The forgotten Evolutionist: Alfred Russell Wallace
Alfred Russell Wallace two hundredth anniversary is here. Who is he?
Wallace was born in 1823 and was the co-founder of evolutionary theory. Yet to a degree he has been forgotten for reasons that I will get to.
Like Darwin, Wallace had been inspired by reading the works of Alexander von Humboldt to become a naturalist. Unlike Darwin, Wallace was not a wealthy man. He paid for his travels and studies by collecting specimens which he would sell to private individuals in Britain. This source of income may seem odd today but was quite lucrative in the mid-1800s as the amateur study of nature was popular among the English upper class.
Wallace set out for Brazil and spent several years collecting and also publishing his findings. Unfortunately, Wallace was someone for whom bad luck would follow him throughout his life. After putting his collection on a home-bound ship, and with Wallace on board, the ship caught fire and sank. Wallace spent ten days in a lifeboat before being rescued and returning to Britain. Oh, and while in Brazil he had caught malaria which would affect his health for the rest of his life.
Wallace next set out for the East Indies, what is now New Guinea and Indonesia. This time he was more successful and also began being recognized for his articles (the “Wallace Line” was one of his findings about the interesting and abrupt transition between Australian fauna and Asian fauna).
Wallace, like Darwin, had read Malthus and internalized his ideas about how populations will always outgrow resources. While in bed with a bout of malaria in 1858, he had a fever dream in which he essentially came up with the same ideas that Darwin had reached over a decade before. Darwin had slowly been writing his book about evolution, although even by Victorian standards, he had been dawdling with it. I suspect that Darwin, who was notoriously adverse to controversy, knew that his book would be socially explosive and was putting off publication.
Wallace wrote out a short synopsis of his idea, even using some language that Darwin had also used in his notebooks on selection, and sent it to Darwin, who was known to be working on the “species” issue. Darwin was shocked and did not know what to do, as it appeared Wallace would now have priority over the work Darwin had been working on for years. After consulting Charles Lyell, Darwin published Wallace’s synopsis along with two of Darwin’s own earlier writings in an article with the Linnean Society outlining the basic ideas of natural selection. Curiously, the article was mostly ignored by other naturalists. Darwin then rushed his book, On the Origin of Species, into publication in 1859.
Wallace himself always acknowledged that Darwin had precedent in coming to the theory, but history would not be kind to Wallace. Darwin got all the credit due to the publication of the Origin of Species which, as Darwin rightly suspected, probably had a more profound impact on human thinking than any other scientific theory.
Wallace’s reputation also declined for an odd reason. Wallace, for his time, had a remarkably “modern” view of the human race. He admired the indigenous peoples that he encountered and studied their societies with an unusually open mind for his era. This led him to an odd conclusion.
Wallace was, if anything, a more ardent evolutionist than Darwin himself. Wallace felt that all living forms are strictly the result of natural selection. However, Wallace found what he believed was a contradiction for humans. Why, he asked, did humans need to have such intelligence? From his observations, even the most “primitive” people seemed to be just as intelligent as “civilized” people. Why would intelligence evolve? Who needs to be able to do calculus if you make your living hunting rabbits and collecting berries and nuts? Wallace was adamant that any organic trait must arise solely by evolution from selection and could not see how intelligence to the extent humans possess had a selective purpose. He concluded that human intelligence is the one and only exception to natural selection which led him, in turn, to Spiritualism. Wallace spent many of the remaining years of his life advocating an odd mixture of Spiritualism and Socialism while otherwise asserting natural selection as the driving force of speciation.
As a result, Wallace became something of an embarrassment to the naturalists advocating for natural selection. We tend to forget that although natural selection is now the accepted mechanism for evolution, by the end of Darwin’s life in 1882, natural selection was questioned as the fundamental mechanism. The fact of evolution was accepted by most naturalists by then, but the mechanism that Darwin and Wallace had proposed had gone into disfavor, maybe in part due to Wallace’s notion that it could not explain human intelligence. It would not be until the early 1900s, with the rediscovery of genetics, that natural selection would revive and eventually be accepted as the main driving force of evolutionary change. The revival was labeled as “Neo-Darwinism” and poor Wallace was pretty much forgotten.
Wallace also in his later years made poor financial decisions and he became destitute. Fortunately, others in the scientific community, including Darwin, were able to convince the British government to give him an annuity.
I think Wallace deserves to be better known. Without his letter to Darwin, it is likely that Darwin would have continued to put off finishing his book. The idea of evolution is now so ingrained in our culture and way of thinking that it is hard to imagine the pre-Darwinian mind set. Wallace helped to set about the revolution in thinking from the publication of Darwin’s book. Wallace was a truly original thinker and, although he was led astray in his conclusions, they were the result of his revolutionary ideas.
