![]() While Darwin was slowly preparing On the Origin of Species for publication, he received, supposedly on June 18, 1858, a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. She was referring to a well known incident involving a famous letter. ”If you had Darwin here at the table,” I said, “and could ask him one question, what would it be?” Janet didn’t hesitate in her answer: “I’d like to know about the missing letter from Wallace.” I once had dinner with Janet Browne, author of what I think is the best biography of Darwin (it’s in two volumes do read it!), and took the opportunity to ask her a question. © 2011 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 249–252.įrom Jerry Coyne's post Did Darwin plagiarize Wallace?: ![]() Wallace's Ternate essay and extracts from Darwin's theoretical manuscripts were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, which is now recognized as a milestone in the history of science. Darwin is thus vindicated from accusations of deceit. We intend to show that Wallace in fact sent the Ternate essay on the mail steamer of April 1858, for which the postal connections actually indicate the letter to have arrived precisely on 18 June. Darwin has been accused of keeping the essay secret for a fortnight, thereby enabling him to revise elements of his theory of evolution. This sequence was cast in doubt after the discovery of a letter written by Wallace to Bates leaving on the same steamer with postmarks showing its arrival in Leicester on 3 June 1858. Darwin immediately wrote to Lyell, as requested by Wallace, forwarding the essay. ![]() For many years it was believed that the Ternate essay left the island in March on the monthly mail steamer, and arrived at Down House on 18 June 1858. In early 1858, when he was in the Moluccas, Wallace drafted an essay to explain evolution by natural selection and posted it to Darwin. ![]() Mendel's conclusions left no room for blending inheritance that Darwin believed to occur. The final two paragraphs argued that the transference of characteristics amongst cultivated plants, such as the edible pea, can be accomplished and seems to occur by discrete integral steps which if accumulating in one species of plant could ‘transform’ it into a different species. Of course it needed confirmation by further experimentation, but in view of the unity in the developmental plan of all organic life one may assume it to be correct. Darwin said that: ‘Mathematics in biology was like a scalpel in a carpenter's shop – there was no use for it.’ The concluding remarks of the paper made quite far reaching claims that the author had discovered laws that could predict the appearance of the different hybrid characters in successive generations of the edible pea, and that this would probably apply to other plant species. But these results were given in a mathematical form that might have put Darwin off from reading any more of the article. If Darwin had received and read Mendel's article, he would have found a detailed analysis of the frequencies observed for different inherited traits from generation to generation of the edible pea. Darwin was writing (and receiving) letters on a daily basis about issues and problems of natural history. Where were the other remaining reprints sent (about 29)? At the time Darwin's house in Kent was a sort of communication hub for European naturalists. (see: my peer reviewed paper for this new evidence ). However, newly available Big Data research techniques reveal solid evidence, from the independently verifiable published literature, that Matthew’s (1831) book was, in fact, (all pre 1858) cited by other naturalists known to Darwin/Wallace – including Loudon (who edited and published two of Blyth’s influential papers), Robert Chambers (who wrote the highly influential book on evolution – the Vestiges of Creation) and Prideaux John Selby (who edited and published Wallace’s Sarawak paper). And because Dawkins demands that Matthew should have “trumpeted his discovery from the rooftops” at a time of great social unrest and tension when his political ideas, linked to and including his natural selection discovery, were criminally seditious and heretical. ![]() Ignoring the convention of priority, and specifically ignoring the Arago Effect, Richard Dawkins (2010) and others have created a new, unique in the history of scientific discovery, “Dawkins’ Demand Rule”, which is that Dawkins demands that Matthew should not have priority over Darwin and Wallace because it was previously their mere un-evidenced ‘knowledge belief’ that Matthew’s unique views went unnoticed. ![]()
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