It was on this day in 1858 that the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London published two articles, one by Charles Darwin and the other by Alfred Russel Wallace, both outlining the principles of natural selection.
Some like to make much of Wallace and whether he “deserved” the credit for the discovery. It does appear while Darwin had made the observation first, and shared this privately with a number of people, he was unwilling to walk into the fire he knew awaited the person who revealed the fundamental law of evolution, it wasn’t until he learned Wallace, who had independently come to the same conclusions, was going to publish that he decided to step forward.
No doubt many factors were involved in why Darwin rather than Wallace is the touchstone person, not least of which were class and access to the public forum, the one had and the other did not.
And, of course, credit is an inside game.
But, I think, in fact the more important point was how this observation, so simple and yet so profound was already in the air. The conditions had been met to force those who looked to see.
The great revolution was at hand.
Then there are the deniers. Their worlds seen to stand on sand, sand that has sifted. They are frightened. And they are dangerous.
But the revolution is at hand.
And the old is being swept away.
A reordering…
And with that the new is birthing. Something amazing.
Something even more beautiful for being true.
And a personal footnote.
Where I differ from some who gladly embrace the new visions that science brings, is that I don’t think all of the old stories need be swept away. But, they do change. The important parts, the great intuitions of our human heart that they contain shift to the foreground, while the parts of the stories that were meant to explain the natural world need to be let go of.
Here in the west the stories of the Bible, for instance, continue to have importance, not as an explanation of how humans came to be on this planet, but as pointers to the ways of the human heart.
Those continue to have a place in this wondrous world.
We need stories.
We need songs.
We need to continue to celebrate and mourn.
And I think those who embrace the new vision of a unified world, all connected, while also allowing their hearts to be touched by the old religions, now lived as metaphor rather than history, are the richest of all.
And this is a good thing, because one of the things we learn is how human beings live within metaphor.
Metaphor is how we think. Not denying the materiality of things, and not denying the magic that appears in the world when the human heart and mind birth out of the world. And we are invited into seeing how thought and feeling are not two different things.
Metaphor is how we live. Metaphor is how we understand and find meaning.
Humans as poems. Sonnets. Haiku. Epics. Blank verse. And the occasional limerick.
This is the world we really live in.
Open, curious, wild,
Dangerous. Oh, yes, dangerous.
And oh so lovely…
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