The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [18]
Darwin and Wallace were both enormously influenced by their foreign expeditions, which Darwin illuminated in his earlier book The Voyage of the HMS Beagle. Far from England’s manicured landscapes, they explored places that displayed a wonderfully untamed diversity of life. Each man was struck by the way that species seemed to have adapted—and were still adapting—to environmental pressures. Wallace had been in Malaysia for five years, tracking the shifting patterns of plants, birds, and insects, when he first wrote to Darwin, sharing his early ideas on how species might respond to changes in location. A year later, in 1858, Wallace sent Darwin a copy of a paper, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” which detailed his new theory of natural selection.
The paper neatly outlined major ideas that Darwin had been compiling into his own book. While recuperating from a tropical fever, Wallace had decided to focus on one particular question: In both the human and animal worlds, why do some die and some live? His observations told him that success seemed to foster success. The healthiest tended to stay healthy. “The strongest, swiftest and most cunning” escaped their enemies. The most able hunters avoided starvation. “Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.”
One read through Wallace’s manuscript told Darwin that he had to move forward or lose claim to his cherished theory. A year later, Wallace’s paper was jointly presented with Darwin’s at a London scientific meeting. The year after that, in November 1859, On the Origin of Species went on sale at a price of 15 shillings. It promptly sold out its print run.
Darwin’s genius went far beyond his ability to make a reasoned and researched case. He possessed a gift for combining science with everyday, commonsense observations that could be shared by the farmer, the gardener, and the recreational hiker. Geology reveals our history, Darwin said, and fossils tell of species come and gone. But we can see selection at work now, in the successful breeding of garden flowers and farmyard animals, in the natural variations in life around us in our fields and forests, in everything showcasing the incredible, responsive, ever-changing diversity of life.
From the planet’s simple beginning, Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful are being evolved.” The evidence is sprawled before humankind: from the traces of dead creatures, cradled in the rock beneath our feet, to the shape-shifting existence of birds and of butterflies brightening the air around us.
“It is so easy,” he added, “to hide our ignorance under such expressions as ‘plan of creation’ & ‘unity of design.’ ” Darwin feared his own generation would never get past its biblical baggage. He thought it might be too difficult for his contemporaries to abandon the idea that Earth was young, that species arose finished in their nature, that humans stood separate from all else, that a divine intelligence had shaped life to meet its particular standards.
He saw that reluctance and anxiety entrenched among fellow scientists. “I look with confidence to the future,” Darwin wrote, “to the young and rising naturalists, who could face the realities of life without prejudice.” Darwin was recommended to Queen Victoria as a candidate for knighthood the month after his book was published. But he never became Sir Charles. The bishops of Her Majesty’s Anglican Church made sure of that.
PERHAPS THE MOST famous of the ensuing debates between a supporter of evolution (a