And Wikipedia – so often the first stop online if you’re gathering information about topics that aren’t directly addressed by TMZ – is surely the place to look for those numbers.įor some time, an independent website aggregated Wikipedia page hit data, and presented results graphically. Realizing, over years of writing and lecturing about Wallace, that I typically glibly asserted that, “Darwin is famous Wallace isn’t,” I decided to try to back up that claim with some numbers. What I want to do is introduce a very 21 st century metric of fame in an attempt to quantify that eclipse. There are plenty of interesting (and contested) reasons for Wallace’s eclipse, and it’s not my intention to discuss them here. People know him as the “other guy.” He lives on in footnotes of biology textbooks, and is often discussed in exactly the terms of this very issue: how come these days all the credit for evolution is laid at Darwin’s door with little or no mention of Wallace? Indeed, Wallace is sometimes described as “Famous for not being famous.” Having said that, it’s not as though Wallace has altogether disappeared. In terms of posterity, Darwin has well and truly trumped eclipsed (what a pity it is to have to avoid perfectly good words because of their unspeakable newfound associations) Wallace. Google “Evolution,” and it’s Darwin’s lugubrious bearded face that stares out at you from the search results, not Wallace’s rather less gloomy (but eventually equally bearded) visage. Given this history, it’s perhaps surprising that Darwin is so much more famous today than Wallace. Historical precedence (he came up with the theory first)? Alphabetical order? Or ranking by seniority (both in terms of age and scientific standing)? The listing in table of contents of the Linnean Society’s journal of the Darwin-Wallace publication. The idea, after all, had been published, and, also, his stock had just gone up in scientific circles now that he was associated with someone as esteemed and senior as Darwin. Wallace, by now in New Guinea, knew nothing of these machinations, but was happy, retrospectively, to give them his blessing. The product was an unusual paper: it’s not strictly speaking a joint publication, but, rather, two independent statements in the same paper of the same idea. Darwin’s precedence was rescued, however, by the intervention by two friends, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who arranged for a paper to be presented shortly afterwards at London’s Linnean Society, featuring Wallace’s manuscript and some hastily cobbled together material from Darwin. In 1858, Wallace sent an outline of his ideas to Darwin, who was duly shocked to find himself about to be scooped. The result of this academic convergent evolution was a famous and oft recounted episode in the history of science. While Darwin was slowly grinding through the production of a major book on the subject – his summary of twenty years of thought and analysis – Wallace was in the field in Indonesia pondering similar issues. I suggested he write it up as a post for this site, and he kindly obliged:Īlfred Russel Wallace & Charles Darwin: the Wikipedia Page Hit DataĬompletely independently of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection. JAC: Last week my friend Andrew Berry, a lecturer at Harvard and expert on Darwin and, especially, Alfred Russel Wallace, was telling me about some interesting data he’d gleaned from Wikipedia about the two Fathers of Evolution.
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