他不是达尔文,他是华莱士 The Man Who Wasn't Darwin

The Man Who Wasn't Darwin
他不是达尔文


阿尔弗雷德罗素华莱士绘制出一个超大的生物分类图谱，并发现了自己的生物进化路线理论。
Alfred Russel Wallace charted a great dividing line in the living world—and found his own route to the theory of evolution.



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翠绿一片的特纳提岛是个优美的小火山锥，从印尼东北方的海面中升起，位在婆罗洲东方1000公里处。特纳提岛曾经是荷兰帝国的贸易中心，香料和其他珍贵的热带商品都是从这里由船只运往西方。如今，它繁忙的船坞区、水果和鱼市场、清真寺、旧堡垒、苏丹宫殿以及整齐的混凝土房屋，有如旋转木马的灯光，沿着一条环状的滨海道路连成了一串。它的高地斜坡多半草木丛生且无人居住，而假如你运气好，还是有可能在那些树林中看到一种华丽的鸟。牠有翠绿色的胸部，两根白色的长羽毛像披肩一样从双肩垂下，学名叫「华莱士旗帜翼」（Semioptera wallacii），以表彰那个最早使科学界注意到牠的人。此人是艾弗瑞德‧罗素‧华莱士，这位年轻的英国自然学者在1850年代末及1860年代初跑遍马来群岛从事田野研究。1858年3月9日，他从特纳提岛寄出一封影响深远的信，并送进航向西方的荷兰邮轮。

这封信是寄给查尔斯‧达尔文先生。华莱士在信中附了一篇短文，标题是〈物种由简变繁的倾向〉。它是匆匆写了两个晚上的结果，但之前却经歷了十年以上思索与仔细研究。这篇文章谈的是透过天择（但不是採用此说法）的演化论（虽然不叫这名称），跟当时家喻户晓的杰出自然学家达尔文自己所发展、但尚未发表的理论极为相似。

这是科学史上的经典插曲：我们现在所认为的达尔文理论，几乎是由达尔文自己和年轻新星艾弗瑞德‧罗素‧华莱士同时所提出的。华莱士在世时以身为达尔文年轻搭档的身分、以及在科学和社会思想上的其他贡献着称，但1913年过世后，他却逐渐遭到淡忘。到了最近几十年，他的声誉再起。他的肖像如今与较旧的达尔文肖像一同悬挂在伦敦林奈学会的会议室里；达尔文和华莱士的共同发现就是在150年前对这个科学社团发表的。他的着作被人重新翻印或刊登在网路上，主题从演化论和社会正义到火星上的生命都有。科学史家公认他是演化生物地理学的开创者，尤其是岛屿生物地理学的先驱，也是适应拟态的早期理论家，以及替我们现在所谓的生物多样性发声的先知。这代表他是从旧时代的博物学过渡到现代生物学的指标人物。华莱士也是多产的收藏家，以及大自然奇观的无情收割者；他的昆虫和鸟类标本大大充实了分类学以及博物馆的收藏。然而，知道华莱士的人大都只知他是查尔斯‧达尔文的祕密伙伴。这个人一起发展出天择的演化论，但却没有获得相等的肯定。

华莱士的故事既复杂、具英雄色彩，又令人费解。除了是19世纪最伟大的田野生物学家之一，他也是个性情古怪孤僻、喜好变化无常的人，信奉唯灵论与降神会，热中于骨相学，对催眠术小有研究，后来在人脑发展方面跟达尔文理论分道扬镳，反对接种牛痘，并提倡把大型私有土地收归国有。诸如此类的怪癖使贬抑他的人得到了一些把他当成疯子来排挤的理由。学者或传记作家都没有充分回答过一个问题：在一个人物──一个兼具全然实证派和田野自然学家身分的人身上，要怎么融和如此杰出的成就、激进的信念和恣意的狂热？假如没有华莱士，那就要在维多利亚时代找一位非常特别的小说家，才能把他创造出来……



The Man Who Wasn't Darwin
Alfred Russel Wallace charted a great dividing line in the living world—and found his own route to the theory of evolution.

By David Quammen
National Geographic Contributing Writer
Photograph by Robert Clark
The island of Ternate is a small, graceful volcanic cone rising leafy green from the sea in northeastern Indonesia, 600 miles east of Borneo. Although it's an out-of-the-way place, tucked between much larger islands, Ternate was once an entrepôt of the Dutch empire, from which spices and other precious tropical commodities traveled westward by ship. Today its busy dock area, its fruit and fish markets, its mosques, its old forts, its sultan's palace, and its tidy concrete houses are strung like carousel lights along a single ring road that traces the coastline. Its upland slopes are mostly forested and unpopulated, and in those woods, if you're lucky, you might still spot a certain resplendent bird, emerald-breasted, with two long white plumes dangling capelike from each shoulder, whose scientific name—Semioptera wallacii—honors the man who first brought it to scientific attention. That man was Alfred Russel Wallace, a young English naturalist who did fieldwork throughout the Malay Archipelago in the late 1850s and early '60s. What you won't see on Ternate is any grand plaque or statue commemorating Wallace's place in scientific history or the fact that, from this little island, on March 9, 1858, he sent off a highly consequential letter, aboard a Dutch mail steamer headed westward.

The letter was addressed to Mr. Charles Darwin. Along with it Wallace enclosed a brief paper titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type." It was the product of two nights' hasty scribbling, which followed a moment's epiphany during a fever, which in turn followed more than ten years of speculation and careful research. What the paper described was a theory of evolution (though not under that name) by natural selection (not using that phrase) remarkably similar to the theory that Darwin himself, then an eminent naturalist of rather conventional reputation, had developed but hadn't yet published.

This is a classic episode in the history of science, a story of a coincidence and its aftermath, told and retold in books about how evolutionary biology came to be: the near simultaneous formulation of what we now think of as Darwin's theory by Darwin himself and a young upstart, Alfred Russel Wallace. Classic or not, many people nowadays are unaware of it. Wallace, famed during his life as Darwin's junior partner and for his other contributions to science and social thought, fell into obscurity after his death, in 1913. In recent decades his renown has been revivified, both by scholars who mine every aspect of Darwin's life—Wallace was a crucial part—and by a few popular writers. His grave marker, in the village of Broadstone, no longer stands crumbling and overgrown by tree limbs. His portrait now hangs, along with an older one of Darwin, in the meeting room of the Linnean Society in London, the same scientific society to which the Darwin-Wallace co-discovery was announced 150 years ago, on the evening of July 1, 1858. His writings, on subjects from evolutionary theory and social justice to life on Mars, are coming back into print or turning up on the Web. He is recognized among science historians as a founder of evolutionary biogeog­raphy (the study of which species live where, and why), as a pioneer of island biogeography in particular (from which the science of conserva­tion biology grew), as an early theorist on adaptive mimicry, and as a prescient voice on behalf of what we now call biodiversity. That is, he's a towering figure in the transition from old-fashioned natural history to modern biology. During his years afield Wallace was also a prolific collector, a ruthless harvester of natural wonders; his insect and bird specimens added richly to museum holdings and the discipline of taxonomy. Still, most people who know of Alfred Russel Wallace know him only as Charles Darwin's secret sharer, the man who co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection but failed to get an equal share of the credit.

Wallace's story is complicated, heroic, and perplexing. Besides being one of the greatest field biologists of the 19th century, he was a man of crotchety independence and lurching enthusiasms, a restless soul never quite satisfied with the place in which he lived, a believer in spiritualism and séances, a devotee of phrenology, a dabbler in mesmerism, a later apostate from Darwinian theory when it came to the development of the human brain, an opponent of smallpox vaccination, and an advocate of nationalizing large private landholdings, who by these and other eccentricities gave his detractors some grounds for dismissing him as a crank. Which they did. The question that no scholar or biographer has adequately answered is: How to reconcile such brilliant achievements, radical convictions, and incautious zealotries within one human character—the character of a consummate empir­icist and field naturalist? If he hadn't existed, this Alfred Wallace, it would have taken a very peculiar Victorian novelist to create him.

The first cardinal point in the biog­raphy of Alfred Wallace is that for him, as for Will Shakespeare but not for Charles Darwin, impecuniousness was the mother of invention. He was a curious lad from a family with no money. At age 14, in 1837, having left school, he went to work. Darwin, at that time a young gentleman of 28 with a wealthy father who subsidized his adventures, had just arrived home aboard the Beagle.

Wallace was largely self-taught, frequenting town libraries and workingmen's institutes during the decade he labored as a land surveyor, a builder, and a schoolteacher in the city of Leices­ter. Early on he discovered the life and writings of Robert Owen, the founder of British socialism, who became his "first teacher in the philosophy of human nature," as Wallace later recalled, and an influence toward his own socialist convictions. During his surveying period, spent largely in rural Wales, he got interested in nature by way of botany, taking long walks across the moors and mountains, training himself to identify plant families with help from a cheap paperback guide. His teaching job left him time for an eclectic syllabus of personal reading that included Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels, and, most consequentially, Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which had catalyzed Charles Darwin's thinking about the struggle for survival and would catalyze Wallace's too. Although Wallace found himself unsuited to teaching, the year at Leices­ter yielded one memorable event: He became friends with a young man named Henry Walter Bates, a former hosier's apprentice, who introduced him to the joys of beetle collecting.

Books were always important to Wallace, and he testified that two others helped set his course. One was Charles Darwin's Journal from the voyage of the Beagle, a lively travel narrative that gave almost no hint of evolutionary ideas. The other, more daring and incendiary, was an anonymously authored best seller titled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, which did offer an evolutionary vision of life on Earth, though not in a form that most discerning readers found persuasive. The prevailing orthodoxy in Western culture was that God had shaped all species through special acts of creation, and that every species was essentially fixed, incapable of varying much from an ideal type. Such fixity was not just a religious dogma but a scientific one; the science philosopher William Whewell, for instance, had recently written: "Species have a real existence in nature, and a transmutation from one to another does not exist." In opposition to that view Vestiges hypothesized a "law of development" in living creatures, whereby one species is transformed into another by external circumstances, in incremental stages, from simple life-forms to complex ones, up to and including man. The result was adaptation. God still played a role, according to Vestiges, but more distantly—as ultimate designer of the process.














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