What Alfred Russel Wallace Really Thought About Darwin

Calopteryx writes "The correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace has gone online for the first time. New Scientist has opened a wormhole between the 21st and 19th centuries and has 'interviewed' the great man."

Comments

Is a blog format possible

[Krishnoid]

Semi-offtopic, but is there any blog software capable of publishing entries with dates prior to 1900? If someone wanted to publish something like a diary with dates marked accurately in a blog format, can that be done? It seems that this would be an interesting medium, at least in concept, to present items of historical relevance.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[Anonymous Coward]

No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever buddy, it doesn't really matter.

It's all in the past now.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[DavidD_CA]

It would be really interesting to see, say, the diary of Anne Frank posted in a blog format -- verbatim, possibly with historical photos added.

Or the scientific journals of Darwin.

Also semi-off-topic: I once wandered into an IRC channel and found the entire cast of Hamlet (as bots) going line by line through the script complete with /me-style actions.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[pointybits]

It's been done for Samuel Pepys: http://www.pepysdiary.com/

Re:Is a blog format possible

[MichaelSmith]

64 bit date formats in OpenVMS go back to 1858 IIRC.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[inamorty]

No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.

Really? Are you sure about that? Not mathmatically possible? I guess negative numbers don't exist in your realm.

<david_attenborough_voice>A spectacular example of a Whoosh in the wild! Let's be careful not to disturb it</david_attenborough_voice>

Re:Is a blog format possible

[dmbasso]

From this openvms faq:
The modified Julian date adopted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) for satellite tracking is Julian Day 2400000.5, which turns out to be midnight on November 17, 1858.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[Jesus_666]

I don't see why not. For instance, WordPress posts use MySQL DATETIME fields, which allow dates as far back as 0000-00-00. If you want your post to appear as being from 1531, go right ahead.

Now, WordPress automatically sets the post date and AFAIK you'd have to resort to database manipulation to change it but if there isn't already a plugin that handles this it would be easy to write one.

Re:Is a blog format possible

[__aaltlg1547]

No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.

Really? Are you sure about that? Not mathmatically possible? I guess negative numbers don't exist in your realm.

<david_attenborough_voice>A spectacular example of a Whoosh in the wild! Let's be careful not to disturb it</david_attenborough_voice>

The original comment was tongue-in-cheek. But most computer date representation systems are prospective from modern zero date.

For example, Unix time was originally coded as elapsed whole seconds since midnight January 01, 1970 and represented time as an UNSIGNED 32-bit integer. Such systems still exist and will roll over on 2038. More modern timekeeping systems use 64-bit integers to represent time and date. I'm not sure whether they interpret them as unsigned or signed. If they interpret them as signed, there is certainly an opportunity to represent dates before 1970 and I can think of no reason not to do so since a 63-bit second count will not have a rollover problem in the next 292 billion years. I'm personally comfortable with putting the problem off that long if it also gets me a nice representation of the day on which I was born, which is before the Unix epoch.

NTP uses the same epoch date as Unix but uses the top 32 bits as seconds and the lower 32 bits as fractional seconds. It thus cannot uniquely represent dates before 1970 or after 2038.

Windows uses some different time representation systems but they suffer from similar deficiencies.

And with all that, supposing you do use a system that can represent negative numbers, you don't have to go that far back before you run into other problems. The first is what to do about leap-seconds. I'd say that once you go back before the adoption of atomic time standards, you should count days as being 86400 seconds long by definition of the ante-atomic second. That gets you back to the next problem date, which is adoption time zones synchronized to Greenwich Time or local adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. Depending on where you are, either may have happened before the other. Greenwich synchronization adds an error of up to several hours depending on location. Gregorian calendar adoption caused a slip of several days to the calendar; the later the adoption, the more days of slip. And that gets you back, at best, to 1582 A.D. Computer representation of the date is thus a very messy business back to 1582, subject to the vagaries and religion of the country under consideration. (Protestant and Orthodox countries tended to hold out against the tide of popery and non-Christian countries weren't interested in any kind of Roman dates.)

And that gets us on the Julian Calendar, which is usable back to it its introduction in 45 BC. But it was only used in the Roman Empire and its historical descendants including Christendom. That's as far as the West goes. You can then switch locally to the Jewish calendar, which represents dates back to 3670 or so BCE. But it has lot of slop in it. It's a lunisolar calendar so precise date synchronization with any modern system depends on precise knowledge of historic (and prehistoric) lunar phase with respect to the Earth's prehistoric rate of rotation. Also, the cycles were determined by observation in ancient times and we don't know whether they were always observed on the right day with respect to the lunar phase because some months would have started on a cloudy day, preventing official observation. And though that calendar can represent dates back 5773 years from today, it may not have been in use that long.

In the East, e.g. China, they had their own calendar system and the first opportunity to align it to a Western system was fairly recent. The Chinese system is lunisolar, similar to the Hebrew system, so it has the same kind of imprecision. What's worse, people recorded regnal years of the Emperors (or worse, some local potentate) and you have to know when each monarch took the throne to figure when things happened. And that only gets you back to 862 or so. Before that, people generally didn't write down what year things happened at all.

A wormhole into a can of worms?

[G3ckoG33k]

A wormhole into a can of worms? I doubt it. Wallace has never critized Darwin publicly as far as I know, and I doubt in secrecy either. Did Victorian English ever use blunt language in writing? I don't really know but I suspect they didn't. I some of the summaries to the scanned pages and find it hard to believe there was ever

Yes, Wallace is our too little sung hero. He is not unsung (e.g. http://wallacefund.info/song-about-alfred-russel-wallace, http://wallacefund.info/mr-darwin-mr-wallace-mr-matthew-song-mr-haines) and I've raised many a toast to his memory!

Re:A wormhole into a can of worms?

[Runaway1956]

One result of Wallace's early travels has been a modern controversy about his nationality. Since Wallace was born in Monmouthshire, some sources have considered him to be Welsh.[7] However some historians have questioned this because neither of his parents was Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because Wallace himself consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh (even when writing about his time in Wales). One Wallace scholar has stated that because of these facts the most reasonable interpretation was that he was an Englishman born in Wales.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace

I guess the real question is, could he become king of England?

Re:A wormhole into a can of worms?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did Victorian English ever use blunt language in writing?"

Of course they did. Otherwise words like "cad", "fop", and "dandy" wouldn't exist in their traditional sense in the English language. There's quite the collection of blunt insults that were used in the 19th century that have fallen out of fashion. Well, or in some cases, been re-tasked as words with slightly different meaning or as unfortunate acronyms.

Anyway, both Darwin and Wallace were gentlemen enough to write and publish a paper together about their ideas rather than scoop each other, Wallace defended Darwin's ideas about evolution (and vice-versa), and in later life Darwin worked to arrange a small pension for Wallace. The feelings couldn't have been bad between them, although like any two friends they probably said bad things from time-to-time.

Re:A wormhole into a can of worms?

[ultranova]

I guess the real question is, could he become king of England?

Well, no, cause he's dead.

But wouldn't that make him an excellent king? Being dead, he can't become involved in any scandal, all his words can be re-interpreted as people wish, and all his misdeeds can be excused as fair for his time. It works for American Founding Fathers, so why not the King of England?

Even better would be a completely fictional person, a royal version of a virtual idol if you will. Almost all we get to see of real royals is already fiction generated by PR machines, so why not go all the way and remove the last icky bits of flesh and blood that sometimes shine through? Heck, with AI advancing as it does, it wouldn't take long to get to the point where people could chat with their virtual king over the Internet.

Take it a few steps further and we can replace the entire government with a bunch of AI programs holding public discussions with one another, thus letting lobbyists to write the laws in peace without the meddling of inefficient middlemen.

A bit exaggerated claims to a 2nd post?

[GodfatherofSoul]

Been a while since I read an essay on "Origin", but as I recall Darwin was sitting on his works for quite a while. It was only after he learned that someone else was working on what he'd already accomplished that he decided to publish. Much like the way Newton had to be goaded into publishing the Principia.

Re:A bit exaggerated claims to a 2nd post?

[Tablizer]

It's not that Darwin was lazy, it was that the religious environment was such that one risked being fired for ticking off the religious establishments. It wasn't quite as bad as Galileo, but the same kind of forces.

Thus, he wanted the publication to be as water-tight as possible before releasing it; and that's one of the reasons why the work, for the most part, stands the test of time.

Misleading headline

[govett]

Your headline is "What Alfred Russel Wallace Really Thought About Darwin," but there is no mention of this information in the article. One has to read 4000 letters to find it.

Re:Misleading headline

[serviscope_minor]

OK, I did it for you!

So, to save you time:

I think it's a fair assessment of the situation to say that Wallace did not think very highly of Darwin. This is apparent in letter number 3024 where he quite clearly states that if "[he met] Darwin he ... would pop a cap in his arse(sic)."

 

The Wallace Award

[Tablizer]

The Wallace Award is for people who would get a Darwin Award, but are slighted full recognition for their achievement.

Correct.

[neoshroom]

You are absolutely correct. It is also a little known fact that all the days between Saturday and Sunday were lost sometime before 1900 and so we are left with only 7 of the original 9 days of the week. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to wake up on Uranday or Nepturday on a sunny day a year before the year 1900.

Re:Correct.

[TarPitt]

We gained color as compensation for the missing days, under the Law of Conservation of Colors/Days:

http://www.reoiv.com/images/random/dadbandwandcolour.jpg

Little known fact that Wallace lived in a black and white world

Copyright of letters?

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

The metadata for some random entry I clicked on reads like:

LETTER (WCP1.1)

A typical letter handwritten by author in English.

Held by: Natural History Museum
Finding number: NHM WP1/1/1
Copyright owner: Copyright of the A. R. Wallace Literary Estate
Record scrutiny: 01/12/2011 - Catchpole, Caroline;

I'm curious about the copyright field. Aren't the letters supposed to be public domain? Since Wallaced died in 1913, which is well past the 50-75 years after death clause of most countries' copyright regimes, shouldn't the copyright on the letters have lapsed already?

IANAL but I'm assuming that the letters have already been "published" by virtue of their having been snail-mailed and read by a second party. It's not as if they're some long-lost manuscript that's been hidden in some author's dusty drawer, which can arguably be considered as unpublished.

Re:Blacklisted, not just "fired"

[Anonymous Coward]

there's nothing racist about the word "blacklisting" or "blacklisted."

Agreed. Incorrectly perceived racism is no reason to be niggardly with your vocabulary.