Science of Discworld III

published two books about them – one on fossil barnacles for the Palaeontographical Society, the other on the living ones for the Royal Society. By 1854 he had produced a sequel to each of them.
    These were Darwin’s eight wrong books:

    Not a hint of transmutation of species, the struggle for life, or natural selection.
    Yet, in a strange way, all of his books – even the geological ones – were crucial steps towards the work that was now putting itself together inside his head. Darwin’s ninth book would be pure dynamite. He wanted desperately to write it, but he had already decided that it would be far too dangerous to be published.
    It is a common dilemma in science: whether to publish and be damned, or not to publish and be pre-empted. You can have the credit for a truly revolutionary idea, or a quiet life, but not both.Darwin was wary of publicity, and he was scared that putting his views into print might damage the Church. But there is nothing that more effectively galvanises a scientist than the fear that somebody else will pip them to the winning post. In this case, that somebody was Alfred Russel Wallace.
    Wallace was another Victorian explorer, equally keen on natural history. Mostly because he could sell it. Unlike Darwin, he was not ‘gentry’, and had no independent income. He was the son of an impecunious lawyer 2 and had been taken on at age fourteen as a builder’s apprentice. He spent his evenings drinking free coffee in the Hall of Science off Tottenham Court Road in London. This was a socialist organisation, dedicated to the overthrow of private property and the downfall of the Church. Wallace’s experiences as a youth reinforced a left-wing view of politics. He financed his own travels, and made a living by selling the specimens he collected – butterflies, beetles (a thousand labelled specimens per box, the dealers demanded 3 ), even bird skins. He went on a collecting expedition to the Amazon in 1848, and again to the Malay Archipelago in 1854. There, in Borneo, he sought orang-utans. The idea that humans were somehow related to the great apes was simmering away in the collective subconscious, and Wallace wanted to investigate a potential human ancestor. 4
    One miserable Borneo day, when a tropical monsoon raged outside and Wallace was stuck indoors, he put together a little scientific paper outlining some modest ideas that had just popped into his head. It eventually appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History , a rather ordinary publication, and it was about the ‘introduction’ of species. Lyell, aware of Darwin’s secret interest in such matters, pointed the paper out to him, and Charles began to read it. Then another of Charles’s regular correspondents, Edward Blyth,wrote from Calcutta with the same recommendation. ‘What do you think of Wallace’s paper in the Ann M.N.H.? Good! Upon the whole!’ Darwin had met Wallace shortly before one of the latter’s expeditions – he couldn’t remember which – and he could see that the Ann M.N.H. paper had useful things to say about relationships between similar species. Especially the role of geography. But apart from that, he felt that the paper contained nothing new, and made an entry to that effect in one of his notebooks. Anyway, it seemed to Darwin that Wallace was talking about creation, not evolution. Nevertheless, he wrote to Wallace, encouraging him to continue developing his theory.
    This was a Really Bad Idea.
    Encouraged by Lyell and others, who were now warning him that if he delayed too long, others might snatch the prize, Darwin was putting together ever more elaborate essays on natural selection, but he continued to dither about publication. All that changed in an instant in June 1858, when the postman dropped a bombshell through Charles’s letterbox. It was a package from Wallace, containing a twenty-page letter, sent from the Moluccas. Wallace had taken Darwin’s advice to heart. And he had come up with a very similar theory. Very similar indeed.
    Calamity . Darwin declared that his life’s work was ‘smashed’. ‘Your words have come true with a vengeance,’ he wrote to Lyell. The more he read Wallace’s notes, the closer the ideas seemed to his own. ‘If Wallace had my MS [manuscript] sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract!’ Darwin moaned in a letter to Lyell.
    Staid Victorians would soon consider both Wallace and Darwin to be out of their minds, and