Alfred Russel Wallace centenary

I had no idea who this dude was until I clicked the link. How come we only learn about Darwin? We all learn about Watson AND Crick, but just Darwin.

 

Darwin gets most of the credit because he wrote the comprehensive book on evolution. There is increasing awareness of Wallace too, but Darwin has had the spotlight for the last century plus so hard to fit Wallace in there too. The guy was a real Indiana Jones type. Someone should make a movie about him - that would get him into the limelight.

 

Wallace was a very great and generous man who was one of the founders of zoogeography. Some people say that Darwin (or his establishment friends Lyell and Hooker) unfairly took all the credit for the theory of evolution, but there is no doubt that Wallace had the same idea about natural selection entirely independently (while Darwin was writing his 'big book' about it). Actually the two men got on very well, Wallace acknowledged that he could not have written 'The Origin of Species' and they corresponded regularly. Darwin organised a successful campaign for Wallace to get a Government pension when he settled down in England and Wallace was one of the pall bearers at Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey.

Alan

 

The BBC has produced a documentary on Wallace, hosted by Bill Bailey and to be screened in March.

Remembering Wallace: Bill Bailey | Small suitcase

 

Where you been David? I missed you.

This guy sounds pretty cool.... But he sounds like a supporting actor, dare I say an extra, rather than a star. If I have an idea about space/time, wasn't capable of writing 'A Brief History of Time', but my good friend Stephen Hawking was, why should history remember me? Who remembers the names of Watson and Crick's lab assistant buddies who didn't write the journal papers or actually make the discoveries?

 

As with all other aspects of science what really happened gets lost in the details as we move farther from the events. Wallace was definitely a star and he did a great deal of work in addition to developing the theory of natural selection in parallel with Darwin. He was a superb natural historian and as Gentle Lemur mentioned he was a pioneer of zoogeography, especially in Austral-asia.

Regarding Watson and Crick, there's a whole subgenre of science history controversy with them and how they treated Rosalind Franklin.

 

Watson is a prime candidate to attend your cultural sensitivity seminar for his views on the intelligence of Africans, so not crediting a collaborator is comparatively minor and almost expected for the character.

I suspect that no one notices the good-looking publicist when she stands next to a Victoria Secret model, so it seems logical for Wallace to disappear in Darwin's shadow. I am a fan of the underdog, the black sheep, and the keyboardist, so I really should watch the documentary when it comes out. From what I read, Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey and Wallace is buried in a village cemetery - a great analogy of how they are perceived and remembered today.

 

Wallace is one of those great unsung heroes, his achievements almost too numerous to mention. I agree he has been in the shadows for too long, eclipsed by the long shadow of Charles Darwin, and it's about time he received the recognition he truly deserves. He was also very good at keeping records; Darwin, on the other hand, in his younger days, did not always keep notes.
I don't want to take anything away from Darwin, who was a very great man and a devoted family man (he was almost a "new man" in regards to the love he lavished on his children, over 100 years before the term was coined), but during the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin did not always keep meticulous notes as he should have done. He had, for example, noted that the tortoises from the Galapagos Islands had different shaped shells, but failed to note which shell originated from which island. This was to cause him much anguish in later years when he realised his omission, and to illustrate how species could diverge from a common ancestor, he was forced to use the rather less dramatic mockingbirds of the Galapagos to illustrate his theory, because fortunately his assistant on the Beagle, who had collected the mockingbird specimens, did take care to note down which ones originated from which particular island.

 

Without wishing to be a contrarian, I think this thread is in danger of promulgating some time-worn myths.
Watson and Crick may have been cavalier in their use of Franklin's data, but the man who showed it to them and shared the Nobel Prize with them was Maurice Wilkins, who is rarely mentioned; it is possible that the Nobel Committee would have awarded a share to Franklin if she had not passed away before the discovery of the structure of DNA was recognised (although it has to be said that their recognition of the work of female scientists has been patchy to say the least - consider the example of Jocelyn Bell Burnell).
In terms of scientific precedence, Darwin and Wallace are equal as their papers were read together. They could have shared a Nobel Prize if they had published their papers after Alfred Nobel's death and if there were a Nobel Prize for Biology (I doubt if natural selection could be considered as Physiology or Medicine). But as I wrote in my previous post, Darwin was writing an encyclopaedic account of natural selection when he received Wallace's letter outlining the same idea that he had many years before. Darwin's individual achievement was 'The Origin of Species', the short book he wrote after abandoning the large one, which explained the evidence for natural selection using the examples he had spent years working through: the original papers had very little impact on the scientists in the Linnean Society - but the Origin caused a storm throughout the intellectual world.
zooman64's point about record keeping is a good one. I would merely add that Darwin openly admitted his mistake in 'The Voyage of the Beagle' and explained why it had caused him such problems. I know that Wallace read the book before he went on his first trip to the Amazon and I think he was a quick learner (this is my speculation rather than a historical fact, but I think I'm right ).

Alan

 

Yes, I should have mentioned to readers of my previous posts that Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, so Franklin, who died a few years earlier, could not be awarded the prize.

With regards to papers versus books, there are many physicists who contributed to and pioneered research into space and time,but the average joe only knows about Stephen Hawking in no small part to his best seller book "A brief history of time". It looks like even back in Darwin's days that writing a book did more for your popularity than publishing scientific journal papers. And for this reason, we learn about Darwin and not Wallace.

Ask any kid today to name two famous astronomers, and one is bound to be Brian Cox, although he will be forgotten in a generation, unless he discovers something radical. We had a thread some time ago about famous scientists, and I suspect that we discussed the fact that we could name scores of entertainers and politicians but only a handful of scientists. It's a shame that guys like Wallace aren't more well-known, but the air at the top is extremely rarefied.

 

I appreciate very much your historical perspective Gentle Lemur. In America at least the Franklin story is still very much controversial and used as an example of the shoddy treatment of women scientists in much of the 20th century.

In university biology programs there are also efforts to elevate Wallace to his proper role as the equal of Darwin in developing natural selection.

 

The Nobel Prizes brings up a question, why is biology the only science that is not awarded a prize?

 

Until fairly late into the 20th century, there were hardly any women scientists to begin with! A woman's place was at home. Indeed, I can't think of a single female scientist (from the pure sciences, so not including Goodall and Fossey, for example) except Curie and Franklin.

Although they are teaching Wallace's role in natural selection at university in specific programs, sadly he will never become mainstream. Newton invented calculus, unless you did advanced calculus and learned that maybe it was Leibniz.

 

I think that the Nobel Prizes are for pure sciences rather than applied sciences, with 'peace' tagged on for good measure. Computer 'science' isn't there and neither is engineering, which is the love child of all sciences.

 

So literature is a pure science?

 

Sorry. No, it is not, neither is economics I suppose. I was thinking about physics, chemistry and medicine when I posted.

 

Yeah, there's as much science in economics as there is vegan pizza on Pluto's unnamed 4th moon.

 

I think biology might fall under the broad umbrella of medicine or even physics or chemistry. Indeed, I believe that this is the argument for not adding new categories.

 

Marie Curie won two and her daughter, Mme Joliot-Curie, won one as well! I had the pleasure of hearing the late Dorothy Hodgkin give a lecture about the structure of insulin in 1971.

Alan