Charles Darwin is considered the father of evolutionary biology. But without Alfred Russel Wallace, things could have been different.
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Charles Darwin was stunned. In the spring of 1858, he sat with a manuscript in his lap. It had arrived in the mail from a blown-away corner of the Southeast Asian island kingdom and was signed Alfred Russel Wallace, an insect collector he barely knew.
In recent decades it had become increasingly obvious that life on Earth had evolved. But exactly how it happened was unclear. Darwin had found the solution – evolution by natural selection – and among other tasks he wrote a large work. But he only talked about it with those closest to him.
Now Darwin was sitting with a ready-to-press article in which his own king’s thought was elegantly explained over a dozen pages and a cover letter in which the author Wallace wondered what he thought of the theory.
Who was Wallace?
Who on earth was this Wallace? Darwin didn’t know much about him – and many still don’t. Today it is 200 years since Alfred Russel Wallace was born.
He came from a poor background, and in his teens he worked as a casual laborer long enough to get a place on a ship bound for Brazil. After four years in the Amazon, where he collected insects and birds for European museums and collectors, he traveled on to Southeast Asia.
Wallace became one of Europe’s first backpackers. He canoed with indigenous people in the Amazon, lived among head hunters in Borneo, walked barefoot in the jungle and for a time was the only European in New Guinea.
The way he traveled brought him close to the local people. And he was captivated: “The more I see of uncivilized peoples, the better I think about human nature, and all significant differences between civilized and savages seem to disappear,” he wrote home.
It has been claimed that the manuscript he sent Darwin was the result of a sudden whim. But it is not that simple. Wallace had been working on the question for many years and saw it almost as a life’s work to solve the evolution puzzle.
In the Amazon, he had discovered that related species often lived on opposite sides of the large rivers. If all the planet’s animals and plants had actually been created individually, they should have been scattered arbitrarily over the Earth. But it wasn’t like that. Red tit and blue tit do not live on opposite sides of the globe, and neither do roe deer and red deer.
Wallace wrote several articles on the matter and believed that it must almost be a law of nature that related species constantly lived near each other. Kinship is about common origin, he stated.
An unknown insect collector
However, the articles were not read by many. He was just an unknown insect collector. Nor did Darwin take much notice of them. The message from England was that Wallace should use his time to collect and not engage in airy speculation. But he didn’t let go. He already had many details in place. It was supposed to be a whole book, but the Rosetta Stone was missing: How could one species become another?
February 1858 he lived in a shed in the forest on an island west of New Guinea. It was pouring rain, the roof was leaking, and he himself was lying flat with malaria. Between bouts of fever, he suddenly understood: All species produce too many offspring. But it cannot possibly be completely random which individuals survive and carry the family on.
Traits that benefit survival will become more common, while those that are a hindrance will disappear. This is how new species can take shape. He sat down and wrote what was to become history’s first paper on evolution by natural selection.
“All my originality is lost,” Darwin announced in despair. That same week, his son became seriously ill. 1858 must have been the worst year of his life. It was the friends who saved the matter – they knew that he had been working on the idea for a long time. Wallace’s paper and a provisional summary of Darwin’s work were presented at a meeting in London shortly afterwards.
Thus the explanation of the history of life on this planet was born. None of the main characters were present. Wallace was in New Guinea unaware of the uproar he had caused. Darwin stood in the cemetery and buried his youngest son.
The Newton of biology
A year and a half later, “The Origin of Species” was published, which examined in detail the implications of the theory of selection. Wallace was overwhelmed when he received the book. Here was what he himself had sketched, worked out to the smallest detail. “Darwin is the Newton of biology,” he wrote enthusiastically to his friends.
Wallace did not return home from Southeast Asia until several years later. He became one of Europe’s most productive scientists and played a key role in the further elaboration of the theory of evolution.
Darwin and Wallace actually created a new science – biology. Because knowledge only becomes science when particulars can be put together into a unifying building of thought. At the same time, Wallace was increasingly drawn into the social debate.
While many used Darwin’s theory to legitimize “the right of the fittest”, Wallace believed that human nature is primarily about cooperation. Humans have not only domesticated animals and crops – they have also domesticated each other. Thus, a species has taken shape that can change the very framework for the globe’s ecosystems.
Brotherhood between people
Wallace predicted the environmental crisis and the Anthropocene and believed that evolution in man continues as moral maturation. Evolution and ethical growth are basically two sides of the same thing. He became a strong critic of British colonialism and a staunch champion of the idea of equality, fighting causes such as nature conservation, prison reforms and feminism.
He wrote over 800 articles and 22 books until his death in 1913 and was equally prolific until the end. The list of publications for his last summer included a defense of Darwinism, a protest against the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst, an article against vaccination, a text on the origin of the soul and a debate paper for the nationalization of landed property.
Evolution is often associated with life’s relentless struggle for existence. But Alfred Russel Wallace showed that natural selection can just as well legitimize cooperation and brotherhood between humans. It resulted in a philosophy of evolution which is both original and surprising, and which today, four generations later, can still be read with great benefit.
