Bloggasm

Though the name Charles Darwin is known by every creation scientist (who curse him), Evolutionary Biologist (his greatest defenders) and the general population (who know of him but usually have a wide range of misconceptions about his theory), not many people would know that there was another scientist who wrote a paper on natural selection before Darwin published his famed The Origin of Species.

That man, Alfred Russel Wallace, was profiled in this week’s New Yorker because of a recent surge in biographies written about him:

When he was twenty-four years old, Alfred Russel Wallace, the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century, had his head examined by a phrenologist who determined that, while his “organ of wonder” was very big, his “organ of veneration,” representing respect for authority, was noticeably small. Wallace was so struck with the accuracy of this report that, sixty years later, he mentioned it in his autobiography. It was wonder that drew him to nature, and an instinctive disregard for authority that made it easy to challenge an entire civilization’s religious convictions, as he did when, in 1858, he dashed off a paper proposing a theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Unlike Charles Darwin, who spent twenty years keeping a similar conclusion to himself in private dread, Wallace didn’t give a damn what people thought. This utter independence from public opinion is one of several reasons that he has all but vanished from popular consciousness.

There was several reasons Wallace drifted into obscurity while Darwin was propped up as the father of evolutionary theory. His major mistake was sending his paper concerning natural selection to Darwin, who had been sitting on the theory for years, afraid to come forth with it. Realizing that another scientist was going to beat him to the punch. Darwin quickly moved forward and published his book.

This wasn’t Wallace’s only error, however. What doomed him most was his own double life; one that was grounded in science, the other in superstition. He spent most of his life trying to find a connection between theism and evolutionary theory, and as a result he wasn’t taken seriously by the scientific community.

There were other mishaps as well. That his own version of Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle” ended in a sunken ship. His poverty and lack of formal education.

Darwin’s theory is propped on some of the predictions made by previous scientists (his grandfather being one of them), and Wallace arrived at the conclusions using the same chain of ideas, and did so completely separately from Darwin’s own work. It’s really just a matter of bad mistakes and luck that his name isn’t as famous as Darwin’s.

But thanks to the new string of biographies, Wallace now seems to be in vogue, and might receive some long-awaited recognition.

What’s most interesting in the article is the debate over whether Darwin stole some ideas from Wallace:

What followed has been called the “Delicate Arrangement.” The term, drawn from a phrase used by Huxley’s grandson, provides the title of a 1980 book by Arnold C. Brackman arguing that Darwin received Wallace’s paper earlier than he acknowledged, incorporated aspects of it into his own work, and then sent it on to Lyell pretending that it had just arrived. Much poring over postmarks and manuscripts is involved in this argument, but the recent biographies all make it pretty clear that, at its root, this was primarily an instance—perhaps the greatest—of great minds thinking alike.

It then goes on to outline his greatest downfall: embracing Spiritualism:

Wallace’s sister Fanny had become a spiritualist while he was in the Tropics, and, partly through her interest, Wallace began attending séances in 1865. Though he was skeptical, looking behind doors and under tables in advance of the proceedings, he quickly fell under the spell of these events, enthusiastically recording what he saw. Fresh flowers materialized on a table. (Wallace duly noted each species.) A spirit hand reached down to touch the keys of an accordion. The name of a deceased brother turned up on a piece of paper that Wallace had hidden.

I’m actually quite surpised that religion apologists don’t start quoting him more often.

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