{"id":298,"date":"2008-07-01T10:17:04","date_gmt":"2008-07-01T15:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/?p=298"},"modified":"2008-07-01T10:17:04","modified_gmt":"2008-07-01T15:17:04","slug":"happy-birthday-theory-of-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/2008\/07\/01\/happy-birthday-theory-of-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday Theory of Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

A nice little recap of the history of it all from Wired<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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<\/cite>, asking him to refer it for publication if it seemed good enough.<\/p>\n

Darwin was crestfallen. Was he about to lose credit for two decades of work? Wallace had suggested that Darwin forward the paper to Scottish geologist Charles Lyell<\/a>. Along with English botanist Joseph Hooker, Lyell was one of a small handful of people Darwin had shown early drafts of his own work on natural selection.<\/p>\n

Darwin wrote to Lyell and Hooker<\/a>, and they arranged for a joint paper to be read at the forthcoming meeting of the Linnaean Society of London<\/a>. (Founded in 1788 and named for Carl Linnaeus<\/a>, the Swedish scientist who devised the binomial system of taxonomy, it is the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s oldest active biological society.)<\/p>\n

Neither Darwin nor Wallace attended the meeting. Wallace was still in Malaysia. Darwin was at home with his wife mourning the death of their 19-month-old son<\/a> just three days earlier.<\/p>\n

The secretary of the society<\/a> read the 18-page paper<\/a>, comprising four parts<\/a>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The readers’ own letter of introduction explaining the extraordinary circumstances;<\/li>\n
  2. An excerpt from Darwin’s unpublished draft, part of a chapter titled, “On the Variation of Organic Beings in a State of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and True Species”;<\/li>\n
  3. An abstract of Darwin’s 1857 letter on the subject to Harvard University botanist Asa Gray;<\/li>\n
  4. Wallace’s manuscript, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The paper and the meeting did not cause an immediate sensation. Other papers were read the same day. The society had routine business to transact. The meeting was long<\/a> (.pdf). But the paper was accepted for publication in the society’s Proceedings<\/cite> later that year.<\/p>\n

    Was this a remarkable case of simultaneous discovery? Not quite. It was more like simultaneous announcement. What is remarkable is that both Darwin and Wallace credited their central insight<\/a> to reading Thomas Malthus’ essay, Population<\/cite>, first published in 1798.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Reminds me again of this great Gladwell essay<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A nice little recap of the history of it all from Wired: 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sciencegeek-porn","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7V2xo-4O","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}