The Infinite Monkey Cage - Alfred Russel Wallace

Episode Date: July 22, 2013

Brian Cox and Robin Ince discuss the life and works of Alfred Russel Wallace, the lesser known co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection. They are joined on stage by biologists Steve Jones and Aoife McLysaght and comedian Tony Law to ask whether Wallace is the great unsung hero of biology and why it was Darwin who seems to have walked away with all the glory.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. On my left, a man whose form, shape and hair is the result of millions of years of evolution

by natural selection, raising questions that maybe evolution does have aim and purpose. And he is it. It is the teleological face of particle physics, Brian Cox. And on my right, a man whose form, shape and lack of hair ironically refutes the idea that evolution has aim and purpose, bringing us mainly by accident back to science rather than mysticism. It's Robin Ince.

Natural selection, despite contrarians throwing eyeballs and flagellum at it in the hope of discrediting it, remains a powerful and convincing part of the theory of evolution. And that, of course, despite intelligent design cabaret scenes, vibrant attempts to manage to get into popular culture with such classic jokes as, Waiter, waiter, what's this flagellum doing in my soup? It's doing the backstroke,

and there is no way the mechanism of movement can be explained by modern evolutionary theory. By the way, while we are on natural selection, we were talking about this beforehand, and some of the fantastic arguments that people have had against it. There's a documentary in America with the subtitle No Darwin, No Hitler, in which at one point this guy goes,

he says, Hitler and Darwin were very similar. You see, Darwin used the word selection, as did Hitler. Darwin, selection. And I think, yes, so did Cadbury's as well, but he doesn't necessarily... This... This cocoa seems fascistic! Today, we're looking at a scientist whose works include

the use of flying machines in war, social environment and modern progress, land nationalisation, is Mars habitable and the revolt of democracy. A polymath is remembered for the one thing above all else, though, being the co-author with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection,

where I'm using the theory in the technical sense here, which means fact. Oh, you tricksy scientist and your semantic games. Anyway... Get it out of the way, you're soon. With the 100th anniversary of his death this year, we look at the work of Alfred Russell Wallace, and to guide us through the work of this complex mind,

we are joined by three brains housed, as is traditional, in bone, skin and other tissue. Yes, probably the UK's finest geneticist, in many ways the Wallace, to Richard Dawkins' grommet, is Professor Steve Jones. Smashing helix, grommet, is Professor Steve Jones. Smashing helix grommet. The, um... Few comedians combine jokes on Babylonian gardening, the South Sea bubble and the Marxist writings of Franz Fanon,

and this man doesn't either. It's almost impossible to do, that's why. But a few people also do actually manage to facially resemble a Victorian Viking going to a fancy dress party as one of the village people with the aplomb of this man. He says he doesn't know much about science, but he does watch Octonauts, so we're in safe hands with Tony Law. Final scientist is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics

at Terence College, Dublin, where she works on the origin and evolution of new genes and gene loss. She said that she was forced to study geography at school rather than physics, which means she knows where everything is, but not how fast it's travelling. Whoever it was who laughed at that, put your hand up. I'll buy you a drink. You're a physicist.

It's Ethan MacLeishit, and this is our panel. APPLAUSE Nothing instils greater confidence in a Radio 4 show than the presenter going, put your hand up who laughed there. Yes. Yes, you, the lone person, just there. I think it was a groan, actually.

Steve Jones, we're talking about Wallace, we're going to talk about evolution, so I thought that two minutes, without hesitation, repetition or deviation, outline evolution by natural selection. Two whole minutes, do I need that much? It's a series of successful mistakes. End of story. Now, I'm all over that.

Tony, you buzzed in there saying that wasn't a full minute, so you're now allowed to continue talking about natural selection. Tony, you have one minute, 55 seconds on evolution by natural selection. What he said. And then longer. When you go with it... So, we'll get straight into the idea. Natural selection.

We see the idea coming to fruition from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Because Darwin and Russell Wallace, they found it through very different means. I mean, Charles Darwin, we see a very long argument that he spent 20 years building up. And Alfred Russell Wallace, apparently, in a moment of kind of a fevered haze. Well, I've had students a bit like Darwin in that they're going to have this perfectionism that prevents them from finishing anything. And so I think Darwin seemed to be really keen on having a completely irrefutable argument,

and that seems to be what delayed him. And Wallace was very keen to get it out, although it's Darwin who published it on his behalf, right? So maybe if he didn't want it published quite so hastily. But I think the difference between them as well possibly comes from their background. You know, Wallace needed to make his reputation as a scientist and he needed to use something like this to make his reputation.

He needed to earn money to live and Darwin was comfortable so he could take the time as well to do it and so I think that's one difference between them. It's usually said that Wallace triggered Darwin to publish so he sent him the theory which matched very closely Darwin's theory and Darwin published shortly afterwards. Their papers were read together shortly afterwards and then Darwin published The Origin of Species the following year which he still called an abstract so we can only imagine how long the full thing would have been if he had been he probably would have died with it unpublished or something if he was going to go on like that but I think it's a little insulting to Wallace to just call him a catalyst

in the whole thing because he did come up with the idea independently and Darwin so Darwin went deeper into it, so he collected a lot more evidence and made a really, really good case for studying barnacles obsessively. It was one of the ways. But I think it's kind of... Sometimes when Wallace is remembered only as the guy

who kind of shook Darwin into action, it's not really fair on Wallace. I think he did something really, really brilliant. It's a great idea. But it also gives us that hope because the idea of evolution by natural selection didn't depend

on Darwin so when you're talking about science and science moving forward and good ideas coming out it doesn't hang on just that one guy ever existing and being a series of lucky mistakes all the way to his or her birth and education. So if Darwin hadn't existed, there would have been Wallace,

and if Wallace hadn't existed, there would have been somebody else. It's an interesting point, Steve, because often the history of science appears to be the history of great, great scientists with these wonderfully revolutionary ideas. Of course, we both know that isn't true, don't we? From our own experience. Absolutely.

This is my question. So was the idea of evolution by natural selection in the air? And why, if so, why? I think the idea of evolution, of change, rather than of a static created universe, was very much in the air. And it had been around really for a long time. If you really want to, you can trace it back to the ancient greeks but in france for example it had been big

and there was a french famous french biologist called lamarck many people have heard of and he's often mocked because he had the notion of what was called the inheritance of acquired characters that if your father was a blacksmith he would get big muscles and you would get big muscles as a result. In fact, there was an early 20th century scientist at University College London, where I work, who wanted to study this, and he took the lines of mice and he cut their tails off for generation after generation to see if he got a tailless line of mice. And he didn't, and after 20 years he stopped his experiment when somebody pointed out to him that people of the Jewish persuasion had been doing it for 2,000 years,

with no effect whatsoever. And Lamarck is often mocked for that, and Darwin, it's said, thought Lamarck was a fool for thinking that, whereas Darwin's was a very simple mechanical idea of a machine that just picked up the best variant and allowed that one to reproduce. That's almost a platonic idea, isn't it? I suppose you could take that back to Greece.

Yeah, it's an idea of essences. There's an essence in every creature which makes it what it is. And we'll come back to it when we talk about Wallace. But Wallace, although he was a great man without question, also had this idea at the back of his mind that he couldn't get rid of it. Aoife, do you think... I mean, there are a lot of conspiracy theorists who... I mean, they're trying to stir up this idea that Darwin was somehow...

He took all of the glory and Alfred Russell Wallace was forgotten. But, I mean, that's not really true, is it, in terms of scientific history? I don't think he's completely forgotten. No, no, because I think a lot of people, if you study this, you learn about Darwin and Wallace together. They're talked about together. But Wallace is probably,

his role is kind of downplayed and Darwin's is played up. And there's some justification for that in the fact that Darwin is the one who did all this meticulous work to accumulate the evidence, which must have been very persuasive then for people who were maybe trying to figure out or decide.

So maybe Darwin, with all this evidence, might have been more persuasive. So Wallace isn't forgotten, but I don't really go in for the conspiracy theory stuff either. And I don't understand the thing about conspiracy theories is that people who believe one tend to believe them all. I don't know what they... So even if one of these

amazing things could be true, how can they all be true? Well, what if Darwin's journals supposedly had been written up to 20 years before Wallace, maybe just backdated the dates? Strangely enough, there is a

controversy which has come back to life again. To me it is very boring which turns on the date of the letter which when Darwin received the famous letter from the Malay Archipelago where Wallace outlines in just a few paragraphs the same theory and they received wisdom until not long ago

it was two or three weeks before they presented the paper to the Linnaean Society of London, which is where they did it jointly, without Wallace actually knowing. But there is now evidence where somebody very meticulously, and this shows how there's a whole industry which is involved in picking the lint out of Darwin's

navel, and he had a very, very deep navel. There are people who just study everything he had for breakfast for 80 years, and I'd just been, you know, for Down House for the 40th time. And this chap has worked out the dates of the mail steamers and the postal service that came from the island where Wallace was. And he's worked out, and I say it's rather convincing, actually,

that actually the letter got to Darwin as much as two months earlier before he claimed to have received it. And if you look at his notebooks, he says, I can't believe this, it's just too hard for me to take on board, that if you look at Darwin's notebooks, there are some pages inserted in a different kind of paper with a different kind of ink on them, where he outlines the theory which Wallace had sent him

as if it's his own. But you can't say that. That's like being rude about the Conservative Party and not allowed to do that. So I don't believe it, but it might still be true. So, Tony, well done. That's a point to you. We're correct on the conspiracy theory. I'm interested, Steve, you read the letter, Wallace's letter.

You said he outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection in a couple of paragraphs. So how different was that to what we know today about the theory of evolution by natural selection in a couple of paragraphs. So how different was that to what we know today about the theory of evolution by natural selection? How complete was it? I think as the theory, it was pretty complete. But the difference was the evidence. Darwin was a real obsessive. And he spent, you know, people, everybody knows that Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, 1859.

Many people have read The Voyage of the Beagle, which is a superb travel book. Some people perhaps know, and the general public, I'm sure you all in the audience do, about the 1871 book about the human evolution. But in fact, he wrote 19 books altogether. And he spent eight years studying barnacles. And all this was to get a huge mass of evidence, which nobody could deny.

And you can imagine what a shock it was to get a huge mass of evidence which nobody could deny and you can imagine what a shock it was to get like an explosion he says my priority has been shattered out of the blue this letter comes and he's painted as being a bit of a gent saying well we'll do it as darwin and wallace rather than what i would do tear up a letter pretend i've never received it and send a note to nature which of course would then be turned down, I was to say. But he was kind of a gent, but perhaps he was a bit less of a gent. It was an amazing year.

It was 1858 when this thing came out. The actual lecture to the famous Linnaean Society didn't cause much of a stink. The president said this was a year when not much interesting happened. Big mistake. Steve. Steve, we've looked at the similarities between Darwin and Wallace,

but society at large may have been uncomfortable with this idea that we were related to animals, part of the animal kingdom. But Wallace also, certainly later in life, was uncomfortable with that idea, wasn't he? Yeah, I mean, it's rather hard to pin down what he meant. It got very, very vague. But he was very much involved in spirituality, and he became very mystical.

And he felt that there had been physical evolution, which led to us having all those useful things like knees that break, or in my case, fingers that get old and the joints get creaky. And that's all evolution. But he felt that somehow there was an evolution of the spirit, and he became a spiritualist. He actually believed that it was possible to speak to the dead, and he went to seances where people came out with ectoplasm and that kind of stuff,

which we now know was completely fraudulent. And Darwin, who liked Wallace, was disgusted by this, and he wrote a rather disparaging letter to one of his friends about Wallace, but then he pointed out that Wallace's belief in speaking to the dead was not, in fact, very different from the prevailing superstition of the country, by which he met the Church of England, of course. So he was being rather rude about that, too. But that was a very odd thing for Wallace to do, to get involved in the spirit, because generally he was a first-rate scientist. And one of the things he was also against, and you can gasp about it now,

he hated the idea of vaccination. He didn't have MMR then, but he was very much against it. But he was against it on two good grounds. First of all, he was against animal experiments on ethical grounds. Now, I can see that you would be against animal experiments on ethical grounds. There's no scientific grounds for being against them, but it's like being a vegetarian. You don't want to harm animals. That's fine. And also he did something more clever.

He went and looked at the survival of kids who'd been vaccinated versus those who hadn't, against smallpox, and there was no difference. And there was no difference. And the reason was that once you're vaccinated, enough people are vaccinated, they're peeing out and pooing out the virus, so everybody becomes immune. But the evidence was then that vaccination didn't work. So he went against the prevailing views by saying that vaccination didn't work. And actually, in those days, although the evidence has now changed, he was right. So in fact, he was a very,

very good scientist. And why he got so involved in this spirituality thing is a great mystery to me. And I think science and spirituality and science and religion really have nothing to say to each other. But Wallace disagreed. But this was much later in life. It was, yeah. We say that Wallace was obscure, but he wasn't really at the end of his life. At the end of his

life, he was probably the most famous scientist in the world, because he'd written a book about Darwin, Darwinism. And he wrote, as you mentioned, he wrote books about the canals, he wrote works about a book, actually, about the life on Mars, it's just that he couldn't live there, he also mentioned in the introduction, one of his last papers, 1913, just a hundred years ago, was called On the Use of Flying Machines in Modern Warfare, And it's incredible to imagine that the man who wrote to Charles Darwin from the remote Far East, 60 years later, was presaging the use of drones, unpiloted aircraft, to attack the enemy. And so that is the sign of a great

scientist, somebody who isn't just concerned with one thing, he was concerned with everything. So I'm a big Wallace man in spite of his short beard. So really what you're saying is that his kind a big Wallace man in spite of his short beard. So really, what you're saying is that his kind of eccentricities at the end of his life were the usual professorial descent. It's called the philosophy pause. We all get it sooner or later.

Do you find it coming on at all yet? What's that story about there's a worm, isn't there? There's an animal and it's got a brain and it swims through the sea. It's called a sapunculid worm. And the famous phrase is, like a scientist given tenure,

it settles on the ocean floor and resorbs its brain. Now, I resorbed mine long ago, but I have no knowledge of yours. It's on its way. Tony, you were just saying before we started that you've been out to Peru. And one of the things that's fascinating about Darwin and Wallace and others was this tremendous excitement of adventure. They went off and they were there. It was the bug hunters going beyond Suffolk,

going, let's go. Apparently Wallace was inspired by reading Voyager. I was moaning about long drives and flights, but you can imagine the curiosity to go to those lengths. It's remarkable, isn't it? Mr Wallace was in Borneo when he sent his letter back. He went to Borneo, but he was on the small islands more when he wrote back. He wrote a fantastic travel book about his time in Malaysia,

but you tend to forget how incredibly brave he was. When he was a young man, he worked as a surve time in Malaysia. But, you know, you tend to forget how incredibly brave he was. I mean, when he was a young man, he worked as a surveyor in Wales. He laid out the street plan of Llandrindon Wells. That's very brave. I would not do that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, actually, he was brave because what was going on was that the common

land was being stolen from the Welsh peasants by rich English landlords, which he was against. But he couldn't make a living out of this, so he decided to go with his brother to South America and collect animals and sell them back here, which he did for several years. His brother died of malaria, more than likely. He came back across the Atlantic, and his ship caught fire and sank.

And the only thing that survived was one parrot, one white parrot, which fluttered about and landed on the boat. They bombed around in the Atlantic for a week or two before they were picked up, and he scarcely mentions this. Unfortunately, the ship sank, and I was in an open boat for two weeks. And then he came back, and then I went... With only a parrot to eat. And then he went and lived for eight years or more in the Far East,

learning local languages, becoming very much involved in local culture. So he was an astonishing man. And, of course, so was Darwin. I mean, they were fantastically brave. Health and safety wouldn't let you do it now. I just love that the ship was called The Mischief. So we have The Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin

and Wallace's Voyage of the Mischief. Aoife, what do you think Alfred Russell Wallace now, in terms of where we've got with understanding evolution, what do you think would most excite and infuse him now? I suppose one thing is when you look at our genome, our complete DNA, only roughly 2% of it is under purifying selection. This is the selection that is characteristic of genes. So it looks like a lot of it is not what we normally call a gene.

And that's a bit of a puzzle because we're carrying around this 98% of our DNA and it either does nothing or we don't know what it does. And it's a bit of both. So there's the ENCODE project last year that made, so this was a project that was trying to characterize all of this DNA and made huge claims that 80% of our genome is doing lots and lots of things, which were probably slightly exaggerated claims. But there's something going on there. And that probably, considering that he seemed to like going after new fresh ideas, he'd probably be leading the ENCODE project or something. What I find remarkable about both Wallace

and Darwin was that, of course, they didn't know what the hereditary mechanism was at all after the Second World War so a hundred years later to see, which does make it all the more remarkable doesn't it, that they've managed to hit on the right idea independently. And I think it's wonderful that on their first go they came

up with a kind of a theory of everything it's more often I think that we see people come up with something that explains this theory of everything. It's more often I think that we see people come up with something that explains this thing over here, somebody else explains that over there, and somebody explains this over there, and it takes somebody else to come along and go, you know what, these are all the same thing in slightly different colours. And they came up with the big theory that can be expressed in a sentence, as Steve did, and then the details are still being worked out in all the special cases, and this gene's a bit weird, and that lineage is a bit weird,

and this species is a bit funny, are what we're doing now. Steve, Darwin eloquently expressed this idea that he traced the origin of life back to a single event. There's that famous phrase, isn't there? A small, warm pond. Now, of course, the origin of life is a bit like the nature of God. You can never really use science to explore it, because it probably happened just once.

Well, if it happened several times, only one attempt succeeded. So we have the vague ideas of when it might have happened, but how it happened, nobody really knows. I have a colleague of mine in my lab who's trying to originate life again. In fact, I have to tell you, rather to my dismay, he signed on a PhD student whose PhD is to make life. This is Nick Lane, is it? Nick Lane. He's been on the show many times. So the origin of life, I think, remains a bit of an unanswerable mystery. But my question was going to be, did Wallace, because I know Darwin went into some depth,

he thought very hard about that, and tracing the line back. Was Wallace the same? Did he realise that this was suggested? What Wallace really did, which Darwin didn't do as much, Wallace founded what we now call biogeography. He realised there was a pattern to the animals of the world. And Darwin, for example, was greatly mystified by the fact that you've got, for example, flightless birds,

the same birds that couldn't fly at all, ostriches in Africa, rears in South America, emus in Australia. How did they get there? Nobody had any idea. And Darwin had this mad idea of land bridges that leapt up out of the seas and they ran across the bridge and the bridge then sank down again. And Wallace was much more rational, and he hinted at what we now know to be true, ran across the bridge, and the bridge then sank down again. And Wallace was much more rational,

and he hinted at what we now know to be true, that actually the shape of the earth has changed dramatically. And we now know that the great shift, which is called Wallace's Line, between the plants and animals of Malaysia and of Australia, which is across a strait which is only about five miles wide, the Strait of Lombok, is due to the fact that's where two continental plates were separated for a long, long time. So that actually Wallace's insight into the geographical patterns of life were predicted by 150 years, the most amazing discovery of geology,

which is the continents are not fixed, they move. And they move quite fast. I was in Australia a few years ago, and I saw somebody wearing a T-shirt that said, Reunite Gondwana Land. And, of course, Gondwana Land was this big, massive continent that broke up, and off it came Australia, the southern part of Africa, South America, and that explains the birds.

And if you look forward, they will reunite. We'll have a continent that's called Amerasia, where America and Asia joined, and the Atlantic Ocean disappears. Looking back now, 150 years after Darwin and Wallis, how would you characterise the leap, the intellectual leap? How would you characterise them as scientists and their impact on our thought today? Well, so it was put really, really well by somebody else,

so I'll quote them if I can. A guy called Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. And that is what we've got from this, because there's all these peculiarities. There's the things we have that don't do anything anymore, like the appendix and all these things. It doesn't make sense except they were once useful in an ancestor.

There's, in terms of the relationships, the similar organisms living in different parts of the world, the fact that we are more related to whales than we are to chickens, and all of these weird things, that a whale is basically a hippo that's gone deeper in the seas. Nothing makes sense. And so at these big levels, it doesn't make sense. But then also at this smaller level,

at the level of genes and level of proteins, we see the relationships. And this is basically the whole model for medical research, is that you try and discover something, you look in other animals, you try and see something that works there. When people develop a new drug, they test it in mice. If evolution isn't true, that's the most stupid thing to ever do. But people develop a new drug, they test it in mice. If evolution

isn't true, that's the most stupid thing to ever do. But thankfully, evolution is true. Therefore, we can test drugs and make sure they're safe before we use them. Anything to do with biology at all, it only works because evolution is true. So when we list the great scientists of the past 200 years, let's say, people know the names of Darwin and Einstein, Newton, Galileo. Should Wallace be there in that list? I think just about, I would say, to be generous. I would say yes. Our audience question, we have the audience question.

This week it was, which human trait would you most like to see evolve? Which human trait would you most like to see evolve? I don't want to see it evolve, but I'd like natural selection to somehow get rid of the trait that makes people walking down the street suddenly stop in front of me.

This one here is objectionable on every possible level, but I'm going to read it out anyway. It says the ability to divine one's own horoscope accurately. Object very strongly to that. Appreciation of D-Ream.

No. Detachable limbs. E.G. I love it when there's an E.G. E.G., if you're stuck on an aeroplane with no leg room, you can pop your legs off and stick them in the overhead luggage. Well done, Britain. Thank you. pop your legs off and stick them in the overhead luggage. Well done, Chris. Well done, Chris.

How about we ask... Here we go round the pack. Steve, what would you most like to see evolve, if that were at all possible? So be teleological for a moment. Galton, who was Charles Darwin's cousin, came up with a law which is called regression to the mean, which is that if you have very tall parents and very short parents,

then the child tends to be intermediate and closer to the average of the population. I would like to reverse that so that the children are always more different from their parents. So if the parents are brain surgeons, the children become chiropodists. That's not the parents of brain surgeons the children become chiropodists It's a chill if the parents it's not the opposite of brains

But he's still a doctor isn't it Tony have you got one that you particularly like to see a vulva trait easy one wings I could and then that's massive arms it would take for those to work With our weight wings Aoife. I don know, infrared vision or something like that. Why? What? Why do you want that? I just think it'd be cool. That would only be used for evil.

Tony wants to fly like a bird and soar over the landscape, and you just want to be able to see hot things. Run around in the dark. Technically, that does make two of them the original X-Men, doesn't it? So that brings us to an end. Thank you very much Professor Steve Jones and Tony Law. You're going to be a professor soon, don't you worry. Next week we are at the Science Museum

for the last in the current series. We're proud to be joining the Flight Exhibition, the medicine floor and the computing room, with the opening of the specifically and specially built facetious wing. Yes, the facetious wing's going to be very exciting. We're going to be in a little kind of like plastic cubicle and there's going to be a hand crank that the children can come up to and they just crank something and then we'll say something facetious about some kind of new age bamboozlement or whatever. Mummy,

mummy, that man said that psychics wear hearing aids or some kind of hearing device in their ears. I wouldn't imagine he did for legal reasons. But goodbye. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, lively discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme, Front Row. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. This is the first radio ad you can smell.

The new Cinnabon Pull Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature.

And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.