Professor Stephen Seligman writes:
Nature‘s News article on Darwin and the 20-year publication gap (Nature 446, 478-479; 2007) discusses some of the controversies surrounding the reasons for the 20-year delay between the time that Darwin began to think about evolution and the publication of Origin of Species.
Whatever the cause of the delay, there is little disagreement about the chief factor that forced Darwin eventually to publish (The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn VII, 840-843; Cambridge University Press,1910). On 18 June 1858 he received a letter from A. R. Wallace, then at Ternate in the Maluku Islands, describing a theory of natural selection strikingly similar to his own. Darwin, taken aback by the realization that he could be scooped, consulted colleagues, who sent Wallace’s essay, together with an abstract of Darwin’s work, as a joint article that was read in a meeting of the Linnaean Society on 1 July of the same year.
Thus a procrastination of two decades was ended in 13 days. Both men had been stimulated by reading Malthus on population. While lying ill with fever in Maluku, Wallace developed the theory of natural selection in two hours and completed his essay in three days. By modern standards, both men would have been eligible to share a Nobel.
Research Professor
New York Medical College
Valhalla, New York 10595, USA