Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Wallace has, I think put the matter well
Wallace has, I think put the matter well; and according to his theory the various domestic races of animals have been fairly developed into species." Despite this hint, Darwin mistook Wallace's conclusion for the progressive creationism of the time and wrote that it was "nothing very new ... Uses my simile of tree [but] it seems all creation with him. Sony VAIO PCG-7153M Battery
" Lyell was more impressed, and opened a notebook on species, in which he grappled with the consequences, particularly for human ancestry. Darwin had already shown his theory to their mutual friend Joseph Hooker and now, for the first time, he spelt out the full details of natural selection to Lyell. Sony VAIO PCG-71312M Battery
Although Lyell could not agree, he urged Darwin to publish to establish priority. Darwin demurred at first, then began writing up a species sketch of his continuing work in May 1856.
By February 1858, Wallace had been convinced by his biogeographical research in the Malay Archipelago of the reality of evolution. As he later wrote in his autobiography: Sony VAIO PCG-7144M Battery
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals. Sony VAIO PCG-7191L Battery
According to his autobiography, it was while he was in bed with a fever that Wallace thought about Thomas Malthus's idea of positive checks on human population growth and came up with the idea of natural selection.[64] Wallace said in his autobiography that he was on the island of Ternate at the time;
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but historians have questioned this, saying that on the basis of the journal he kept at the time, he was on the island of Gilolo.[65] From 1858 to 1861 he rented a house on Ternate from the Dutchman M.D. van Renesse van Duivenbode. He used this house as a base camp for expeditions to other islands such as Gilolo.[66] Sony VAIO PCG-3F1M Battery
Wallace describes how he discovered natural selection as follows:
It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, Sony VAIO PCG-3H1M Battery
since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? Sony VAIO PCG-3J1M Battery
And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... Sony VAIO PCG-8141M Battery
In this way every part of an animals organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained.
Wallace had once briefly met Darwin, and was one of the correspondents whose observations Darwin used to support his own theories. Sony VAIO PCG-8161M Battery
Although Wallace's first letter to Darwin has been lost, Wallace carefully kept the letters he received.[68] In the first letter, dated 1 May 1857, Darwin commented that Wallace's letter of 10 October which he had recently received, as well as Wallace's paper "On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species" of 1855, Sony VAIO PCG-3C2M Battery
showed that they were both thinking alike and to some extent reaching similar conclusions, and said that he was preparing his own work for publication in about two years time.[69] The second letter, dated 22 December 1857, said how glad he was that Wallace was theorising about distribution, Sony VAIO PCG-5N2M Battery
adding that "without speculation there is no good and original observation" while commenting that "I believe I go much further than you".[70] Wallace trusted Darwin's opinion on the matter and sent him his February 1858 essay, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type", with the request that Darwin would review it and pass it on to Charles Lyell if he thought it worthwhile.[71] Sony VAIO PCG-5P1M Battery
On 18 June 1858, Darwin received the manuscript from Wallace. While Wallace's essay did not employ Darwin's term "natural selection", it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was very similar to the theory that Darwin had worked on for twenty years, but had yet to publish.Sony PCG-31211T Battery
Darwin sent the manuscript to Charles Lyell with a letter saying "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters ... he does not say he wishes me to publish, but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to any journal."[72] Distraught about the illness of his baby son, Sony PCG-31311T Battery
Darwin put the problem to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who decided to publish the essay in a joint presentation together with unpublished writings which highlighted Darwin's priority. Wallace had not asked for publication of his essay, but publishing the contents of letters from far-off naturalists was a common event in those times. Sony PCG-51111T Battery
Wallace's essay was presented to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, along with excerpts from an essay which Darwin had disclosed privately to Hooker in 1847 and a letter Darwin had written to Asa Gray in 1857.[73]
Communication with Wallace in far-off Malay was impossible without months of delay, so he was not part of this rapid publication. Sony PCG-81111T Battery
Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, happy that he had been included at all, and never expressed public or private bitterness. Darwin's social and scientific status was far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that, without Darwin, Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken seriously. Sony PCG-81311T Battery
Lyell and Hooker's arrangement relegated Wallace to the position of co-discoverer, and he was not the social equal of Darwin or the other prominent British natural scientists. However, the joint reading of their papers on natural selection associated Wallace with the more famous Darwin. This, combined with Darwin's (as well as Hooker's and Lyell's) advocacy on his behalf, Sony VPCF138FC Battery
would give Wallace greater access to the highest levels of the scientific community.[74] The reaction to the reading was muted, with the president of the Linnean remarking in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any striking discoveries;[75] but, with Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species later in 1859, its significance became apparent. Sony VPCF219FC Battery
When Wallace returned to the UK, he met Darwin. Although some of Wallace's iconoclastic opinions in the ensuing years would test Darwin's patience, they remained on friendly terms for the rest of Darwin's life. Over the years, a few people have questioned this version of events. In the early 1980s, two books, one written by Arnold Brackman and another by John Langdon Brooks, Sony VPCS135EC Battery
even suggested not only that there had been a conspiracy to rob Wallace of his proper credit, but that Darwin had actually stolen a key idea from Wallace to finish his own theory. These claims have been examined in detail by a number of scholars who have not found them to be convincing. Sony VPCS136EC Battery
Research into shipping schedules has shown that, contrary to these accusations, Wallace's letter could not have been delivered earlier than the date shown in Darwin's letter to Lyell.
After the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Wallace became one of its staunchest defenders on his return to England in 1862. Sony VPCS138EC Battery
In one incident in 1863 that particularly pleased Darwin, Wallace published the short paper "Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species" in order to rebuke a paper by a professor of geology at the University of Dublin that had sharply criticised Darwin's comments in the Origin on how hexagonal honey bee cells could have evolved through natural selection.[80] Sony VPCS139GC Battery
An even lengthier defence of Darwin's work was "Creation by Law", a review Wallace wrote in 1867 for The Quarterly Journal of Science of the book The Reign of Law, which had been written by George Campbell, the 8th Duke of Argyll, as a refutation of natural selection.[81] After an 1870 meeting of the British Association, Sony VPCYA15EC Battery
Wallace wrote to Darwin complaining that there were "no opponents left who know anything of natural history, so that there are none of the good discussions we used to have."
Historians of science have noted that, while Darwin considered the ideas in Wallace's paper to be essentially the same as his own, there were differences.[83] Sony VPCYA16EC Battery
Darwin emphasised competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, whereas Wallace emphasised environmental pressures on varieties and species forcing them to become adapted to their local environment. Sony VPCYA25EC Battery
Others have noted that another difference was that Wallace appeared to have envisioned natural selection as a kind of feedback mechanism keeping species and varieties adapted to their environment.They point to a largely overlooked passage of Wallace's famous 1858 paper: Sony VPCYA26EC Battery
The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow. Sony VPCYB15JC Battery
The cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson would observe in the 1970s that, though writing it only as an example, Wallace had "probably said the most powerful thing that'd been said in the 19th Century".[87] Bateson revisited the topic in his 1979 book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and other scholars have continued to explore the connection between natural selection and systems theory. Sony VPCYA17GH/R Battery
In 1867, Darwin wrote to Wallace about a problem he was having understanding how some caterpillars could have evolved conspicuous colour schemes. Darwin had come to believe that sexual selection, an agency to which Wallace did not attribute the same importance as Darwin did, explained many conspicuous animal colour schemes. Sony VPCCW2S8E/W Battery
However, Darwin realised that this could not apply to caterpillars. Wallace responded that he and Henry Bates had observed that many of the most spectacular butterflies had a peculiar odour and taste, and that he had been told by John Jenner Weir that birds would not eat a certain kind of common white moth because they found it unpalatable. Sony VPCCW2Z1E/B Battery
"Now, as the white moth is as conspicuous at dusk as a coloured caterpillar in the daylight", Wallace wrote back to Darwin that it seemed likely that the conspicuous colour scheme served as a warning to predators and thus could have evolved through natural selection. Darwin was impressed by the idea. At a subsequent meeting of the Entomological Society, Sony VPCY11S1E Battery
Wallace asked for any evidence anyone might have on the topic. In 1869, Weir published data from experiments and observations involving brightly coloured caterpillars that supported Wallace's idea. Warning colouration was one of a number of contributions Wallace made in the area of the evolution of animal colouration in general and the concept of protective colouration in particular. Sony VPCY11S1E/S Battery
It was also part of a lifelong disagreement Wallace had with Darwin over the importance of sexual selection. In his 1878 book Tropical Nature and Other Essays, he wrote extensively on the colouration of animals and plants and proposed alternative explanations for a number of cases Darwin had attributed to sexual selection. Sony VPCW1 Battery
He revisited the topic at length in his 1889 book Darwinism. In 1890, he wrote a critical review in Nature of his friend Edward Bagnall Poulton'sThe Colours of Animals which supported Darwin on sexual selection, attacking especially Poulton's claims on the "æsthetic preferences of the insect world".Sony VPCW1E8R/BU Battery
In 1889, Wallace wrote the book Darwinism, which explained and defended natural selection. In it, he proposed the hypothesis that natural selection could drive the reproductive isolation of two varieties by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. Thus it might contribute to the development of new species. He suggested the following scenario. Sony VPCY11AGJ Battery
When two populations of a species had diverged beyond a certain point, each adapted to particular conditions, hybrid offspring would be less well-adapted than either parent form and, at that point, natural selection will tend to eliminate the hybrids. Furthermore, under such conditions, natural selection would favour the development of barriers to hybridisation, Sony VPCY11AHJ Battery
as individuals that avoided hybrid matings would tend to have more fit offspring, and thus contribute to the reproductive isolation of the two incipient species. This idea came to be known as the Wallace effect.[91] Wallace had suggested to Darwin that natural selection could play a role in preventing hybridization in private correspondence as early as 1868, Sony VPCY11AVJ Battery
but had not worked it out to this level of detail.[92] It continues to be a topic of research in evolutionary biology today, with both computer simulation and empirical results supporting its validity.
In 1864, Wallace published a paper, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection'", applying the theory to humankind. Sony VPCY11M1E Battery
Darwin had not yet publicly addressed the subject, although Thomas Huxley had in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. He explained the apparent stability of the human stock by pointing to the vast gap in cranial capacities between humans and the great apes. Unlike some other Darwinists, including Darwin himself, Sony VPCY11S1E Battery
he did not "regard modern primitives as almost filling the gap between man and ape".[94] He saw the evolution of man in two stages: achieving a bipedal posture freeing the hands to carry out the dictates of the brain, and the "recognition of the human brain as a totally new factor in the history of life. Sony VPCY11V9E Battery
Wallace was apparently the first evolutionist to recognize clearly that...with the emergence of that bodily specialization which constitutes the human brain, bodily specialization itself might be said to be outmoded."[94] For this paper he won Darwin's praise.
Shortly afterwards, Wallace became a spiritualist. At about the same time, Sony VPCY11V9E/S Battery
he began to maintain that natural selection cannot account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, as well as metaphysical musings, and wit and humour. He eventually said that something in "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded at least three times in history. The first was the creation of life from inorganic matter. Sony VPCY219FJ/S Battery
The second was the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals. And the third was the generation of the higher mental faculties in mankind. He also believed that the raison d'être of the universe was the development of the human spirit.[95] These views greatly disturbed Darwin, who argued that spiritual appeals were not necessary and that sexual selection could easily explain apparently non-adaptive mental phenomena. Sony VPCY21AFJ Battery
While some historians have concluded that Wallace's belief that natural selection was insufficient to explain the development of consciousness and the human mind was directly caused by his adoption of spiritualism, other Wallace scholars have disagreed, and some maintain that Wallace never believed natural selection applied to those areas. Sony VPCY21AGJ Battery
Reaction to Wallace's ideas on this topic among leading naturalists at the time varied. Charles Lyell endorsed Wallace's views on human evolution rather than Darwin's.[98][99] Wallace's belief that human consciousness could not be entirely a product of purely material causes was shared by a number of prominent intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sony VPCY21AHJ Battery
However, many, including Huxley, Hooker, and Darwin himself, were critical of Wallace.[101] As the historian of science Michael Shermer has stated, Wallace's views in this area were at odds with two major tenets of the emerging Darwinian philosophy, which were that evolution was not teleological (purpose driven) and that it was not anthropocentric (human centered) Sony VPCY21AVJ Battery
Much later in his life Wallace returned to these themes, that evolution suggested that the universe might have a purpose and that certain aspects of living organisms might not be explainable in terms of purely materialistic processes, in a 1909 magazine article entitled The World of Life, which he later expanded into a book of the same name; Sony VPCY21S1E/L Battery
a work that Shermer said anticipated some ideas about design in nature and directed evolution that would arise from various religious traditions throughout the 20th century.
In many accounts of the development of evolutionary theory, Wallace is mentioned only in passing as simply being the stimulus to the publication of Darwin's own theory.[104] Sony VPCY21S1E/P Battery
In reality, Wallace developed his own distinct evolutionary views which diverged from Darwin's, and was considered by many (especially Darwin) to be a leading thinker on evolution in his day, whose ideas could not be ignored. One historian of science has pointed out that, through both private correspondence and published works, Sony VPCY21S1E/SI Battery
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