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ANDREW BERRY: Evolution by natural selection.
This is an idea that has been sought after since the dawn
of human thought.
And it was a theory that was discovered by two people,
and we've blithely forgotten one of them.
What on Earth has happened to poor old Alfred Russel Wallace?
GEORGE BECCALONI: Alfred Russel Wallace
was born in 1823 in a small cottage
by the banks of the river Usk in Wales.
ANDREW BERRY: And he works with his brother,
and they're surveying the British countryside.
He becomes interested in plants.
And this is Britain.
There's not even that much to become interested in.
I say that with a certain amount of national pride.
And in 1844, he meets Henry Walter Bates.
GEORGE BECCALONI: Bates turned out
to be a really keen beetle collector.
ANDREW BERRY: So OK, here we are collecting
beetles in miserable Britain.
We can do better than this.
We can do real science.
GEORGE BECCALONI: He suggested to Bates
that they both go off to Brazil and collect mainly
insects, but also birds.
ANDREW BERRY: These are two know-nothings.
They don't have any money.
They've been nowhere.
And they decide to go to the tropics.
I mean, this was equivalent today of going to Mars.
It's just so unimaginably bold.
GEORGE BECCALONI: They headed off to Brazil,
worked together for a while, and then
decided to split up and concentrate on different areas
of the Amazon.
ANDREW BERRY: Wallace was the modern equivalent
of the backpacker, basically traveling by himself.
He's dependent upon local help.
Everything's stuffed into a dug-out canoe.
And yet he's trying to do science.
And collecting stuff, which is the worst kind of science
to do under those circumstances because you're just
accumulating enormous amounts of stuff--
spider monkeys, toucans, parrots,
fantastic, gaudy things.
So he has this vision.
He's going to walk into a London scientific salon
with a toucan on his arm.
He's not going to be a nobody.
He's going to be a somebody.
GEORGE BECCALONI: What happened next was at 26 days
into the voyage when the ship was
in the middle of the Atlantic,
it caught fire.
ANDREW BERRY: Ship's on fire.
It's going up like a tinderbox.
GEORGE BECCALONI: And they watch the ship sink.
ANDREW BERRY: Wallace got to visualize the collections which
he'd nearly died for, those living animals,
those pets that were his passport to the big time,
he watches everything go up literally in flames.
GEORGE BECCALONI: Ten days later, they were very luckily rescued
by an old leaky ship that was going back to England.
ANDREW BERRY: And he writes this poignant letter, as one would.
It's nice to be back.
I'm never going to sea again.
But if he wants to realize that ambition
to become, quote, "a scientist," he's got to do it again.
GEORGE BECCALONI: Wallace decided, where next?
ANDREW BERRY: He's off again, this time to Southeast Asia.
GEORGE BECCALONI: He collected an astonishing total of 126,000
specimens of natural history.
And out of all the specimens he collected,
several thousand were new to science.
ANDREW BERRY: He's doing the backpacker thing again.
He's struggling to survive.
He's getting attacked by--
his specimens keep getting stolen by dogs.
And yet he's still finding time in between bouts of malaria
to really think big picture.
GEORGE BECCALONI: He was in a little village
racked by malarial fits.
During this illness, Wallace was really
thinking about natural history and the distribution of plants
and animals in space and time.
ANDREW BERRY: The notion was that species changed one
into another through time.
And for whatever reason, ping, yes,
there was his Eureka moment.
GEORGE BECCALONI: Wallace realized
that, basically, there's constant death and struggle
in the natural world.
ANDREW BERRY: There's finite resources.
Therefore, competition.
So who's going to win that competition?
Well, the best endowed.
GEORGE BECCALONI: And this provided a mechanism
driving evolution--
natural selection.
ANDREW BERRY: If you want a Eureka moment,
that's pretty Eureka-ry.
Famously, as soon as he's capable of holding a pen,
he writes out his manuscript.
GEORGE BECCALONI: Because he knew that Charles Darwin was
interested in evolution, he posted the scientific essay off
to Darwin.
When Darwin opened Wallace's essay and started to read it,
he was absolutely shocked.
ANDREW BERRY: Darwin wrote, "Wallace
could have seen one of my manuscript
and used its chapter headings as his topic sentences."
Darwin cobbles together a set of notes to be presented alongside
Wallace's.
The next thing that happened, of course,
was it galvanized Darwin into scribble, scribble, scribble.
The Origin of Species, published in November 1859,
does mention Wallace in the preface, but, it's my theory.
This is-- here it is.
And look, to a certain extent, fair enough.
He's been working on this for a long time.
Does Wallace go through and count the number
of times he's referred to?
Does Wallace get-- excuse me!
No.
Wallace loves the book, says, God, look.
Darwin knows so much.
I couldn't have done this.
GEORGE BECCALONI: I suppose I hate injustice,
and I feel that, at the moment, the history of biology
has a very Darwino-centric view.
People like Wallace actually made massive contributions,
and they deserve to be remembered as well.
ANDREW BERRY: It's the greatness of the idea that they had
which should give him prominence,
which is this idea that everyone's
been seeking forever--
where we come from and how we relate
to the rest of the natural world.
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