Why does Darwin get all the credit for coming up with evolution when his contemporary, Alfred Russell Wallace, came up with the theory first?

Maybe because when Wallace had published a letter on his thoughts towards evolution, Darwin had already written two volumes of work on the subject at over 250,000 words.  Darwin, in fact, received Wallace’s sketch before its publication. He realized immediately that Wallace, if the publication were to continue, was to be given credit for a theory that Darwin had come up with over a decade ago, but had not bothered to publish.

 

Darwin knew that Wallace had a right to publish his work, but he also knew that he had written much more extensively about the subject. Thinking in a self-interested matter, he thought of trying to block the publication of Wallace’s sketch, but ruled against it, since it would go not only against the spirit of the scientific revolution, but also against Darwin’s personal values.

 

Also, Darwin did not want the eventual publication of his volumes to be tainted a public that would perceive him as petty.

 

But Wallace revisionists like saying that he preceded Darwin. This seems to discredit Darwin, even though it should not. Between the two men, Darwin clearly came up with the theory first, understood it better, and wrote more about it.

 

Darwin was a superior scientists to Wallace in every sense of the word and deserved, and continues to deserve, the accolades that have been bestowed on him.

 

These revisionists also like to say that it was clear in Darwin’s time that evolution existed because of the recent discovery of fossils that demonstrated species ancestral to human beings. Around that time, Thomas Huxley would be lecturing in London about where Homo sapiens were meant to be placed in the animal kingdom’s family tree. (Darwin would avoid the issue for most of his career.)

 

Huxley’s argument revolved around the established notion that humans were primates, and closely related to chimps and gorillas.

 

OK, but knowing that evolution affected humans wasn’t really the point of Darwin’s work, just like knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun is a long, winding road away from understanding Newton’s laws of motion. Evolution isn’t about the progress from monkey to man, just as Newton’s laws of motion aren’t about hitting baseballs into the outfield.

 

Yes, Newton’s laws apply to baseball, but they’re really about motion.

 

Yes, Darwin’s principles apply to humanity, but they’re not about humanity specifically. They’re about evolution. And evolution is about information, digital information. It’s always about the information.

 

                                                                                            (to be continued soon with DNA: Best. Molecule. Ever.)