July 1: The day evolution went public
On July 1, 1858, the Linnean Society heard the joint paper that first made natural selection public. Tonight's film: Species (1995).
There is something strange about the great historical moments. In the films we imagine them with applause, somebody leaping up, somebody declaring that the world has just changed. In reality, most of the time, nobody notices. On an ordinary day something happens that will rewrite how we understand life for the next century, and the room is either bored silent or the people in it do not even suspect they have taken part in anything at all.
On July 1, 1858, the Linnean Society of London held a special meeting. Two papers were read back to back, one by Charles Darwin, the other by a then little-known collector named Alfred Russel Wallace. Working entirely independently, the two men had arrived at the same idea. Species are not fixed. They change over time, shaped by their environment, and the forms best suited to survive and reproduce pass their traits onward. That was the whole of it, and it was the whole revolution.
The strange part is that neither author was in the room. Darwin was at home, grieving. His youngest son, Charles Waring, had died of scarlet fever ten days earlier. Wallace was on the far side of the world, in the Malay Archipelago, pinning insects and preparing specimens, with no idea he had just missed the central event of his own life. In their absence two friends, the geologist Charles Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker, read the papers for them.
And the room? Dull, by every account. Nobody leapt up. The society’s president, the dentist and zoologist Thomas Bell, delivered his annual address the following May and summed up the year just passed:
“The year has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”
That was the year the theory of evolution by natural selection went public. We are rarely good at recognizing that we are standing in the middle of history.
This is why I like to pair a date like this with a science fiction film. The theory of evolution has been the engine behind almost every what-if story since. What happens if we speed it up? If we interfere with it? If we splice the genetic code of another species into our own?
That is how we arrive at Species (1995). In Roger Donaldson’s film, scientists receive an alien radio transmission that turns out to contain a stretch of genetic code, sent by some unknown intelligence. The researchers, because what could go wrong, combine it with human DNA and grow a hybrid. They name her Sil. She is beautiful, fast, and singularly driven. She wants one thing: to reproduce, and to push her own line forward at our expense.
The film asks the question that preoccupied Darwin and Wallace, only at the worst-case end of the scale. Natural selection here is not a slow process running across millions of years. It is a predator that reaches adulthood in a matter of hours, and whose success would mean our disappearance. Survival of the fittest stops feeling reassuring when the fitter party is not us.
Species is not great filmmaking. It is a mid-nineties B-thriller that wears its decade plainly, and its effects now invite more smiles than shivers. Xavier Fitch’s government team, led on screen by Ben Kingsley, begins as serious researchers hunting answers, then loses the handle on what they have built faster than they expected. That is the part that still works. The science in the story runs ahead of the conscience, which is roughly how the real thing behaves too, only with less collateral damage.
That tension has not gone anywhere. CRISPR gene editing, engineered embryos, the slow erosion of the line between treating disease and improving on the factory model of a human being. Reality is catching up to what the 1995 film put on screen. Darwin wanted none of this. Wallace wanted none of it. They set out to understand how life works. What we do with that knowledge is a different story, and a less comfortable one.
So tonight, put on Species. Do not expect depth. Expect a good, slightly queasy thrill, and the lingering sense that nature still knows what it is doing better than we do. And while it plays, spare a thought for that cool London afternoon when someone read a paper aloud and almost nobody realized the story of life was being rewritten in front of them.
What else happened on July 1
July 1 is a crowded date. To show how crowded, here are two other events that could just as easily have been tonight’s pick:
.2004, Cassini enters orbit around Saturn. It had traveled for seven years and covered more than 3.5 billion kilometers before a 96-minute engine burn on July 1 placed it in orbit, the first human-made object to circle the planet. It stayed there for thirteen years. If this were the night’s topic, the film would be Sunshine (2007): Cassini’s seven-year voyage to orbit a distant celestial body mirrors the crew’s lonely, high-stakes mission to reignite the dying sun.
1997, Hong Kong is handed back to China. After 156 years under British rule, sovereignty transferred at midnight on July 1. If this were the night’s topic, the film would be Blade Runner (1982): a city’s identity and autonomy dissolve into a larger power structure, just as its replicants struggle with uncertain legal status in a corporatized metropolis reshaped by its new masters.
Sources
The main event: the Darwin-Wallace paper, July 1, 1858
The Alfred Russel Wallace Website, “The 1858 Darwin-Wallace paper” (the readable text of the joint paper and its history): https://wallacefund.myspecies.info/content/1858-darwin-wallace-paper
The Linnean Society of London, “160th anniversary of the presentation” (confirms the July 1, 1858 date): https://www.linnean.org/news/2018/07/01/1st-july-2018-160th-anniversary-of-the-presentation-of-on-the-tendency-of-species-to-form-varieties
Friends of Charles Darwin, “01-Jul-1858: Darwin goes public”: https://friendsofdarwin.com/articles/darwin-goes-public/
Thomas Bell, Anniversary Address to the Linnean Society, May 1859 (the source of the “not been marked by any striking discoveries” quotation)
Tonight’s film: Species (1995)
Wikipedia, “Species (film)”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_(film)
The alternative events
Cassini enters orbit around Saturn (2004), ESA, “Cassini-Huygens due to arrive at Saturn”: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens/Cassini-Huygens_due_to_arrive_at_Saturn
Sunshine (2007), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film)
Hong Kong handed back to China (1997), Wikipedia, “Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_sovereignty_over_Hong_Kong
Blade Runner (1982), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner