The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. David Quammen

nobody in those circles knew him—not face-to-face and not as a peer, anyway. He was a collector of dried creatures for pay, a natural-history tradesman. There was class stratification in science as in every other part of Victorian British society. But he had published a few earlier papers in a respectable journal, and one of those papers had drawn favorable attention from Charles Lyell, the great geologist. Oh, and Wallace knew one other famous man, not personally but as a sort of pen pal, who had spoken generously to him in a letter: Charles Darwin.

      It was now February 1858. Hardly anyone at that point recognized Darwin for what he was—an evolutionary theorist, in secret—and though Lyell was among that small group who did, as a close friend and confidant, Alfred Wallace certainly wasn’t. Charles Darwin to him was just a conventionally eminent naturalist, author of the Beagle chronicle and other safe books, including several on the taxonomy of barnacles. But a Dutch mail boat would soon stop at the port of Ternate, in the Moluccas, where Wallace had fetched up. He was excited by his own discovery, if it was a discovery, and eager to share this dangerous hypothesis with the scientific world. So he packed up his paper with a cover letter and mailed the packet to Mr. Darwin, hoping that Darwin might find it worthy. If so, maybe Darwin would share it with Mr. Lyell, who might help get it published.

      The packet reached Darwin, probably on June 18, 1858, and hit him like a galloping ox. He felt crushed, scooped, ruined—but also honor-bound to grant Wallace’s request, passing the paper on toward publication. It would mean, Darwin knew, letting the younger man take all the credit for this epochal idea he himself had incubated for twenty years but was not yet quite ready to publish. Despite that, he did send the Wallace paper along to Lyell—communicating yelps of his own anguish along with it. Lyell took not just the paper but also the hint. Along with another of Darwin’s close scientific allies, the botanist Joseph Hooker, Lyell talked Darwin back from despair, suggested a posture of sensible fairness rather than self-abnegating honor, and brokered a compromise of shared credit. The result was a clumsily conjoined presentation—a pastiche of Wallace’s paper plus excerpts from Darwin’s unpublished writings—before a British scientific club, the Linnean Society, in the summer of 1858. Lyell and Hooker offered an introductory note, and then simply watched and listened. Proxies read the works aloud, with neither of the authors present. (Darwin was at home, where his youngest son had just died of scarlet fever; Wallace was still out in the far boonies of the Malay Archipelago.) This joint presentation made almost no impression on anyone, not even the few dozen Linnean members in attendance, because the night was hot, the language was obscure, the logic was elliptical, and the big meaning didn’t jump forth.

      Seventeen months later, Darwin published On the Origin of Species. That 1859 book, not the 1858 paper or excerpts, launched the Darwinian revolution. It was only an abridged and hasty abstract of the much longer (and more tedious) book on natural selection that Darwin had been writing for years, but The Origin was just enough, in the right form, at the right time. It presented the theory as “one long argument,” not just a bare syllogism, and with oodles of data but not many footnotes. It was plainspoken, and readable by any literate person. It became a bestseller and went into multiple editions. It converted a generation of scientists to the idea of evolution (though not to natural selection as the prime mechanism). It was translated and embraced in other countries, especially Germany. That’s why Darwin is still history’s most venerated biologist and Alfred Russel Wallace is a cherished underdog, famous for being eclipsed, to the relatively small subset of people who have heard of him.

      The crux of the “one long argument” comes in chapter 4 of The Origin, titled “Natural Selection,” in which Darwin describes the central mechanism of his theory. It’s the same combination of three principles that he had scratched into his notebook two decades earlier, plus the turned crank. “Natural selection,” he wrote in the book, “leads to divergence of character and to much extinction of the less improved and intermediate forms of life.” Lineages change over time, he stated. You could see that in the fossil record. Different creatures adapt to different niches, different ways of life, and thereby diversify into distinct forms and behaviors. Transitional stages disappear. Then he wrote: “The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth.”

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      Darwin explored the tree simile in one extended paragraph, ending that chapter of The Origin. “The green and budding twigs may represent existing species,” he wrote. From there he worked backward: woody twigs and small branches as recently extinct forms; competition between branches for space and for light; big limbs dividing into branches, then those into lesser branches; all ascending and spreading from a single great trunk. “As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds,” Darwin wrote, and those buds grow to be twigs, and those twigs grow to be branches, some vigorous, some feeble, some thriving, some dying, “so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.” There’s a nice word: ramifications.

      It’s especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is “a structure formed of branches,” from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is “implications.” Darwin’s tree certainly had implications.

      Furthermore his book, like Edward Hitchcock’s, included a treelike illustration. This was the only illustration, the only graphic image of any sort, in the first edition of The Origin. It appeared between pages 116 and 117, amid his discussion of how lineages diverge over time. A foldout, again like Hitchcock’s, but published in simple black and white. It was a schematic figure, not an artfully drawn tree, not even so lively as the little sketch in his notebook long ago. Darwin called it a diagram. It showed hypothetical lineages, proceeding upward through evolutionary time and diverging—that is, dotted lines, rising vertically and branching laterally. Darwin was no artist, but, even lacking such talent, he could have laid out this diagram with a pencil and a ruler. In its draft version, as sent to the lithographer, he probably had. But it made the arboreal point.

      Each increment of vertical distance on the ruled page, Darwin explained, stood for a thousand generations of inheritance. Deep time. Eleven major lineages began the ascent. Eight of those came to dead ends—meaning, they went extinct. Trilobites, ammonites, ichthyosaurs, and plesiosaurs had all suffered such ends, leaving no descendants of any sort. One lineage rose through the eons without splitting, without tilting, like a beanstalk—meaning that it persisted through time, unchanged. That’s much the way horseshoe crabs, sometimes called living fossils, have survived relatively unchanged (at least externally, so far as fossilization can show) over 450 million years. The other two lineages, dominating the diagram, branched often and spread horizontally—as well as climbed vertically. Their branching and horizontal spread represented the exploration of different niches by newly evolved forms. So there it all was: evolution and the origins of diversity.

      Darwin’s diagram of divergence, from On the Origin of Species, 1859.

      Back in Massachusetts, Edward Hitchcock read Darwin’s book, and it stuck in his craw. This wasn’t his first exposure to the idea of transmutation (he knew of Lamarck’s work and some other wild speculations), but it was the latest statement of that idea, the most concrete and logical, and therefore the most dangerously persuasive. Like some other pious scientists who chose to see God’s hand acting directly in the fossil record—Louis Agassiz at Harvard, François Jules Pictet in Geneva, and Adam Sedgwick, who had been Darwin’s mentor in geology at Cambridge—Hitchcock wasn’t pleased.

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