Darwin, Wallace and Bad Nerves

Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace came to parallel discoveries of the principle of evolution through natural selection. However, though they came to similar conclusions, the path they each took to come to their conclusions and what they did after their discoveries was very different. Both Darwin and Wallace went to relatively uninhabited island formations (Darwin went to the Galapagos and Wallace to the Malay Archipelago) and traveling from island to island, noted the wide variety of species even at short distances. Wallace and Darwin were both influenced by Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population which argued that there was a greater population than available food which created a struggle for existence and created misery. Both Darwin and Wallace were wary of publishing their work after seeing the way Sedgwick, one of Darwin’s advisors at Cambridge, had lambasted Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844.

After Wallace sent Darwin his ideas on evolution through natural selection, Darwin realized that his ideas might be taken so he worked to publish before Wallace. Darwin’s good friends Hooker and Lyell, pushed him to publish his work and present his work with Wallace in a joint paper. After Darwin and Wallace presented their work, they went in different directions with their work. Wallace became involved in Socialism and many other radical causes, whereas Darwin avoided confrontation and promoted more conservative ideas including the belief that women were the inferior sex. I found it interesting that men with such similar ideas would have completely diverged in almost the next instant. I also found it interesting that Darwin had bad nerves because it meant that he was clearly in the upper class and educated because bad nerves and nerve exhaustion was a common problem for people in the upper class whereas the people of the lower classes might have been institutionalized. By blaming problems on brain function, people could save face. During the “great debate” between Huxley and Wilberforce, Darwin did not attend because he was ill. I wonder if he was ill or was suffering from a nervous problem. When did Darwin’s nervous condition begin? How widespread was the problem? Did nervous conditions come about because more people were entering the middle class and with the improvements and faster pace of life, did people just mentally collapse?