Spotlight falls at last on ‘missing link’ scientist eclipsed by Darwin over theory of evolution
Every single damn discussion of the subject goes “Wallace independently arrived at the conclusion, the papers were read together and well, Darwin had worked it out more than Wallace had done”.
Still, nice he’s getting a statue.
Anyone care to place a bet on how long it is between the unveiling and the demands to tear it down?
I see Bill Bailey is making a career move from clowning to cultural commentator. That’s understandable, because it’s harder to make people laugh when you get older, and people already know who you are. Miller, Cleese, Palin, etc….
I can’t think of anyone who has done it the other way around. And it’s a great pity that Ken Dodd never got around to sharing his thoughts on climate change.
Jonathan
Surely they’re shrieking to have it pulled down already!!
Ken Dodd. Just after he was acquitted on income tax fraud he opened a fete run by a work colleagues missus. He was most insistent that his fee was paid in cash in an unmarked envelope. She worked for the Inland Revenue…..
Walllace shot an awful lot of orang utans. (He wrote a memoir about it.) So his staue comes down in 3, 2, 1…
And the currently prevailing culture warriors make it quite dangerous to tell jokes, so far safer for one’s career and bank balance to just support them instead.
What was his connection to the slave trade? He must have had one. Everybody else has. And he was only whitesplaining anyway. Blacks evolved before whites. Some might say, pity they stopped. But it’d only get Greta’s little friend along to harass them.
When I saw Bailey he was funny and entertaining until the red mist descended and he went off on a “Fatcha” diatribe (a good couple of decades after the lady stood down).
*sigh* There were a fair number of scientists/naturalists that had sussed on the fact that organisms change/evolve. Conservative thought at the time was of the opinion that organisms evolved away from the original design from the Sky Fairy ( because Evil) and thus were inferior.
The real breakthrough Darwin made wasn’t that evolution happened, but that he showed that the principles behind it were the same as the selective breeding humans did. That the environment itself was the reason species evolved and that species specialised to fit their niche better.
Wallace was a major contributor to Darwin’s work, which he himself always admitted, but Wallace never made the link to inheritable traits and how those would change under selective pressure.
And he never considered the fact that humans’ selective breeding was in fact nothing more than using what Mother Nature did all by herself without any human interference anyway.
Wallaces’ other observations were much more important than his contribution to Darwin’s work, as they helped fill in the Big Picture of the history of our planet, and paved the way for later proof of some very fundamental things about the world we live in. But at the time there was simply no way to prove his ideas. There simply wasn’t enough data from enough places to make his case.
Then again science in those days was a lot like rock ‘n roll in the 60’s: quite a lot of “rival” bands happily borrowed stuff from each other to make their stuff.
Ken Dodd was witty and funny. Bill Bailey is neither. Ken’s victory over HMRC is and should remain the stuff of legend. It is a great shame he didn’t make it to a 100th birthday show.
And Bailey’s new besties amongst middle class Marxist scum are a tiny temporary crew. Once their BS starts to make them uncomfortable (ie the delusion their lifestyle will last from everlasting to everlasting falls in the face of green socialist evil-) the cult will collapse.