Page 20 - RD (English) - Sample

12 chapter 1

to receive Wallace’s paper – Darwin had been quietly working on the
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same ideas for twenty years by this time. Now the younger Wallace
was about to receive credit for the theory Darwin considered his own.
Of course, there were differences between Darwin’s conception and
Wallace’s conception. Darwin had focused on the uniqueness of spe-
cies and Wallace on the driving force of natural selection. But both
had drawn their ideas from Malthus’s paper on population econom-
ics. When Darwin mentioned Wallace’s letter to Charles Lyell, Lyell
encouraged him to copublish the theory with Wallace. Wallace readily
agreed to share the spotlight, and on July 1, 1858, their joint paper was
presented to the Linnean Society of London. This was the official birth
of the theory of evolution through natural selection.
The theory drew little notice at first – it was only one of several
papers read at the Linnean Society that summer – but it came more
into the light a year later when, on November 22, Darwin published On
the Origin of Species. The book was an overnight bestseller and some-
what eclipsed Wallace’s role in the theory’s development. From then
on, the theory of evolution has been almost exclusively attributed to
Charles Darwin.
What made Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory unique was that it pro-
posed what appeared to be a plausible natural mechanism to account
for how the numerous species scattered over the earth had come about:
they had evolved from a common ancestor by the processes of variation
and natural selection. As mentioned previously, others had long ago
presented ideas about evolution, but no one had yet presented a plau-
sible driving mechanism. Lamarck, for example, had proposed that
evolution was fueled by a nebulous vital force or inner urge common
to all living organisms. Darwin and Wallace, however, confined their
theory to “variation” and “natural selection” as sufficient mechanisms
to create variety in life.
Darwin’s theory can be summarized in a few words: Every species
contains variations among individuals in terms of size, ability, color,
pattern, etc., and some of these differences prove advantageous for an
organism in its competition for survival with other members of the