Here is the Darwin-Wallace story as told by Olivia Judson in a NY Times article:

By 1858, Darwin had spent more than 20 years studying plants and animals and thinking about evolution. . . . But he had published nothing. (He had, however, published books on several other subjects, including an exhaustive study of barnacles, both living and extinct.) Then, in June of that year, Darwin received a package from a young man named Alfred Russel Wallace; in the package, Wallace enclosed a brief manuscript in which he outlined the principle of evolution by natural selection.

On July 1, 1858, Wallace’s manuscript, as well as a couple of short statements on natural selection by Darwin . . . . were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. . . .

Of the material presented that night, the manuscript by Wallace is, in some respects, the more impressive: it is clearer and more accessible. Yet it is Darwin we celebrate; it is Darwin who, like a god in a temple, sits in white marble and presides over the main hall at the Natural History Museum in London. Why?

The reason is the “Origin” . . . .the “Origin” changed everything. Before the “Origin,” the diversity of life could only be catalogued and described; afterwards, it could be explained and understood. Before the “Origin,” species were generally seen as fixed entities, the special creations of a deity; afterwards, they became connected together on a great family tree that stretches back, across billions of years, to the dawn of life. Perhaps most importantly, the “Origin” changed our view of ourselves. It made us as much a part of nature as hummingbirds and bumblebees (or humble-bees, as Darwin called them); we, too, acquired a family tree with a host of remarkable and distinguished ancestors. (emphasis added)

So the article says, “Of the material presented that night, the manuscript by Wallace is, in some respects, the more impressive: it is clearer and more accessible.” Today, the Linnean Society of London confers a medal called the “Darwin-Wallace medal.” The Linnean Society of London, unlike the rest of the world, has not forgotten Wallace.

BTW, Judson’s article says that the “Origin” (which as everyone knows is the book “On the Origin of Species”) “changed our view of ourselves” — i.e., Darwinism is not just a scientific idea but represents a worldview, a philosophy of life, and even a religion. And I don’t know why Judson calls our alleged ancestors “remarkable and distinguished”; while I don’t think that the idea of being descended from monkeys — or worse — is anything to be ashamed of, I don’t consider it anything to be proud of, either.

The Darwinists are not now going to be objective about Darwin — they have simply invested too much in Darwin worship. There are the “I love Darwin” items (T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc., and even a doggie shirt), “Friend of Darwin” certificates (conferred at a reunion of the Dover plaintiffs team), Darwin Day celebrations, the Darwin-Lincoln nonsense (they have nothing in common other than the same official birthdate), etc..

As I said in my piece, I’m not ready to necessarily agree completely with Davies’ conspiracy theory. However, what I DO know is, we simply cannot take Darwin’s own words to shed much light on anything. The more I dig into Darwin’s life the more duplicity I see. I mention his claim to not having left Christianity until age 40 in my review; this is clearly not so as evidenced in his private Notebooks, now made public since 1987.

But there are other examples. So many of the materialistic ideas that Darwin wove into his evolutionary theory were the products of earlier free-thinking heretics that he had experienced as a teen in Edinburgh. As a young inductee in the radical Plinian Society, Darwin learned materialistic science from William Browne, who insisted there was no difference between animals and men (shades of Darwin’s Descent of Man?); from William Greg he heard a lecture arguing that “the lower animals possess every faculty & propensity of the human mind”; from his instructor Robert Jameson he heard a Lamarckian lecture on “The Origin of the Speices of Animals”; and from Robert Edmund Grant, his walking companion and confidant, he was taught that “there was no spiritual power behind nature’s throne” and that the same organs in different animals were homologous suggesting some evolutionary materialistic scheme. Darwin made little of these experiences in his later writings, which I simply find hard to beleive. They’re too close to his later ideas.

All these elements, learned when Darwin was about 16 crop up in his Origin of Species. I find Darwin’s insistence that he came upon these notions at the Galapagos hard to swallow. Darwin’s plaintive cry that he left religion relatively late in life (as he claims in his autobiography and elsewhere) just doesn’t comport with other facts we now know about his exposure to radical ideas early on. I’m still finding more, but I’ve become very suspect of Darwin’s later claims. I believe Darwin (and later his family) carefully crafted a persona of the “reluctant agnostic.”

So I don’t know if Darwin stole from Wallace or not (that he would have had to have acknowledged Wallace after the Ternate letter is a given), but I DO know that the particular brand of evolution he concocted was tailor-made for a materialist – Browne, Greg, Jameson, Grant all would have approved.

My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work—the latter having read my sketch of 1844—honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.

At the very beginning of his book, Darwin acknowledges that Wallace had come upon the same ideas independently. What part of “acknowledging independent derivation of the same ideas in his seminal work on the subject” constitutes “stealing ideas”? Wallace receives numerous citations in Darwin’s work, why would you cite somebody from whom you were stealing not only credit but work and data?

But, perhaps he just swiped the idea from Blythe and Wallace in 1858 and rearranged his prior work and data to show it as his idea.

Perhaps aliens landed and gave Darwin a time machine and he went back 20 years and fed himself the work from Blythe and Wallace from the future. He had to do that otherwise when carbon dating was invented somebody might have noticed that the paper was 20 years older then it should be.

StuartHarris, do you habitually speak ill of the dead with no basis whatsoever?

Yes, Darwin’s character matters very much to the believability of his theory.

Assuming that you can prove our outrageous slurs, what then? Do you think that biologists worldwide are going to stop considering evolution when trying to solve problems because somebody who’s been a very long time dead was proven to be a bit of a dog torturer?

I’m just interested in what you think you are going to achieve by this StuartHarris? Presumably if you had any proof you would make it public, write a book something like that? Innunendo and slurs will reflect back on you, after all Darwin is not around to either defend himself or care about your slurs!

I think the blind chance theory would have eventually won out (not because of its merits), but because I think academic worldviews would have shifted that way anyway. So, then we’d be having scientists say, “Oh, that quaint tired old theory was disproved and replaced decades ago. [about teleological evolution]” Without giving any evidence as they like to do (just call it ‘antiquated’ and be done with it). I would imagine also that if Wallace could have forseen the situation today, he might have been more concerned with getting credit.

It’s always been puzzling to me why there was a gap of so many years between the voyage of the Beagle and Darwin finally publishing his theory. Why did he wait for two decades after supposedly coming up with his theory in 1838 before publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859? Excuses have been given: he felt the world wasn’t ready to hear it; it was so radical he had trouble squaring it with his supposed theism; his time was taken up with geological studies, etc.

But, perhaps he just swiped the idea from Blythe and Wallace in 1858 and rearranged his prior work and data to show it as his idea.

Yes, Darwin’s character matters very much to the believability of his theory. It’s a story-based theory, not a mathematical one. Newton, for example, also had some very serious character problems and eccentricities, but it has absolutely no effect on his science. His theories on gravitation and optics, and his invention of the Calculus are subject to strict mathematical scrutiny and are able to stand outside of his persona.

Some Psychological Aspects of Atheism

Thank you both for your comments. In one sense you’re correct, Denyse; as I tried to point out, whether Darwin stole his idea of natural selection doesn’t matter if we’re not going to look at it as part of a larger metaphysical construct. This is was what distinguished Darwin from Wallace and is REALLY what matters in the end.

But Stephen you too are absolutely right in pointing out that Darwin’s character speaks to the theory as much as to the man. I am throughly convinced that Darwin’s metaphysical beliefs drove his alledged “science.” Darwin had been exposed to transmutation and other kinds of heretical ideas while at the famed University of Edinburgh struggling to please his father to become a physician. It didn’t work out. But what it did do was give him the essential features of the atheistic materialism that he would carry with him for life. His life-changing experience didn’t occur at the Galapagos Islands when he was 26, it was his school days at Edinburgh when he was 16! This is crucial for it changes everything. From that point on Darwin sought to develop a theory upon which his metaphysic could hang. No wonder he was aghast when Wallace told the world he didn’t think natural selection could account for human intellect! (Denyse, Wallace would have so approved of your book, The Spiritual Brain!! And, of course, I do too.)

But more germane to the Down House “hero,” his life shows that Darwinian evolution is not only a secular creation myth, the story of its own creation was (and sadly still is) itself mythical – chiefly created by the myth-maker himself, Charles Darwin. In truth very, very few of Darwin’s contemporaries have ever picked up on this and neither have his biographers. I continue to work out the details so if any additional thoughts along these lines come to mind please let me know. I appreciate the feedback immensely.

Political correctness teaches that Darwin’s scientific discoveries caused him to lose his religious faith. Many of his biographers, however, suggest that it was his materialism and his growing anti-religious sentiments that drove his science and not the other way around. If that is true, then his research was less about following the evidence and more about using it to harmonize with his previously held beliefs. He has been charged (credibly in my judgment) with the non-scientific attitude of wanting to refute Paley’s design argument even before he began his so-called journey of discovery.

Also, Darwin was obviously self conscious about the way others would react to some of his more controversial statements. In the “Descent of Man,” he insists that [A] it is foolish to allow inferiors to breed, [B] nevertheless, our “nobility” bids us to be compassionate, yet [C] we ought to discourage inferiors from breeding anyway. So, what was [B] all about? Was he really being compassionate? Or, was he merely trying to appear compassionate so he could more readily promote his decidedly uncompassionate world view? Did he really believe that we have a “noble nature,” or was he simply putting a smiley face on his materialism and camouflaging his assault on the inherent dignity of the human person?