Robert McNees
Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently conceived of a theory of evolution via natural selection, and whose work was presented alongside that of Darwin in a paper read to the Linnean Society in 1858, was born #OTD in 1823.
Photographer unknown
Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15997/15997-h/15997-h.htm
Robert McNees
You can read "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type" here, as part III of the joint Darwin-Wallace paper.
https://wallacefund.myspecies.info/content/1858-darwin-wallace-paper
Robert McNees
And you should read it, if you haven’t before. It’s pretty important.
But that’s not what I want to tell you about Alfred Russel Wallace.
Robert McNees
In 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace won a ￡500 bet (that’s about $50,000 today, give or take) with a flat Earther named John Hampden.
He won the bet by demonstrating the curvature of the Earth along a six mile stretch of the Old Bedford river.
Hampden, publicly humiliated, threatened to kill Wallace and was jailed.
Robert McNees
Hampden could not let it go. He wrote to newspapers and distributed pamphlets, telling whoever would listen that Wallace was a liar and swindler.
So Wallace sued Hampden for libel and was awarded another￡600.
Hampden transferred all his assets to his son to avoid paying. Wallace them sued him again in 1872, and Hampden was forced to publicly apologize in several newspapers.
There was a story about it in the New York Times!
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1871/08/10/78770850.html?pageNumber=6
Robert McNees
Anyway, a happy “mercilessly own a flat earther” day to all who celebrate.
WesDym
@mcnees This makes a little more sense to me (as much as any such thing could make ANY sense) after watching Dan Olson's lengthy but very detailed and insightful "In Search of a Flat Earth", which explores this phenomenon deeply. A large part of the flat earth movement is not interested in objective reality, but in the power to define SUBJECTIVE reality, by force of will. In that mindset, someone who proves you wrong is either wrong themselves, or should be destroyed. It really that horrifying.
Chirp! is a social network. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Chirp! content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.