bashing Darwin day?

The hype over Darwin will not end soon -- the 150th anniversary of publishing the Origin of Species is in November and there's a major motion picture about Darwin planned for a fall release. If this hype increases scientific literacy and acceptance of evolution by the American public, whom am I to complain? I was part of an overflow crowd at the state museum last night for a Darwin Day lecture, and much of the audience was not academic -- older couples, fathers and sons, pairs of undergrads who were clearly not science majors (based on overheard conversations), even a guy in overalls who looked like he'd been on a tractor earlier in the day. Darwin Day seems to be working as extension, as a way of getting the average person to be more aware of biology and the process of science.

However, one day after Darwin's 200th birthday, we can stop some of the hero worship...

CPP posted over at Propter Doc that "if it hadn't been Darwin it would have been someone else." Yup, natural truths become evident over time and eventually someone would have articulated the theory of natural selection had it not been Darwin. But this subjunctive phrasing belies the fact that someone actually did independently come to the same conclusions before Darwin had published his theory. Darwin was scooped! Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger and bolder man, published some the same ideas based on different data without waiting for the results of 8 years of barnacle experiments for more evidence. Because of Darwin's work was known to members of the Royal Society -- some of whom had been trying to get Darwin to publish for years -- Darwin's precedence was recognized and the official paper on natural selection read to the Royal Society is authored by both Darwin and Wallace.

Some texts still refer to it as the "Darwin-Wallace" theory, and the Linnean Society gives out a Darwin-Wallace medal each year, but this is not the year to mention the shared credit to the general public. It's extremely similar to the history books lauding Newton for inventing calculus even though Liebniz published his independent derivation of calculus first. These days he who publishes first gets the credit, even if another scientist has been laboring on the problem longer, even presenting if s/he had presented the unpublished data at meetings. And as long as the publishing group did their work independently and without knowledge or malice... that's life in science, that's being scooped. Either Newton and Darwin had friends in much higher places, or the rules of science have changed.

Perhaps especially so in 2009, there are those dedicated to not forgetting that someone else did conceive of natural selection that wasn't Darwin. Almost everything discovered could have been found by someone else... could have been done years before we started working on it... it would be 10 times faster and easier for a scientist starting to work on it a decade from now. Linus Pauling's alpha helix discovered while he was sick in bed, Kekule's dream of a benzene ring, Darwin's amazement that all those Galapagos birds were still finches... could have been discovered by someone else. Perhaps with less poetry, less of a good anecdote. But it doesn't take away from these visionary scientists that they were the first to conceive of these major ideas and that they knew what to do with their inspiration from there.