138 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
treating the origin of human races, to a paper on the medical case of a piebald woman. He
presented this paper to the Royal Society in 1813, but only published it as he lay dying in 1818—
as a subsidiary to his two famous essays on the origin of dew, and on why we see but one image
with two eyes.
Matthew, still alive and vigorously kicking when Darwin published the Origin, wrote to
express his frustration at Darwin's non-citation. Darwin offered some diplomatic palliation in the
historical introduction added to later editions of the Origin, while professing, with ample justice,
that he had meant no malice, but had simply never encountered Matthew's totally forgotten and
inauspiciously located speculation. He responded to Matthew's ire in the Gardener's Chronicle
for April 21, 1860: "I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the
explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. I
think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard
of Mr. Matthew's views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the
Appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture."
Wells' article is particularly intriguing, if only for an antiquarian footnote, in the context of
this book's focus on supraorganismal levels of selection. Although Wells has often been cited as
a precursor, very few citationists have read his paper, and have therefore simply assumed that he
spoke of natural selection by Darwin's route of advantages to individuals within populations. In
fact, as I discovered (Gould, 1983a), Wells attributes racial differentiation in skin color to group
selection among populations.
I do not wish to make overly much of this point, as "precursoritis" is the bane of histori-
ography; yet I am tickled by the ironic tidbit, in the light of later orthodoxy, that the first
formulation of natural selection went forward in the supraorganismic mode. The point should not
be overstressed, if only because Wells reached this alternative by the fallacious argument that
favorable variants could not spread within populations. Echoing Jenkins' later criticism of
Darwin, Wells held that blending inheritance prevents the transformation of populations from
within because advantageous variants "quickly disappear from the intermarriages of different
families. Thus, if a very tall man be produced, he very commonly marries a woman much less
than himself, and their progeny scarcely differs in size from their countrymen" (1818, pp. 434-
135).
Populations must therefore be transformed by fortuitous spread and propagation within
small and isolated groups: "In districts, however, of very small extent, and having little in-
tercourse with other countries, an accidental difference in the appearance of the inhabitants will
often descend to their late posterity" (p. 435). Change may then occur within an entire species by
group selection among these differentiated populations:
Of the accidental varieties of man, which would occur among the first few and scattered
inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa, some would be better fitted than the others to
bear the diseases of the country. This race would consequently multiply, while the others
would decrease, not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but from their
incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbors. The color of this vigorous
race I take for granted ... would be dark. But the same disposition to form varieties still
existing, a darker and a darker race would in the course of time occur, and as the darkest
would be the best fitted for the climate, this would at length become the most prevalent, if
not the only race, in the particular country in which it had originated (pp. 435-436).
Note Wells' unquestioned assumption that our original color must have been white, and
that dark skin could only arise as a modification of the type. As a final interesting footnote,
Wells denied (probably wrongly) that dark skin could be adaptive in itself, and argued for its
establishment in Africa as a result of noncausal correlation with unknown physiological
mechanisms for protection against tropical disease. Thus, Wells presents an "internalist"
explanation based on what Darwin would later call "correlation of growth." With this argument
about channels, and his basic claim for group selection, Wells' departure from Darwin's later
preferences lie very much in the spirit of modern critiques, though for reasons that we would
now reject (as if our anachronistic judgment mattered).