Two Men, One Phenomenal Idea

The following excerpt is from The Ant and the Peacock by Helena Cronin. The book mostly deals with two special cases of biological evolution, altruism and sexual selection, that at first were problematic. Here is the text:

"Imagine a world without Darwin. Imagine a world in which Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had not transformed our understanding of living things. What, that is now comprehessible to us, would become baffling and puzzling? What would we see as in urgent need of explanation?

"The answer is: practically everything about living things--about all of life on earth and for the whole of its history."

A brief explanation is in order for those not familiar with Wallace. After his famous voyage across the globe on The Beagle and two decades of gathering additional data and developing hypotheses, Darwin came to some conclusions concerning "the origin of species by means of natural selection," but had decided not to make public his ideas just yet. As I recall, about this time he received a letter from an associate, the younger naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. (He has quite an interesting story of his own that you can read about elsewhere.) The letter detailed Wallace's hypothesis that provided an explanation for the variety and similarities we see among species. Darwin quickly realized that he and Wallace had independently pieced the same puzzle and decided it was time to make his ideas public. Being a gentleman and not wanting to rob Wallace of the credit due him (which would have been very easy), Darwin arranged for his and Wallace's ideas to be presented together at a meeting of the Linnean Society.

The next year, Darwin published his book The Origin of Species (short title). We tend to mention only the work of Charles Darwin with respect to biological evolution for, I think, two reasons: first, he had accumulated more data and spent more years studying the subject than Wallace; and second, Darwin was more affluent and had a broader reputation.

If you want to learn more, here is a link with useful information:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/history_14

Also check out the Charles Darwin Wikipedia article that was nominated and elected for featured article status:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_darwin

The article on Wallace is very good and also was elected as a featured article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace