A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [195]
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