Richard Russel Wallace, one of A. R. Wallace's two grandsons and one of the three permanent members of the Wallace Memorial Fund, asked me to post the text of a letter he recently wrote to The Times which they didn't print. It is a comment about an article by Kate Muir which was published in The Times on July 19. The article is all about Richard Dawkins and his Channel 4 series on Darwin, the first programme of which will be broadcast tomorrow. What Richard Wallace especially objected to (I do as well) is the following sentence in Muir's article:- "The Dawkins on Darwin programme – note who gets the first namecheck – was commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the presentation to the Linnean Society in London of Darwin’s paper on his theory of evolution, and the bicentennial of his birth next year." [Click HERE to read the full article]
This is what Richard Wallace's wrote to the Editor of The Times on 20th July 2008:-
"Dear Sir,
I read Kate Muir's article on Richard Dawkins with interest and look forward to his forthcoming series on Channel Four next month. However, I cannot let the paragraph about "the anniversary of the presentation of Darwin's paper on his theory of evolution" go unchallenged. What paper? This presumably was the paper sent by my grandfather Alfred Russel Wallace to Darwin, setting out the theory, lucidly and cogently, with the request that Darwin should have it published if he thought well of it. This he did, on 1st July 1858 at the Linnean Society. The rest is history.
It would seem that once again Wallace, that great Victorian naturalist and thinker, is to be conveniently airbrushed out of the scenario!
Yours with some resentment.
[signed] Richard Russel Wallace"
I will be watching the Channel 4 series carefully to see how accurate (or otherwise) Dawkins' account of the history of the discovery is....
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