Sir David on Birds of Paradise

Posted by Rebecca Ford Apr 8, 2008

To the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore last week, to hear Sir David Attenborough speak. I’d been lucky to get a seat, as there was a ballot for places (the organisers obviously anticipating huge interest in his talk). As we filed in I realised that I’d missed a trick – many people were clutching copies of his books, in the hope of getting them signed afterwards.

Sir David looked just as he does on TV – ridiculously youthful for a man in his 80s, though with a rather more noticeable limp, which looked like a painful hip. His talk was on Alfred Russell Wallace and Birds of Paradise. Wallace, a Victorian naturalist, spent years in and around Borneo – much of the time observing these fascinating birds.

His observations led him to realise that species can evolve – a theory he proposed in a letter to Charles Darwin. David Attenborough vividly described the turmoil caused by this letter – for Darwin had essentially come up with his theory of evolution over 15 years earlier, but hadn’t published it for fear of the controversy it would provoke. Now, if he published it would look as if he had copied Wallace. And if he didn’t – it would look as if Wallace had beaten him to it.

In the end, a tactful solution was reached – papers by both men would be read to a scientific audience – just a short distance from where the RGS is today. That was 150 years ago. Next year, Sir David reminded us, is the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Then he left the stage to go and sign books – pursued frantically by the man who’d been sitting next to me, clutching a dog-eared copy of his work on birds.