Translator: Jaime Ochoa Reviewer: Emma Gon
[Evolution, integrity, and responsibility by Juan Enríquez (videoconference)]
This is a young man who wanted to be a priest, who wanted
to live quietly in a church preaching the word of God, the Bible.
But like many young men, many times they devoted themselves to traveling.
Let's move on to the next [slide].
And this young man boarded this ship and started to travel around the world.
He wasn't even the first option to be the scientist naturalist
on this voyage, he was a rather spoiled guy.
This young man lived with his cousins,
the Wedgwood family, who many of you surely learned
from your grandmothers who have some dishware
made in this famous Wedgwood factory in England.
He was neither a diligent nor a dedicated kid,
but he did decided to travel around the world before going back home,
and so this gentleman embarked in [1836].
If we could move on to the next slide.
After traveling around the world, he returned and started
thinking for 22 years.
So here you see the difference between the young man
and the gentleman that had decided not to leave his home.
This was a gentleman that after going around the world
he would barely travel, only a trip to France.
He might have traveled once or twice outside of England,
but he really never returned to other countries, to exotic places.
He stayed home,
If we go to slide number 5,
for the first 20 years, he dedicated to write.
He wrote 250 000 words, 11 chapters; but he did not publish anything.
He did not feel that what he was saying matched with what he had learned,
with his conscience, with his knowledge.
Then it took him 20 years to make sense of the evidence that he started piling up,
and of what he was taught, and of his own beliefs.
He gathered more and more data until one day, in doing so,
something, that is common to see to happen in many families --
there are great days and tragic days.
Annie, his daughter,
in slide number 6,
died of scarlet fever in 1851.
22 years after his trip, he kept thinking and ended up experiencing a situation
in which his daughter Etty contracted diphtheria.
So, just like anyone of us who have children, we can see ourselves
in a situation where we already lost a child, another daughter is now sick
and in the middle of this sickness and this despair
for not being able to publish; this gentleman,
if we move on to slide number 7,
gets a letter sent from one of the remotest islands on the planet.
So, he is at the bedside of his sick daughter while sipping some tea,
going over these manuscripts, and he gets a card, a short letter
on June 18, 1858,
sent from a small island called Ternate, the one you are looking at now
marked with a red spot. This island is located in one of the remotest areas on the planet.
And this is a letter written by a gentleman
if we move on to number 8,
whose name is Alfred Russell Wallace.
And Wallace was a collector of natural species
which he would sell to men in England and Europe.
Wallace had ended up living in the land of Sandokan, where Salgari used to write,
living in these absolutely remote islands east of the Celebes
and immersed in the middle of a disease, in the middle of malaria,
in the middle of a dreadful fever. Wallace starts writing
and starts dreaming about the possibility of change in species.
In those days the belief was that God had created
all the species, that those species had been created in 6 days,
and that was the end of the story.
So this Mr. Wallace, in the middle of his malaria delusion
starts writing a letter
which he sends to Darwin.
if we move to number 9,
In that letter he explained to Darwin his new theory.
Then Darwin wrote one of the most important letters
not only in his life, but he wrote one of the most important letters,
in my opinion, one of the most heroic letters in the history of nearly anything.
This is a copy of that letter, and to tell you a little about its context...
let's move on to slide number 10.
Here, his son Charles Waring also falls ill.
So, we have that Darwin's daughter had diphtheria,
and that Darwin gets this letter and his son gets sick.
His son is sick with scarlet fever,
the same disease that caused his oldest daughter's death,
his son ends up dying on June 28, 1858.
So this was a father who lost a daughter, who had his second daughter sick,
and whose ill son would soon die.
And he has got this letter in his hands. Why was Wallace's letter important?
Let me share with you the words of an extraordinary woman
whose name is Janet Browne, she is the curator of Darwin's letters.
She wrote this fantastic book called Voyaging
and later The Power of Place, which is about Charles Darwin's life.
In it she briefly explains this context and the letter.
What this package contained
here in slide number 12,
was a letter, a short handwritten note, where
the theory of evolution by natural selection was described line by line
which up until that moment, after working for 22 years,
Darwin thought it was his.
So Darwin had in his hands a document about the theory
that he had been thinking about for 22 years.
In the first part of slide number 13,
let me read you two of the most important paragraphs in Wallace's words:
"There is a general principle in nature that causes many variants
to survive longer than their predecessors; and each one in turn,
gives origin to variants that are each time further away from the original species."
This was such a radical theory because everyone had thought that
two individuals of each species had boarded Noah's Ark, and that they were
the species that survived, and that there was no change in the species
from that moment
or from the moment species were created.
This man, riddled with malaria, riddled with fever,
writing from one of the remotest regions of the world,
described to Darwin what Darwin himself had been thinking for the past 22 years.
This was so different from what Darwin had learned,
that Darwin collected data, data, and more data
to be able to reinforce his theory before publishing.
The second part of Wallace's document goes like:
"Eventually the best variant remains by itself and when
the favorable characteristics return, its numbers quickly
rise until it occupies the extinct species' place."
Once again, this is normal for us, but in those years
the concept of extinct species was radical,
the concept of the time that was necessary for these changes to occur was radical.
And the concept that new species appear was even more radical.
It went completely against what most of the people thought.
So Darwin thought, "I am a poor lunatic, I am the only one who thinks this,
this is too dangerous to publish, not until enough evidence was collected",
then he gets this letter.
If we go to slide number 14,
here is Darwin's reaction to the letter
holding it in his hands next to both of his sick stricken children.
Here is a man who was "in awe, humiliated, useless, mortified, possesive,
irritated, bitter, angry and miserable" because what
he had been working for 22 years, was now better explained
by a man on an island in th edge of the world.
The following hours might have been
the most lonesome hours in Darwin's life.
If we go on to slide number 16,
Darwin had a series of options.
The first one in this slide was to have said:
"I am sorry my good man, I never got that letter".
This was a very feasable option because Wallace was sending him a letter
from the confines of the world, from one of the remotest islands on the planet,
full of cannibals, pirates and all types of things...
and Darwin could have just said, "What letter?"
The second option was to "publish first". He had all the manuscripts,
more than 100 000 words, 11 chapters. He published them and then publish
Wallace's letter arguing that "he got it after" he had published.
The third option was "to send it to someone who would not publish it."
This was too easy because there were so many people who did not believe in the theory of evolution
that Darwin would just send it to a scientist and say to him:
"What do you think? Should it be published or not?"
And that gentleman, right there could have said,
"No way, this is crazy."
The fourth option Darwin had was to tell Wallace that "he had a lot to catch up,
that he had been thinking about this for 22 years,
and that he thought what Wallace was saying was brilliant and similar
to what he had written at different times."
Of course, if we go on to slide 17,
there was a fifth option, and this fifth option was to write the following letter:
This is a snippet of that letter which
he basically sent to his best friend saying:
"My dear Lyell, (Wallace) sent me this letter and asked me to forward it to you.
It is worth reading. When I explained my theory of "Natural Selection"
according to a tug of war for existence, you warned me someone was going to beat me
if I did not publish. Now your premonition has become a reality.
I had never seen more coincidence.
If Wallace had seen my 1842 manuscript
he couldn't have written a better summary.
His precise terms are the titles of my chapters. He does not ask me to publish it
but I will immediately offer to send it to any scientific magazine.
All my originality for what it is worth, will be destroyed; and my book
if any value of it is left, it will only be an application of this theory."
Please notice the date on this letter,
he sends the letter on the same day he got the it from Wallace.
Here is a gentleman willing to take 22 years of his life work
and give the lead to another person just for getting a letter.
When Lyell,
if we move on to slide 19,
got this letter,
he started talking with Darwin's other great friend, [Joseph Dalton] Hooker.
They talked about the years they had spent at Darwin's flat,
at his home in Down House, writing about these things.
What starts unfolding right then
is that they started gathering some of the documents,
if we go on to slide 20,
that Darwin had already seen.
Take this one for example, it is one of the most important documents
in mankind's history of science;
and it is the first time that Darwin starts thinking that there is a sort of tree
of species and that from that point, there is a series of changes
in the species that get further away from that tree.
This one is from 1837. There's a mistake in my notes.
What these men finally decide to do is to tell Darwin
that they will publish Wallace's work, like Darwin was asking,
but that they will include some of the addenda that Darwin himself had forwarded.
Darwin, who was worried since his son at that time
was agonizing, agreed and then retreated to take care of his family.
Lyell and Hooker went to the Linnean Society, an organization in charge of studying plants,
which at the time was holding a session to honor Robert Brown,
who in turn wasn't exactly a distinguished scientist but who had been
the Society's President; so they ended up revealing to the world the Theory of Evolution.
This is important because it is the first document that anyone has,
the first time anyone learns about this theory
that was being discussed by these two gentlemen.
Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present.
Darwin was in his son's funeral,
and Wallace was still in Ternate, in the world's confines.
Wallace didn't even know this was being published at that time.
Twenty-five people were present.
They paid little attention because they were there for another reason,
and many of them fell asleep.
This is the document,
in slide number 23.
Indeed, it is not a document that appears to be of great importance. Its topics,
in slide 24,
were the tendency of species to form varieties and the permanence
of the variations and species by means of natural selection.
So, this document included three things:
the tendency of the variants to endlessly branch out from the original.
The first is Wallace's article, which means Darwin was not given the lead.
Then a 1844 passage of an unpublished part of
Darwin's work on the species,
and a letter that Darwin had sent to Asa Gray
some years before describing his own theory of evolution.
Darwin thought that these writings would appear as an addendum
or foot note to Wallace's manuscript.
He felt a pang of shame because he himself gave Wallace the lead,
when the three manuscripts appear; indeed, Wallace's was first
but then the other two manuscripts next to Darwin's.
Ok, this was allowed and it is the end of some of the worst
weeks in Darwin's life.
In May 1859, almost a year after the publication of this document
read when the members of the Linnean Society were sleeping,
these members have finally had the time to ponder, discuss,
and to take this information that Wallace and Darwin showed them;
Thomas Bell, the president of the Society, wrote the following paragraph in his annual report:
"This current year has not been indeed marked by any of those striking discoveries
which revolutionize some area of science."
Which means that almost a year after the publication, in the same Linnean Society,
the same president and the members do not realize
that the power of this theory was going to change the world,
and how it became one of the most important documents of its kind.
However, what this document and Darwin's actions did,
if we go on to slide 28,
were to nurture a man that has become a hero in many areas of the world.
And in places like Costa Rica, Ecuador, United States, Canada,
and any region of the world, Darwin's lessons still teach us not only
on how to make science, to make evolution, but also what the meaning
of an upright person is and what the meaning of ethics and leading a life is.
It teaches so much about a man who has put together one of the most radical theories
in mankind's history is not attacked at a personal level.
What gets attacked is his theory and whether or not there was an origin of species in some places,
but Mr. Darwin is a gentleman who set an example throughout his life,
an example of integrity, coherence, of search for the evidence,
even though his findings contradicted his personal beliefs.
Like Einstein, he became an example not to be condemned.
The things that either Einstein or Darwin said may have been very radical.
But Darwin's integrity and his clarity were such...
that the life of transparency with which he lived, makes it hard to
attack a gentleman, who spent all his life
thinking about only one thing: just life.
This is a story, a brief one of two or three weeks
in the life of a man who, in my opinion, is a hero and an example of what
many times we lack in politics, what we lack in business,
what we lack in the way we lead our lives, because we forget
about the importance of integrity, of absolute dedication.
To such an extent that this man is willing to sacrifice his life's work
and give the lead to a man who was almost unknown,
just because Wallace had the clarity and vision
to send Darwin a single letter that went beyond,
in Darwin's mind, the priority of 11 chapters
and hundreds of thousands of words;
and that is an example that for me, in a country like Costa Rica,
a nation that holds the environment with such a high regard,
that has set many examples on how to start to link a sustainable society,
a society that can work without an army,
a society that can work with technology head to head with nature;
Darwin's integrity is an example that should be spread even more.
It has been an honor to be at TEDxPuraVida,
to wear the T-shirt with you,
I hope you greatly enjoy your day.
Thank you very much and I'd like to
apologize for not being there with you.
(Applause)