Giving Darwin His Due (But Just)

Apparently, we're on the cusp of a momentous anniversary. July 1 marks the 150th anniversary of the first public announcement of natural selection, at the Linnean Society in London. That kicks off an 18-month series of observances, including the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of the release of On the Origin of Species. It's enough to make the IDiots see stars (and some sort of pattern, I'm sure).

While Darwin today is remember as the man who "discovered" natural selection and evolution, he doesn't really deserve all the credit:

But hold on. Does he deserve all this? He wasn’t, after all, the first person to suggest that evolution happens. For example, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, speculated about it towards the end of the 18th century; at the beginning of the 19th, the great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck made a strong case for it. Lamarck, however, failed to be generally persuasive because he didn’t have a plausible mechanism — he could see that evolution takes place, but he didn’t know how. That had to wait until the discovery of natural selection.

Natural selection is what we normally think of as Darwin’s big idea. Yet he wasn’t the first to discover that, either. At least two others — a doctor called William Wells, and a writer called Patrick Matthew — discovered it years before Darwin did. Wells described it (admittedly briefly) in 1818, when Darwin was just 9; Matthew did so in 1831, the year that Darwin set off on board HMS Beagle for what became a five-year voyage around the world.

What Darwin did do was bring a lifetime's worth of data and to his work and pulled everything together into one coherent theory. As one of the commenters to that post put it:

Like the Wright Brothers with the airplane and Ekert and Mauchly with the computer, he might have not thought of it first, but he established the credibility of the idea to the world.

Indeed. That is that accomplishment that generally gets remembered and is something worth celebrating, even if it slights some of the other pioneers.