Darwin-s-Moon-Revisited-Review-of-Dispelling-the-Darkness-Voyage-in-the-Malay-Archipelago-and-the-Discovery-of-Evolution-by-Wallace-and-Darwin-John-va.pdf

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Book review
Endeavour
Vol. 38 No. 3–4
Full text provided by
www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
Darwin’s Moon Revisited: Review of Dispelling the Darkness: Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and
Darwin, John van Wyhe, World Scientific Publishing, 2013.
Koen B. Tanghe*
Universiteit Gent, Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium
When Alfred Russel Wallace died in his sleep on 7 Novem-
ber 1913, after a long and productive life, he was feted as
the ‘Grand Old Man of (Victorian) Science’. Darwin, at the
time, was in the nadir of his so-called eclipse, even though
evolutionary biology was thriving. After his death, howev-
er, Wallace met the sad fate of most ‘Great Men’ of science:
relative obscurity. Darwin’s star, meanwhile, rose again,
and after the centennial of the publication of
On the Origin
(1859), a veritable Darwin industry emerged. This raised
suspicions. Wasn’t Wallace the co-discoverer of the princi-
ple of natural selection? Why, then, hadn’t his reputation
followed Darwin’s?
Our perception of the past is inevitably fragmented and
often blurred by Whiggish myths and half-truths. However,
in the case of Wallace, this seeming discrepancy between his
accomplishments and his status became, in conjunction
with the relative lack of scholarly interest in his work, a
fertile breeding ground for non-scholarly conspiracy myths.
Some Wallace ‘fans’ even depicted him as a working-class
hero and the true father of the theory of evolution by natural
selection. Wallace had been cheated of his priority and fame,
they claimed, with or without the malicious intervention of
Darwin and the scientific establishment.
It is this exceptionally elaborate and intricate web of
misunderstandings, myths and half-truths that John van
Wyhe tackles in
Dispelling the Darkness.
While writing a
biographical chapter on Wallace for the
Cambridge Ency-
clopedia of Darwin
(2013), van Wyhe became intrigued by
one of the boldest claims of the, as he calls it, ‘Wallace-
Darwin conspiracy industry’ (221): the thesis that Darwin
lied about the date when he received Wallace’s famous
1858 essay on the principle of natural selection. After
solving this ‘intractable mystery’ in Darwin’s favor (Dar-
win received the essay when he said he received it), van
Wyhe thought that ‘more of Wallace’s story might also turn
out to be different than conventionally told if subjected to
intensive historical research’ (xi). As a former Research
Fellow on the Wallace correspondence project at the Open
University (2003–2005) and later editor of Wallace’s note-
books and letters, he was certainly well placed for this self-
imposed task.
Wallace’s ‘story’ is, in fact, largely confined to his voyage
to the Malay Archipelago (1854–1862). His earlier Amazon
expedition (1848–1852) is dispensed with in a few pages.
The reason is simple: Wallace lost almost all his notes on
his way back from Brazil, when his ship, the
Helen,
caught
fire in the mid-Atlantic. No full and critical reconstruction
of that voyage was possible. Van Wyhe claims that tradi-
tional accounts of Wallace’s second and more fortunate
expedition are ‘highly inaccurate’ (6). He also gives the
reader plenty of new background information, for instance
on the steamships on which Wallace sailed, and on
Singapore, where Wallace stayed 228 days. The
main and more relevant aim of
Dispelling the Darkness,
however, is clarifying Wallace’s intellectual voyage as an
evolutionist.
Van Wyhe’s assertion that his book completely over-
turns the ‘traditional’ story is misleading. He counters and
overturns alternative accounts of the discovery of natural
selection by Darwin and Wallace but largely confirms and
elaborates (i.e., substantiates with new arguments and
facts) the orthodox, Darwin-centric account. In some ways
his book is even too Darwin-centric. Darwin is mentioned
more than twice as often as Wallace. The complete gesta-
tion of his theory of evolution is sketched and an entire
chapter deals exclusively with the myth of Darwin’s delay
between conception and publication of his theory of evolu-
tion. Also, instead of emphasizing that Wallace was more
than Darwin’s moon and of fully enumerating his other
accomplishments, van Wyhe, in his eagerness to counter
and correct uncritical Wallace biographies and hagiogra-
phies, tends to highlight Wallace’s failures. It is correct
that Wallace’s voyages were not inspired by a quest for an
adaptive evolutionary mechanism, but that does not imply
that they were not partly motivated by his undeniable
interest in the ‘species question’. However, none of this
should detract from the scholarly value of
Dispelling the
Darkness.
It may be a tad too Darwin-centric and, at times,
too critical of existing biographies, but it is a well-
researched, useful and necessary addition to the Wallace
literature. No serious student of the history of evolution
can ignore this book.
*Tel.: +32 484354721.
Available online 27 August 2014
www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.07.003

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