First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Here are the notions that great eras had passed; ages of creatures living in water and aspiring to evolve on land had existed long before our present-day world emerged. By 1810 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was publishing his views on evolution in France, and came up with a theory that was quickly rejected. Lamarck claimed that organisms evolved because of adaptations made in response to the experiences of successive generations – the reason a giraffe has a long neck, his theory argued, is because successive generations had stretched to reach up for leaves. Survival of the fittest, by contrast, holds that natural selection of longer-necked animals takes place as those with shorter necks were eliminated by an inability to reach up for leaves, and so they would die of starvation. We all know the two versions, and we have been taught to dismiss Lamarck and his views as misguided. Yet Charles Darwin did not do so – for him, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was entirely possible. This surprising view was called Pangenesis by Darwin, and he included many examples of the phenomenon in the last chapter of a book published in 1875 entitled Variation in Plants and Animals under Domestication. The argument was that cells within an organism would produce ‘gemmules’, microscopic particles containing inheritable information that accumulated in the germinal cells, which runs contrary to what is conventionally called Darwinian evolution. This is a remarkable revelation: in some ways, Darwin supported Lamarckism. More recent findings by biologists including Denis Noble at Oxford University have revealed the extent to which genetic change can be passed on through epigenetics – the way gene expression is regulated – so we now know that the extent to which genes are expressed can impose profound controls on evolution. Lamarck was partly right.
Although the theories expounded by Wallace and Darwin were to propose natural selection as an evolutionary principle, that essential idea had recently been published by an experimenter whose name has largely been forgotten. He was an arboriculturist named Patrick Matthew. Like Darwin, he went to Edinburgh University, and like Darwin, he left without a degree. Matthew returned to his family home in Errol, a small Scottish town, where he showed proficiency as a grower of fruit trees. He experimented with cross-breeding, and, notably, with grafting. These activities gave him insights into heredity, and in 1831 he published an important book entitled On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. It is in the Appendix that he introduced the crucial concept of natural selection. Wrote Matthew: ‘There is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition,’ and he continued:
Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls. Those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing … their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind.8
This was in print, and widely available, 27 years before Charles Darwin’s ideas were first presented. When the matter was raised with Darwin, he wrote: ‘I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered on the origin of species under the name of natural selection,’ and he promised: ‘If another edition of my book is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect.’ He did not keep his word but wrote instead: ‘An obscure writer on forest trees clearly anticipated my views … though not a single person ever noticed the scattered passages in his book.’ In the fourth edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin eventually admitted:
In 1831, Mr. Patrick Matthew, published his work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, in which he gives PRECISELY the same view of the origin of species as that … propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the Linnean Journal, and as that enlarged in the present volume.
He then added:
Unfortunately, the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, on April 7th, 1860.9
This claim was disingenuous. Matthew’s views were well known and widely discussed when first they appeared – indeed, many libraries banned his book because of its scandalous allegations that evolution had occurred.
Since I have shown clearly that Charles Darwin was not the first to write a book on evolution, then who was? The first great book on the subject was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844 and written in great secrecy by an anonymous naturalist, who remained unrecognized as the author for many years.10
The unnamed author stated that all forms of life had evolved over time, and they had done so according to natural laws and not because of divine intervention. He included in his text a diagram of an evolutionary tree, which was the first ever to appear in print. Although Vestiges contained descriptions of the ‘progress of organic life upon the globe’, the text did not contain the word ‘evolution’. The book was enormously successful for its time, selling over 20,000 copies to readers including world leaders such as Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln, politicians from William Gladstone to Benjamin Disraeli, scientists like Adam Sedgwick and Thomas Henry Huxley. The book was devoured with enthusiasm by Alfred Russel Wallace. Many years later it was revealed that the author was Robert Chambers, a naturalist who espoused evolutionary theory. His belief in an explanation founded on scientific rationalism went too far when he believed in the claims of W.H. Weekes, who insisted that he had created living mites by passing electricity through a solution of potassium ferrocyanate (K4[Fe(CN)6] · 3H2O). Chambers clearly saw biological evolution as steady upward progress, though he felt it was governed by divine laws. Another prior advocate of evolution was the Reverend Baden Powell, Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford and father of the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Robert Baden Powell. In his Essays on the Unity of Worlds, published in 1855, he wrote that all plants and animals had evolved from earlier, simpler forms, through principles that were essentially scientific. Powell also wrote to Darwin, complaining that his own views on evolution should have been cited in his book.
Charles Darwin did admit the influence of Thomas Malthus, who published several editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population between 1798 and 1826. In the opinion of Malthus, a leading British scholar, competition was an important factor regulating the growth of societies. Darwin conceded to his readers that his ideas were not original: in the introduction to The Descent of Man he emphasized: ‘The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of ancient, lower, and extinct forms is not in any degree new.’ Darwin knew that; modern scholars, intent on mindless magnification of the man, have forgotten the fact. This is how science is taught to us all. Reality is somewhat different.
Just as we imagine that Richard Owen gave us dinosaurs, we have been taught to hero-worship Charles Darwin as the originator of evolutionary theory. Yet we can now see that evolution was far from being Charles’ original idea. Not only had it been summarized by his own grandfather in a previous century, but the essential notion of natural selection was omitted from his early accounts of evolutionary mechanisms, even though it had been published decades earlier by an experimenter whose work Darwin knew. Today, we know Charles Darwin for the crucial concept ‘survival of the fittest’, and most authorities say that the theory is Darwin’s own – yet ‘survival of the