Science Literature

Here's some gripping reading for your summer vacation!

The Darwin Conspiracy by Roy Davies (2008)

This publication marks the 150th anniversary of the joint presentation of Darwin and Wallace of their thinking about evolution by natural selection to the Linnean Society. The book is a blockbuster because it claims that "Darwin perpetuated one of the greatest crimes in the history of science". It concludes that Darwin plagiarised Alfred Russel Wallace, deceived the world about the maturity of his own ideas before 1858, and, to satisfy his personal need for glory, failed to give credit to scholars who influenced his thinking.

It needs someone with remarkable abilities to put together such a radical revision of history. The author's experience is in writing, producing and directing documentaries that challenge popular historical narratives. During the 1980s, he was responsible for a TV programme about Darwin that presented a story that was and is widely accepted:

"Darwin [was] a nervous man who concealed the secret of how species originate for more than twenty years, until he was forced to publish when he realised someone else might get there before him. The programme was called The Devil's Chaplain."

Since that time, Davies has come to reject this account as iconic.

"Today, having researched the Darwin record for myself and having been utterly convinced by what I have learned, I believe [. . .] that the original programme (which went out under my name) left a great deal of new information about Darwin unmentioned. If I had known then what I know now, The Devil's Chaplain would never have been made. What you are about to read is the story leading up to the discovery of the origin of species, which I would eagerly have transmitted in its place."

Being a natural sceptic of conspiracy theories, I read this book cautiously - 'convince me if you can!' By the end, I was persuaded. What impressed me was the way Davies drew on the research of numerous Darwin scholars, showing that although they discovered important aspects of Darwin's life and work, they were unable to package their findings into a coherent whole. The person who came closest was Arnold Brackman, who concluded in 1980 that Darwin did plagiarise Wallace. It is the 'big picture' that Davies provides for the first time, and my title makes reference to the earlier eye-opening research papers.

The first researcher to be discussed in the book is Professor Darlington of Oxford University. He sought an answer to the question "by what thought process had Charles Darwin actually arrived at his ideas about evolution?".

"Darlington pointed out that he could not find, in all the accounts of Darwin's work published up to that time, any suggestion that some original germ in Darwin's mind had led inexorably to the full development and enunciation of this big idea."

Darlington recognised that Darwin's writings bore the marks of rhetoric. For example, "Darwin's unawareness of what his contemporaries were thinking matched his unawareness of what his predecessors had written". This comment is highly significant for what comes later, because Darwin was very concerned about gaining precedence for his own ideas and he consistently referred to "my theory".

The second scholar is the anthropologist Loren Eiseley. He identified a mismatch between the time (October 1838) when Darwin read Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population (which Darwin claimed "Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work. . .") and yet 18 months earlier he was already making notes on the very same ideas? After noting many similarities between the way Edward Blyth reported data in his published articles and the wording in Darwin's notebook about these same phenomena, Eiseley came to the conclusion that Darwin had lifted Blyth's thinking about natural selection - without acknowledgement.

"Eiseley believed, even making some allowance for the accidental use of the same sources, that the effect of his research was cumulative. He argued that these many similarities could not be explained by chance and that Darwin had plundered Blyth's articles for the ideas which underpinned the thinking that led to On the Origin of Species."

Barbara Beddall set out to refute Eiseley's suggestion that Darwin had plagiarised Blyth. She particularly wanted to find the letters between Wallace and Darwin - but found that some were missing. She also found, in the period 1853-8, that other letters to Lyell, to Hooker and to Asa Gray were lost. This, in her opinion, was "very odd". She came to the conclusion that they had been deliberately destroyed to obscure the record of how Darwin formulated his theory. She commented: "Without these letters, a clear idea of the extent of Wallace's influence on Darwin is beyond academic assessment and the full story impossible to gauge". But the jigsaw that Davies has assembled does have a clearer picture so that the significance of the missing letters is not "odd" but part of a pattern.

"The idea that it might have been Darwin himself [who destroyed the letters] seems not to have occurred to her."

Altogether, Davies features the work of nine researchers, with each contributing one or more pieces to the jigsaw. This review cannot do justice to the way the arguments develop. Here is just one more nugget. It concerns another letter of Wallace dated 2 March 1858. We know it was posted at the same time as his momentous letter to Darwin that contained the short paper that was presented at the Linnaean meeting in on 1st July that same year. Darwin claimed the letter reached him on 18 June, the same day that he wrote to Lyell to say that Wallace could not have written a better abstract for Darwin's own work. However, as Davies shows, we now have a complete timeline for the transport of this letter from the Dutch East Indies to its arrival in the UK, and the date-stamped envelope of the other letter posted along with the letter to Darwin. These date stamps show that the letter arrived in the UK on 2 June - on course for delivery to the addressee on the following day. Davies writes: "

The arrival of Wallace's letter on 3 June would have given Darwin more than enough time to digest its contents and make the two lengthy changes to the "natural selection" chapter of his manuscript. It would also have allowed him to claim that Wallace's ideas were replicas of his own."

Most people coming across this for the first time will be incredulous, thinking that Darwin's ideas on evolution by natural selection before this time were well documented. Davies shows that this is erroneous. This is why his 'big picture' is so important: Darwin was like a man groping in the dark. He gathered data, hoping to find a synthesis, but theoretical ideas were elusive. When he came across other people's ideas that helped to make sense of the data, he gathered them as well, treating them as his own. The plagiarism of Wallace was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of behaviour.

There are really two conspiracies in this book. Lyell and Hooker played a significant role (not in plagiarising, but in engineering circumstances to favour their gentleman friend).

"The members [of the Linnean Society] agreed that Darwin and Wallace should be acknowledged as co-discoverers of the theory of how species evolve, which would henceforth be known as the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution. The crucial question of priority was settled by placing Darwin's name before Wallace's. Lyell and Hooker had successfully conspired to hand Charles Darwin the proze he had coveted for more than twenty years."

Alfred Russel Wallace in Singapore in 1862 (Source here)

Wallace emerges as the real hero. He could easily be made a role model for young scientists. Davies refers to him as a "brilliant yet unassuming naturalist who was never to comprehend the full extent of the conspiracy enacted against him".

Clearly, if Davies' argument is correct, the iconic Darwin needs to be dethroned. When this is accomplished, we will be in a better position to reappraise his significance as a scientist. In the meantime, here is a summary paragraph from Davies:
"Charles Darwin was a very secretive man with a driving ambition. He neither praised nor tipped his hat in the direction of Jean-Baptiste Lamark or of his grandfather Erasmus. He never openly acknowledged his debt to Edward Blyth, nor to Patrick Matthew (who had been one of the first to write about the 'natural means of selection', a phrase that Darwin modified and used without attribution). He never acknowledged his debt to Wallace. By the time Eiseley, Gruber, Beddall, McKinney, Brackman and Brooks began reassembling the long-lost pieces of the jigsaw, the myth-making surrounding Darwin's achievement, which had so worried Darlington in 1959, was complete."

Book Reviewed:
The Darwin Conspiracy - Origins of a Scientific Crime, by Roy Davies, Golden Square Books. May 2008.

Links:

The Darwin Conspiracy Home page

Tyler, D, Charles Darwin - Icon of Evolution, ARN Literature Blog, 30 June 2008

Tyler, D., Why Alfred Russel Wallace deserves to be remembered,ARN Literature Blog, 11 March 2008

Flannery, M. Science or Monkey Business?: A Review of Roy Davies' The Darwin Conspiracy, Uncommon Descent, 1 August 2008

Update:

Wright, T. Alfred Russel Wallace's Fans Gear Up for a Darwinian Struggle, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2008)