Monday, October 09, 2006
Matthewism. Lindqvist, Wallace and Darwin
In his latest collection of essays, “Fadern, sonen och den heliga motorcykeln” (2006), Sven Lindqvist writes about Charles Darwin’s famous stomach problems. He contends that it was no wonder that Darwin vomited in the mornings, considering the terrible secret he was carrying for several decades, until Alfred Russell Wallace (photo) forced him to “come out of the closet” with evolution by natural selection.
Actually Wallace is often placed in the shadow of Darwin, which is somewhat unlucky. He had stated the theory of evoultion by natural selection just as good as or even somewhat better than Darwin. He had suffered more than Darwin in his travels, almost dying in fever and being shipwrecked and losing all his natural collections and notes. He is one of the true heroes of the development of biological science.
As Lindqvist points out, the first person to come up with the theory of natural selection, three decades earlier, was actually neither Darwin nor Wallace, but Patrick Matthew. Matthew was an author of a book of ship timber, and thought natural selection was quite self-evident and nothing to make a big affair out of, so he put the theory in a foot note. So evolution by natural selection might just as well have been called Matthewism.
// posted by The beaver @ 7:08 PM 
