好久不来更新了……最近看到了一个有趣的故事。不知道有谁知道或者还记得Alfred Russel Wallace。这个人曾经和达尔文同时提出进化论。但似乎人们只记得达尔文，而Wallace好像不存在一样。故事如下：

Wallace had once briefly met Darwin, and was one of Darwin's numerous correspondents from around the world, whose observations Darwin used to support his theories. Wallace knew that Darwin was interested in the question of how species originate, and trusted his opinion on the matter. Thus, he sent him his essay, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type, and asked him to review it. On 18 June 1858 Darwin received the manuscript from Wallace. While Wallace's essay did not employ Darwin's term natural selection, it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was essentially the same as the theory that Darwin had worked on for twenty years, but had yet to publish. Darwin wrote in a letter to Charles Lyell: "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters!" Although Wallace had not requested that his essay be published, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker decided to present the essay, together with excerpts from a paper that Darwin had written in 1844, and kept confidential, to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, highlighting Darwin's priority.

Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, grateful that he had been included at all. Darwin's social and scientific status was at that time far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken as seriously. However he pointed out, in a largely overlooked passage of the 1858 paper that "The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor". The cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson observed though seeing it only as an illustration Wallace had "probably said the most powerful thing that'd been said in the 19^th Century". Though relegated to the position of co-discoverer, and never the social equal of Darwin or the other elite British natural scientists, Wallace was granted far greater access to tightly-regulated British scientific circles after the advocacy on his part by Darwin. When he returned to England, Wallace met Darwin and the two remained friendly afterwards.

过了不久，达尔文的儿子Francis Darwin说过这样一句话：

In science credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. (Francis Darwin; Galton Lecture)

***

Nowadays, in scientific world, credit goes to those scientific Godfathers. When people are trying to kiss the rings on their hands, they are cutting the horse's head...