Alfred Wallace was a young naturalist from a working-class
background who made his living as a collector in the New and Old
World tropics. His travel and natural history writings were well-know to
Darwin. In February 1858,
while working in the Moluccas
Islands of the Malay Peninsula, and in the grip of a
malaria-induced fever, the central features of the concept of
Natural Selection as Darwin had
already conceived them occurred to him. He drafted an
abstract of his theory and sent it to Darwin by mail. The day
after receipt of the essay, Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell, "I never saw a more
striking coincidence... If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in
1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! ... Even
his terms now stand as heads of my chapters..."
Darwin was
strongly inclined to give priority for the theory to Wallace.
Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, knowing of his long-withheld work on
the same subject, prevailed upon Darwin to publish together with Wallace. They
transmitted Wallace's essay "On the Tendency of Varieties
to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" along with an
abstract of Darwin's sketches to
the Linnaean Society, where they were read together on 01
July 1858. The reading made no impact. Darwin began intensive work
on his "Big Book": Origin of Species
was published 15 months later
in November 1859.
Wallace
and Darwin remained close friends, and it was Wallace who proposed the unfortunate phrase "survival
of the fittest", which Darwin included in the fourth
edition of the Origin. Wallace was one of
the pallbearers at Darwin's funeral in 1881 at Westminster Abbey.
Wallace lived to see the re-discovery of Mendelian genetic
principles, but like others at the time tended to dismiss them as
irrelevant to Darwinian evolution.
