Wallace called the mechanism survival of the fittest and Darwin called it natural selection. But Darwin’s insight was in 1838 and Wallace’s was in 1858.
Darwin, like Newton, was reluctant to publish but even more reluctant to see someone else get the credit for ‘his’ discovery. Fortunately, other scientists arranged for Wallace and Darwin to present their results in talks at the same meeting. Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, stunned the scientific world with the weight of its diverse data. Its conclusions were so radical that overwhelmingly compelling data were essential. Darwin left the task of arguing the case to others.
Wallace is largely forgotten today, but he had experienced far greater disappointment than seeing Darwin receive much of the credit for the theory of evolution: after spending four years collecting animal specimens in the Amazon, he lost everything when the ship home caught fire.
“With what pleasure had I looked upon every rare and curious insect I had added to my collection! How many times, when almost overcome by the ague, had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species! How many places, which no European foot but my own had trodden, would have been recalled to my memory by rare birds and insects they had furnished to my collection!
“And now everything was gone, and I had not one specimen to illustrate the unknown lands I had trod or to call back the recollection of the wild scenes I had beheld! But such regrets I knew were vain, and I tried to think as little as possible about what might have been and to occupy myself with the state of things which actually existed.” [Wallace, 1853].
To Wallace, 1858 brought two joys: he solved a problem that had obsessed him for years, and he was personally responsible for the public awareness of the revolutionary concept of evolution. The most important thing that he brought back from South America was in his mind, not in flammable boxes.
Gregor Mendel undertook and published one experiment in his life. He used measurements of characteristics of sweet peas to lay out the basic pattern of genetic inheritance. The results overthrew the conventional theory that offspring inherit traits intermediate between their two parents; they demonstrated instead that offspring inherit each trait from only one parent, in predictable integer proportions.
“Mendel published his results in 1866 in the Journal of the Brno Natural History Society, and achieved instant oblivion. No one cared. No one understood his work” [Bronowski, 1973]. He picked an obscure journal, he failed to distribute copies of his paper to biologists, he was a monk rather than a professional scientist because he had flunked out of the university, and his research was before its time. Thirty years passed before biologists were ready to appreciate Mendel’s paper.
Paradigm change can be explosively rapid on the time scale of evolution of a scientific field, yet ploddingly slow on the time scale of an individual scientist. While working full time at the patent office in 1905, Albert Einstein published five revolutionary papers: light quantized like particles rather than waves, diffusion-based estimates of the size of molecules and of Avogadro’s number, Brownian motion (a final confirmation of the existence of atoms), the special theory of relativity, and conversion of mass into energy.
He later submitted the diffusion paper to the University of Zurich as a potential doctoral thesis. It was rejected as too short; Einstein added one sentence and resubmitted it, and it was accepted. But
