Dr van Wyhe then had to trace back the remainder of the 9,240 miles of the journey from England, through the Mediterranean, across Egypt, to Sri Lanka, Penang, Singapore, Jakarta and so on. This was surely not a coincidence - Wallace's letter must have been on that ship. If Darwin really received it on 18 June- how could it get there? It had come to his house in the countryside from London the day before, the 17th.ĭr van Wyhe then found that a steamer arrived in England the day before, the 16th with mail from India and South East Asia. Since that side of the correspondence was all one really had to go on, it occurred to me to trace the letter from Darwin's end, rather than Wallace's," said Dr van Wyhe. All of his correspondence changed dramatically after that date for example. The other evidence that Darwin received it on 18 June 1858 seemed more likely. But this recollection from years later seemed to me not very reliable as evidence of what really happened at the time. That suggested that the essay was sent in March 1858. But it occurred to me that we really have no contemporary evidence of when Wallace sent the essay to Darwin, only his much later recollection that he sent it by the next post after writing it in February. "I initially assumed that it was impossible to solve since so many historians had examined it before. So did Darwin receive the letter when he said he did, or not? But most other evidence suggests that Darwin received the letter when he said he did. For example, several writers have claimed that Darwin stole ideas from Wallace's essay during the time he kept the letter secret. Thus began the mystery - how could two letters from Wallace leave Ternate on the same steamer and travel along the same mail route back to London but Darwin received his two weeks later than Bates did? This mystery has led to numerous conspiracy theories. The letter still bore postmarks from Singapore and London which showed that it arrived in London on 3 June 1858 - two weeks before Darwin said he received the essay from Wallace. In 1972 a researcher found another letter from Wallace to a friend named Bates that was sent on the March 1858 steamer from the island of Ternate in modern Indonesia. Wallace's essay was published together with an essay by Darwin in 1858 and marks the first publication of the theory of evolution which then resulted in one of the greatest revolutions in the history of science. Darwin's accusers claim that he waited two weeks to do so, lying about the date of receipt to give himself time to revise his own ideas in the light of Wallace's. He wrote up his ideas in an essay which he sent in 1858, to Charles Darwin, for him to pass on to noted geologist Charles Lyell. Wallace had a dramatic eureka moment while living on the island of Ternate in the Moluccas (now Indonesia). Just recently, two researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), supported by a private donation, reconstructed the route taken by Wallace's letter to Darwin from Ternate and provided evidence that Wallace sent the letter a month later than historians had always assumed, thus clearing Darwin of the accusations against him.ĭr John van Wyhe, a historian of science and Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Biological Sciences & History at NUS and his collaborator Dr Kees Rookmaaker, published their study, titled "A new theory to explain the receipt of Wallace's Ternate Essay by Darwin in 1848," in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society in December 2011.Īlfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who spent eight years in Singapore and South East Asia between 18, discovered evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin. For the past four decades, Charles Darwin had been accused of keeping the essay of fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace for a fortnight, thereby enabling him to revise elements of his theory of evolution, before jointly announcing the theory of evolution by natural selection in July 1858.
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