The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

There is no Darwin Conspiracy: A response.
By Roy Davies
London February, 2009

In January Todd Charles Wood, a convinced Creationist, via the Centre for Origins Research and Education, Bryon College, Dayton, TN posted a critical review of my book The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime. (Golden Square Books, London 2008.) I was only informed of its presence a few days ago.

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That there is ‘rather strong evidence’ to be marshalled against the work of the academics whose ideas contributed to the general argument of my book (Wood’s primary assertion) simply doesn’t stand up

• Certainly not against the knowledge and scholarship of Femme Gaastra, professor of Dutch maritime history at the University of Leiden who eliminated any possible alternative routes by which letters from the Malay archipelago in the mid-19th century could have been delivered to London and Amsterdam other than the anti-clockwise Java – Macassar (Celebes) – Timor – Amboina – Ternate – Menado - Macassar – Java route;

• nor the shipping evidence in the archives of the British Post Office discovered by John Brooks around the same time which showed exactly when the P&O mail packets carrying letters from Wallace to Bates and Darwin arrived in London;

• certainly not against the material discovered in the Darwin archive in Cambridge by Dov Ospovat in the 1970s and his conclusions as to the significance of those finds for the version, long accepted by most academics, of the development of Darwin’s theory;

• nor the assessment of Asa Gray to Darwin, in a letter received in November 1857, long since disappeared from Darwin’s archives, which assessed Darwin’s definition of his Principle of Divergence as ‘grievously hypothetical’ and who then ignored Darwin’s alternative definition completely;

• nor H. Lewis McKinney’s discovery of comments made by Darwin in the margin of Wallace’s ‘Sarawak Law’ paper suggested that Darwin, despite more than 30 marks of close attention, had little idea of what Wallace was actually talking about in his description of a law of descent with modification away from the original type.

• And in his haste Wood must have missed Janet Browne’s assertion [Browne 1980] that Darwin had no understanding of divergence and the relationship between new varieties and species until the summer of 1857, months after the arrival of Wallace’s first letter.

He is also guilty of questionable academic practice when criticising me for views held and published by one of America’s most celebrated academic cognitive psychologists more than 50 years ago whose name and ideas are so prominently featured in my book. Close to the beginning of the narrative I indicate, very clearly, that the research into the different versions of Darwin’s Beagle journal had been the work of Howard E. Gruber, a prominent American cognitive psychologist who first recorded his ideas in the 1950s and who followed this up with a book first published in 1974 which was re-published in a slightly different form in 1981. In omitting Gruber’s name from his review of my book Wood allowed readers to assume that these ideas were mine and therefore lacked any academic weight. In my view, Gruber’s analysis supports and delivers added focus to Loren Eiseley’s insistence that there was something extremely dubious about the way Darwin had taken ideas from both Edward Blyth and Patrick Matthew without proper acknowledgement.

It is simply not true, either, for Wood to state that because of Darwin’s treatment of his contemporaries it was I who speculated that the guilt brought on by his treatment of Blyth and Mathew led to the chronic illness from which he suffered so badly during these years. I was quoting Eiseley following his presentation of his argument and the quotation marks in the section are quite obvious.[p.31]

Wood does it again later when claiming that it was my personal opinion that the land-bridges idea of Edward Forbes threatened Darwin’s species theory in the mid 1850s. I make it quite clear in the book that criticisms of Darwin’s migration theory came from Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, Darwin’s two closest advisers, both of whom in letters to Darwin indicated not only that there was something wrong with Darwin’s theory but in Hooker’s opinion that Forbes’s land-bridges idea could answer questions which Darwin’s own theory failed to answer. Hooker finally told Darwin directly in the summer of 1856 that in his view, Forbes’ land-bridge theory was superior to Darwin’s migration theory. It was shortly after this exchange of letters that Darwin’s theory began to change in fundamental ways which are spelled out in the book but not referred to by Wood in his review.

Wood accuses me of ‘alleging’ that Wallace’s Ternate essay was mailed to Darwin immediately after writing it in February 1858 and also that I ‘allege’ that shipping records indicate the letter arrived in London on June 3, 1858 rather than June 18th of that year which is the date accepted by most Darwin scholars. The imputation is that I have no strong evidence for either. Again Woods is wrong. Wallace records in his journal that that letter was sent from Ternate by the official monthly mail steamer service operating under contract to the Dutch administration of the Malay Archipelago which arrived at the island on March 9th, 1858 [McKinney 1972]. New evidence in my book from shipping records indicates the vessel that month would have been the Ambon and traces the journey of the successive ships, all named, which carried the two letters Wallace put on board that day – one to an address in Leicester and the other to Charles Darwin – all the way from the eastern archipelago to their arrival at the General Post Office in London on June 2nd twelve weeks later.

The use Darwin made of Wallace’s Ternate essay in the two weeks between receiving it on June 3rd and his seeming distraught letter to Lyell on June 18th was to insert 66 new pages of material relating to divergence – not merely 41 pages as Wood claims – and then to write a letter to Hooker telling him that divergence was now the keystone of his theory along with natural selection. (This is not a claim original to my book. It was part of the impressive detective work of John Brooks [1984] on this subject, a man who was long castigated for daring to suggest that Darwin cheated when he inserted these two new sections into his ‘big’ species book.) How do we know?
Because Brooks discovered these major insertions were made on an entirely different bluey-grey paper rather than the grey wove Darwin had used for the rest of the book. But more than that: five days after receiving Wallace’s letter Darwin wrote to Hooker to tell him of his new certainty about divergence and four days later he wrote in his journal that he had finished amending his chapter on natural selection (which covered the section on divergence).

Wood offers Schwartz [1974] as an authority in understanding that Blyth’s idea of natural selection was a conservative force as if that was not already both understood and highlighted in my book. Eiseley had already made this clear in his comparison between the closed mind religious forces working on Blyth and the relatively free thinking of Darwin after the Beagle voyage un-constricted by what Eiseley called Blyth’s ‘hedgerow’ mentality of nature. However, it wasn’t Darwin’s free thinking which led him to the idea of migration, isolation and sudden change into a new species. The migration idea was Lyell’s but Lyell had the hand of a Creator to ensure that new species filled the spaces available. Darwin knew he could not use God as a solution. So he used magic instead and had his migrating forms literally jump into a new form so that they should not perish in an environment to which they were no longer perfectly adapted. What Wood seemingly fails to understand is that from that moment on until the second half of the 1850s that remained Charles Darwin’s understanding of natural selection: a little bit of God – perfect adaptation to only one environment; a little bit of magic – that species would jump per saltum from one form into another; and a little guesswork – that species really could migrate across vast expanses of salt water and survive.

How is it then, if Darwin believed in such a process in 1842, that academics today still insist that Darwin understood Natural Selection for 20 years while quite aware that the outline of Natural Selection which appears in the Origin of Species is an entirely different idea from that he had called by the same name 20 years before? Somewhere along the line Darwin’s ideas changed completely and Ospovat recognised this in his 1970s research. In his book he wouldn’t go as far as to say that Darwin came up with an entirely new theory in the mid 1850s but he felt that in order to find out what had happened that might be a good place to begin.. Unfortunately for Ospovat and for every other academic who has followed the paper trail in Cambridge there is no general agreement on what exactly caused Darwin’s ideas to change so radically. But what they do agree on is that the one area of new thinking which had absolutely no affect whatsoever on Darwin’s change of ideas was the blitz of public scientific papers and private correspondence that came winging in from the Malay Archipelago from Alfred Russel Wallace between September 1855 and January 1857.

At this point I have to register a very strong objection to Wood’s suggestion that somehow, (he didn’t specify), I distorted Ospovat’s conclusions as to how Darwin’s theory had developed once he had sifted through all Darwin’s paper and notes in Cambridge in the 1970s. Ospovat never considered Wallace a threat to Darwin before the Ternate letter arrived at Darwin’s home on June 18 (as he and everyone else believed at the time). He did not mention the Sarawak Law or Wallace’s essay on Birds or his first letter to Darwin dated October 10, 1856 because Wallace was a long way from his mind. Ospovat was concentrating on the way Darwin arrived at his ideas simply by assessing the progression of notes and thoughts as he discovered them.

Moreover, Wood is wrong to say that Ospovat considered Darwin’s eventual discovery of a principle of divergence to have come through Darwin’s ongoing interaction with classification. In fact, Ospovat makes it quite clear that he could find no evidence of what might have led Darwin to his principle of divergence. In my book I quote Ospovat saying that it certainly had not come from anything in Darwin’s accumulation of facts nor from any insight he may have gained from his barnacle research. Ospovat also says that during Darwin’s years of research there is little indication that divergence as a concept of descent with modification is to be found in any of his papers before March 1857. This is echoed by Francis Darwin’s awareness that no mention of divergence meaning descent with modification is to be found in either the sketch of 1842 or the Essay of 1844. This was an amazing realisation for Francis Darwin who had been led to believe by events at the Linnean Society that this in fact was so.

It is also false for Wood to claim academic agreement that the subject of the November 1854 note headed divergence, written as an aide memoir by Darwin two months after resuming his species research after barnacles, was about descent with modification. Ospovat is unequivocal that it was simply about classification. And he is not alone on this. The same interpretation will be found in Browne [1980] and De Beer [1963] Darwin had continually used the word ‘divergence’ as a synonym for classification.

In the same way Wood is also wrong to say that ‘the precise explanation of classification as a result of natural selection is the subject of divergence’. This, more or less, was used by Darwin as an explanation of his principle of divergence to Asa Gray in September 1857. Wood conveniently omits to point out from correspondence evidence in my book that Asa Gray was singularly unimpressed by Darwin’s account of his principle of divergence and rather than approve it in terms pleasing to Darwin actually dismissed it in terms which Darwin himself said amounted to being ‘grievously hypothetical’. And yet one year later it was Darwin’s copy of that letter to Gray which Lyell and Hooker used to help convince the Linnean meeting that Darwin already knew as much about divergence as Wallace revealed in his Ternate paper.

If Darwin’s new understanding of variation in nature came about from his study of barnacles [Browne 1995; Kohn 2009] why did Darwin not put that fact and its context at the heart of any written account between the early 1850s and 1858? Wood says that by November 1854 Darwin had begun to recognise that he needed a way to explain divergence. Then why not exploit his insight into variation in barnacles which had happened some years before? There is, also, genuine doubt about the provenance of Darwin’s January 1855 note recording that ‘on the theory of descent, a divergence is implied’.

Some of the theories expressed in Wood’s review are open, at the very least, to discussion. Darwin’s botanical arithmetic was championed by Browne in 1980 but had been exchanged for barnacles as an explanation of Darwin’s understanding of the idea of descent with modification by the time she completed the first volume of her impressive biography of Darwin in 1995. And the idea of division of labour, rather than having been something Darwin understood from his awareness of industrial practices of the time, is far better explained by Darwin’s reading Wallace’s example in his Birds paper of September 1856 of hornbills and barbets taking fruit from the same tree at different times of the day while living happily alongside each other. Was this division of land? Or was it division of labour? Darwin’s confusion is revealed in his double crossing out of the word Land and his opting for the word labour instead. Wallace’s article in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History had been published only weeks before Darwin wrote that sentence into his big species book. The incredible coincidence of published information and the development of Darwin’s ideas, evident since Lyell, Matthew and Blyth twenty years before, were yet to reach their culmination.

Wood is also mistaken that Darwin formulated his principle of divergence in September 1856. Certainly Darwin’s ideas began to change after the publication of Wallace’s Birds article but his two line formulation of his principle of divergence did not get written down in his big species book until March 31, 1857 after Wallace’s letter had been in his hands since January 12.

On the question of the charge of a conspiracy inherent in this whole affair, there can be no question that Lyell and Hooker acted unethically at the Linnean meeting on July 1, 1858 to ensure that it was Darwin’s name which would lead and Wallace’s name which would follow in the years ahead. There are few academics who would condone what happened at the Linnean that day (and fewer who would condone it if they were treated as unfairly as Wallace in the same circumstances). As it transpired, Lyell and Hooker made Wallace’s complete theory of evolution secondary in importance to three unpublished extracts from the archives of a man who had been working for nearly 20 years to find a theory which until, as recently as two years before the Linnean meeting, had failed to impress even his closest friends. Even more important was that the letter to Asa Gray indicating his discovery of a principle of divergence and the extract from his essay making reference to Thomas Malthus were both false claims as was the third extract when Lyell argued that Darwin’s understanding of Natural Selection twenty years before indicated that he had got there before Wallace. The fact of the matter was that for Darwin natural selection in 1844 was an entirely different concept than that of the natural selection that Darwin eventually described in the Origin [Ospovat 1981] and Malthus’ name was used as a convenient smokescreen.

Asa Gray who had dismissed Darwin’s definition of divergence in words amounting to ‘grievously hypothetical’ had been informed by Darwin in the letter of September 5th 1857 that the main influences on his species ideas had been Charles Lyell, Augustin de Candolle and the Rev. W. Herbert.

The name of Thomas Malthus was never offered to Gray as having had any influence on Darwin’s ideas. His name hadn’t been mentioned earlier, either, despite the claim Darwin made in a brief autobiography that he had been greatly influenced by Malthus. As his son Francis came to realise after his father’s death, not only had Malthus not influenced Darwin in offering him ‘a theory to work by’ but his father’s then version of his theory of natural selection had already been written out at least a whole year before he read Malthus on Population. [Henderson 1958] [Eiseley 1979] [Francis Darwin 1909].

So why did Malthus’s name suddenly become so important to Darwin? It only did so after Darwin and Lyell had read Wallace’s Ternate paper sometime between June 18 when Darwin decided to tell Lyell the letter had arrived and July 1 when two extracts from Darwin’s earliest notes and Essay were chosen to be read to the delegates at the Linnean meeting. And why? Because both men could clearly see that Wallace’s sudden insight into the importance of natural selection as the flywheel of species change relied heavily on Malthus’s ideas. To counter such a clear use of Malthus in Wallace’s complete theory Lyell, who had never even read Darwin’s Essay of 1844, would have relied on either Darwin or Hooker, who had read it, to suggest a section of Darwin’s earliest material featuring Malthus’ name which would neutralise Wallace’s brilliant tour de force. And so the choice was made. But Charles Darwin knew that Thomas Malthus had never been an influence on his theory and yet he still allowed the section to be read at the Linnean as if it had been central to his ideas. Can we check exactly how one particular section was chosen? We cannot, because while Darwin’s letters to Hooker and Lyell still exist, their own letters to Darwin do not.

And this might be a good place to examine Wood’s anodyne ‘the letters are now lost’. How polite we all are in using phrases like ‘all the letters are missing’, ‘the letters are no longer extant’, ‘the letters are no longer in the files’. Yet anyone who has worked in the area of the development of Darwin’s theory knows [Beddall 1968] that all these letters would have been in Darwin’s possession alone for him to do with as he chose between the date of their arrival and the date of his own death. They didn’t go anywhere else. When Francis Darwin began to collate material for his father’s biography at Down House he soon became aware of gaps in the correspondence but even he couldn’t have been aware of the extent or importance of all the missing letters. It wasn’t simply the three letters Wallace wrote to Darwin between October 1856 and March 1858. It wasn’t only the crucial letters Darwin received from Lyell and Hooker in the fraught week leading up to the Linnean meeting, nor the two vital letters from Asa Gray to Darwin in November 1857 and April 1858. Despite the fact that, as is the way with most people’s correspondence, letters simply get lost, it is almost incredible that not one of these crucial letters survives in a body of correspondence whose ownership was only transferred along with Darwin’s other written material to the Cambridge University Library in 1941 seventy years after Darwin’s death. Whatever excuses are made for this absence of record one thing is sure: Charles Darwin had no wish for posterity to learn what exactly was in those letters. So, another part of a conspiracy theory? Or, ultimately, does everything begin pointing in one unmistakeable direction. That Charles Darwin did in fact cheat, steal and lie his way to fame? The real secrets of this story once rested in that chaotic jumble with its huge fireplace and family portraits which was Darwin’s study at Down House. What we are now left with from his own archive are mere archival whispers.

There is, however, one thing on which I stand corrected by Wood. Somehow I had become convinced that Darwin had used the word ‘inosculate’ only once. That occasion, I was somehow convinced, had been connected with Eiseley’s claim that the gathering together of such strange examples of species variation by Blyth and Darwin could only be explained by Darwin having used Blyth’s basic ideas as a trampoline for his own. I am grateful to Wood for having pointed out my mistake.