On October 2, 1836, Her Graceful Majesty’s ship HMS Beagle moored in Falmouth, after 5 years and 2 days of traveling through South America. An aged Charles Darwin got out of it. His father, as soon as he saw him, exclaimed: “The shape of his head has completely changed!”
After his arrival and in just six months he wrote his famous Research Diary, which became one of the best travel books of all time . In those early years he classified his collections and explained the formation of coral reefs. In July 1837 he began a series of notebooks on what he called the transmutation of species . Fifteen months later he had come up with a theory as to how it could have happened. Remembering the Galápagos finches, he realized that for the transmutation of an isolated population to take place, some change in the environment had to take place. But what mechanism explained these adaptations? Darwin had studied the mechanisms of selection in domestic animals and cultivated plants, but could not understand “how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature,” he wrote. But one day, while “looking for some distraction reading Malthus’s work on population”, he found the answer (we must be eternally grateful to Darwin’s peculiar way of distracting himself). This English clergyman defended that the population always grows faster than the food resources, so that there will always be someone who will die of hunger. There was the key! All animals produce more offspring than can live on the available food . Therefore, some have to die. Which? Those that adapt worse to the environment in which they live. Darwin baptized this mechanism with the name of natural selection.
Darwin begins to write the book
In 1844 he set out to tell the world about the discoveries that for five years aboard the Beagle led him to the mechanism that guides the evolution of species. But Darwin was not a man in a hurry and after 14 years he still hadn’t finished it. Until then he had only written a “brief” summary -according to his standards- of 35 pages and an essay of 230 where he included an enormous volume of data that confirmed his theory. Actually we can consider it a draft of his magnum opus which, by the way, he intended to title it… Summary of an essay on the origin of species and varieties through natural selection ! Nobody, except his friend and botanist Joseph D. Hooker, had access to him and for 12 years, until 1856, he limited himself to amassing data and publishing 4 monographs on barnacles .
On May 14, 1856, encouraged by Charles Lyell -the best geologist in England- and Hooker, he began to write his definitive work entitled Natural Selection . It was to be a monumental work, 4 to 5 times longer than The Origin of Species , implying 2,500 pages. Two years later he had finished 10 chapters and was about to finish the eleventh on pigeons when he received a letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russell Wallace.
Wallace springs into action
For eight years Wallace had covered more than 20,000 kilometers spread between the Moluccas, Sumatra, Java, New Guinea and many other islands. The abundance of his scientific contributions created an excellent reputation for him as a biologist in his native England. But his greatest discovery was yet to come. In 1855, while in Borneo, he came up with the idea that species must change over time . Three years later he concluded that the changes are produced by natural selection, which he baptized as the survival of the fittest . Interestingly, he came to this conclusion following the same path as Darwin: after reading Malthus ‘ Essay on the Principles of Population .
In February 1858, on one of the islands of the Malay archipelago, our dear English adventurer, wrapped in a blanket waiting for his malaria attack to pass, set out to write down his ideas about the origin of species, the problem that it had haunted him for eleven years. Once recovered, Wallace, much more dynamic than the calm Darwin, sat down and in two days finished the article entitled On the tendency of varieties to deviate indefinitely from the original type . He put the pages in an envelope and sent it off to be reviewed by the most famous naturalist of the day, Charles Darwin.
The ‘delicate arrangement’
Darwin’s surprise was capital : what Wallace had written were his own ideas, some of them expressed in a similar way. Overwhelmed, he thought a lot about what to do with that manuscript. In the end he asked Lyell and Hooker for advice: he would do what they thought was a decent solution. This led to what has been called the ‘ delicate arrangement’ : presenting Wallace’s article and the excerpt of two letters from Darwin in which he had outlined his views on the subject before the Linnean Society . Although Wallace’s paper was the only one actually submitted to the society, Lyell and Hooker managed to get Darwin’s letters published first. Moreover, calling it an arrangement is too much of an exaggeration, since Wallace had no idea of such an arrangement until a year later. Interestingly, both articles went completely unnoticed, to the point that the president of the society would write in his annual report that 1858 had been a particularly dull year as far as scientific discoveries were concerned.
The following year the bomb exploded: Darwin finished his long-awaited book. The first edition of The Origin of Species consisted of 1,250 copies sold at 15 shillings each: it sold out the next day. Darwin ended up putting the human being in his rightful place in nature and ceased to be the center of creation. And that, of course, many did not like.
References:
Darwin, C. (2019), Autobiography, Nordic Books
Van Wyhe, J. (2018), Darwin, Anaya
Milner, R. (1990) The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity’s Search for Its Origins, Facts on File
