Richard Dawkins champions Alfred Wallace!

In last night's episode of the British TV company Channel4's series "Genius of Britain" (episode 3) Richard Dawkins gave a brief but good biography of Wallace and an account of the events surrounding Wallace's independent discovery of natural selection and the co-publication of this theory with Charles Darwin (to watch it click here: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/genius-of-britain/episode-guide/series-1/episode-3). Unfortunately, Dawkins makes the common mistake of saying that although the theory was co-published with Darwin in the infamous Linnean Society paper of 1858 very little notice was taken of it etc etc etc....and it was only when Darwin published his great work Origin of Species 15 months later that everyone suddenly took notice. This inaccurate account of the historical events has been repeated over and over again by historians of science and others and it is only if one examines the primary sources (and a few enlightened secondary ones) that one realises that this is a Whiggish view of history. Here is something I have already written about this pernicious myth (taken from http://wallacefund.info/faqs-myths-misconceptions):-

"Misconception: The Darwin-Wallace paper of 1858 generated very little interest after its publication.

Correction: This myth probably originated from one, or both, of two sources. The first was the famous disingenuous statement made by Thomas Bell, the President of the Linnean Society, in his presidential report published in 1859 i.e. that “The year which has passed [1858] has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.” It seems likely that his comment was intended to be a slight aimed at the Darwin-Wallace paper, but many have taken it at face value. It is frequently quoted by writers who wish to downplay the significance of the 1858 paper. The second is a well known remark made by Darwin in his autobiography:- "...our joint productions excited very little attention, and the only published notice of them which I can remember was by Professor Haughton of Dublin, whose verdict was that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old. This shows how necessary it is that any new view should be explained at considerable length in order to arouse public attention." Well, he would say that given that he was the author of a large book on the subject! Darwin's memory must have been failing him, since it is known that he discussed many of the comments published about his and Wallace's paper in letters to his friends and colleagues in 1858 and 1859 (see his published correspondence).

This is what Darwin expert Janet Browne has to say regarding the impact of the paper: "The double paper appeared in the Linnean Society Journal (in the zoological section) in August 1858. During the next two or three months it was reprinted either in full or in part in several popular natural history magazines of the day. A number of people made their views known in letters, reviews, and journals. There were more notices than usually assumed.

Richard Owen, for example, referred to the paper in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Leeds in September 1858, praising Wallace's explanation of the way varieties replace one another, although hastily adding that there was no reason to think that this accounted for the origin of species. Owen's published address had a wide circulation.....Another acquaintance of Darwin's, the botanist Hewett Cottrell Watson, added an excitable word or two about the new theory to the next volume of his series on British plants, Cybele Britannica. And when extracts from Darwin's and Wallace's papers were reprinted in the popular magazine Zoologist, only a few correspondents raised their eyebrows....A young naturalist called Alfred Newton, a junior fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, sat up late into the night clutching his copy of the Journal. "I shall never forget the impression it made on me," he wrote afterwards. "Herein was contained a perfectly simple solution of all the difficulties which had been troubling me for months." Within a week he persuaded his college friend, a trainee ordinand, Henry Tristram, to agree, and Tristram prepared a short paper on the birds of North Africa for the influential ornithological journal Ibis....Hooker published comments on Darwin's and Wallace's evolutionary views in the substantial essay on Tasmanian plants that he was compiling....There, he announced his support for "the ingenious and original reasonings and theories by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace." (Browne, J. 2002. The power of place. Vol. 2 of Charles Darwin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)."