unexpectedly as is sometimes suggested. The two were already corresponding, and Wallace had more than once generously sent Darwin specimens that he thought might be of interest. In the process of these exchanges Darwin had discreetly warned Wallace that he regarded the subject of species creation as his own territory. “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, on the question of how amp; in what way do species amp; varieties differ from each other,” he had written to Wallace some time earlier. “I am now preparing my work for publication,” he added, even though he wasn’t really.

In any case, Wallace failed to grasp what Darwin was trying to tell him, and of course he could have no idea that his own theory was so nearly identical to one that Darwin had been evolving, as it were, for two decades.

Darwin was placed in an agonizing quandary. If he rushed into print to preserve his priority, he would be taking advantage of an innocent tip-off from a distant admirer. But if he stepped aside, as gentlemanly conduct arguably required, he would lose credit for a theory that he had independently propounded. Wallace’s theory was, by Wallace’s own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin’s was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.

To compound his misery, Darwin’s youngest son, also named Charles, had contracted scarlet fever and was critically ill. At the height of the crisis, on June 28, the child died. Despite the distraction of his son’s illness, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, offering to step aside but noting that to do so would mean that all his work, “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Lyell and Hooker came up with the compromise solution of presenting a summary of Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas together. The venue they settled on was a meeting of the Linnaean Society, which at the time was struggling to find its way back into fashion as a seat of scientific eminence. On July 1, 1858, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.

The Darwin-Wallace presentation was one of seven that evening-one of the others was on the flora of Angola-and if the thirty or so people in the audience had any idea that they were witnessing the scientific highlight of the century, they showed no sign of it. No discussion followed. Nor did the event attract much notice elsewhere. Darwin cheerfully later noted that only one person, a Professor Haughton of Dublin, mentioned the two papers in print and his conclusion was “that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old.”

Wallace, still in the distant East, learned of these maneuverings long after the event, but was remarkably equable and seemed pleased to have been included at all. He even referred to the theory forever after as “Darwinism.” Much less amenable to Darwin’s claim of priority was a Scottish gardener named Patrick Matthew who had, rather remarkably, also come up with the principles of natural selection-in fact, in the very year that Darwin had set sail in the Beagle. Unfortunately, Matthew had published these views in a book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture , which had been missed not just by Darwin, but by the entire world. Matthew kicked up in a lively manner, with a letter to Gardener’s Chronicle , when he saw Darwin gaining credit everywhere for an idea that really was his. Darwin apologized without hesitation, though he did note for the record: “I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, considering how briefly they are given, and they appeared in the Appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture.”

Wallace continued for another fifty years as a naturalist and thinker, occasionally a very good one, but increasingly fell from scientific favor by taking up dubious interests such as spiritualism and the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. So the theory became, essentially by default, Darwin’s alone.

Darwin never ceased being tormented by his ideas. He referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain” and said that revealing the theory felt “like confessing a murder.” Apart from all else, he knew it deeply pained his beloved and pious wife. Even so, he set to work at once expanding his manuscript into a book-length work. Provisionally he called it An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection -a title so tepid and tentative that his publisher, John Murray, decided to issue just five hundred copies. But once presented with the manuscript, and a slightly more arresting title, Murray reconsidered and increased the initial print run to 1,250.

On the Origin of Species was an immediate commercial success, but rather less of a critical one. Darwin’s theory presented two intractable difficulties. It needed far more time than Lord Kelvin was willing to concede, and it was scarcely supported by fossil evidence. Where, asked Darwin’s more thoughtful critics, were the transitional forms that his theory so clearly called for? If new species were continuously evolving, then there ought to be lots of intermediate forms scattered across the fossil record, but there were not. [43]In fact, the record as it existed then (and for a long time afterward) showed no life at all right up to the moment of the famous Cambrian explosion.

But now here was Darwin, without any evidence, insisting that the earlier seas must have had abundant life and that we just hadn’t found it yet because, for whatever reason, it hadn’t been preserved. It simply could not be otherwise, Darwin maintained. “The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained,” he allowed most candidly, but he refused to entertain an alternative possibility. By way of explanation he speculated-inventively but incorrectly-that perhaps the Precambrian seas had been too clear to lay down sediments and thus had preserved no fossils.

Even Darwin’s closest friends were troubled by the blitheness of some of his assertions. Adam Sedgwick, who had taught Darwin at Cambridge and taken him on a geological tour of Wales in 1831, said the book gave him “more pain than pleasure.” Louis Agassiz dismissed it as poor conjecture. Even Lyell concluded gloomily: “Darwin goes too far.”

T. H. Huxley disliked Darwin’s insistence on huge amounts of geological time because he was a saltationist, which is to say a believer in the idea that evolutionary changes happen not gradually but suddenly. Saltationists (the word comes from the Latin for “leap”) couldn’t accept that complicated organs could ever emerge in slow stages. What good, after all, is one-tenth of a wing or half an eye? Such organs, they thought, only made sense if they appeared in a finished state.