BOOK REVIEW
The Evolution of a Naturalist
Oren Harman
An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel
Wallace. Martin Fichman. x + 382 pp. University of Chicago
Press, 2004.
The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel
Wallace. Ross A. Slotten. x + 602 pp. Columbia University
Press, 2004.
In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel
Wallace. A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History.
Michael Shermer. xx + 422 pp. Oxford University Press, 2002.
When Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) published his
autobiography in 1905, one reviewer pronounced him the only man who
believed in spiritualism, phrenology, antivaccination and an
Earth–centered universe whose life was worth writing. Nearly a
half–century earlier (on March 2, 1858), Wallace had posted a
package to Charles Darwin from the jungles of the Malay Archipelago
containing a shockingly powerful manuscript and a solicitation for
advice. Wallace's manuscript, by jolting Darwin to the realization
that he was about to be scooped, served as the gadfly that finally
forced him to share his long–held theory of evolution with the world.
Unlike the scientifically well–positioned and financially
well–padded Darwin, Wallace came from a working–class
background and was little known up to that point. He had achieved
the insight that would fashion him the codiscoverer of natural
selection while in a fit of delirium, in the space of a couple of
hours between the onset of chills and their subsidence in a pool of
sweat. Because Wallace sent the manuscript explaining his insight
off to Darwin, rather than sending it directly to a journal or
publisher, the question of which of the two men discovered and
described natural selection first has been the subject of some
confusion and controversy. Through a "gentlemanly
arrangement" brokered by Darwin's powerful scientific friends
Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, Wallace's offering to Darwin was
presented at, and published by, the Linnean Society in July 1858
along with an abstract of an unpublished paper Darwin had written in
1844 and an abstract of an 1857 letter from Darwin to Asa Gray, an
American botanist. By presenting this material chronologically,
Lyell and Hooker implied that Wallace was merely supporting Darwin's
earlier discoveries, and Darwin's priority was secured.
Wallace returned from his eight–year tropical expedition in
1862 as one of Britain's greatest–ever naturalists, having
gathered 125,660 specimens: 310 mammals, 100 reptiles, 8,050 birds,
7,500 land shells, 13,100 butterflies and moths, 83,200 beetles and
13,400 "other insects." He made a prodigious number of
seminal contributions to evolutionary theory, natural history,
geology, archaeology, primatology, linguistics and biogeography,
which earned him a place in the pantheon of the great scientific
names of the Victorian era, alongside Lyell, Hooker, Francis Galton,
Herbert Spencer and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as Darwin.
But Wallace took a troublesomely diverging path when it came to
applying the new theory of evolution to humankind. He was not a
typical man in any way, but he did suffer from the cultural
chauvinism typical of his day. Accordingly, he reasoned that if
savages could be trained to command the finest subtleties of
European art, philosophy and morality, yet in the state of nature
needed none of those abilities to achieve their impoverished
languages, repugnant moralities and base cultures, then human
intelligence patently arose before it was needed. It could not,
therefore, be a product of natural selection, which fashions only
traits that are immediately helpful in the battle for survival.
"The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena,"
Wallace concluded, "is, that a superior intelligence has guided
the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special
purpose."
Darwin was dismayed. "I hope you have not murdered too
completely your own and my child," he wrote to Wallace in 1869,
deeply troubled that his partner in science seemed to have lost his
nerve on man. Wallace had rejoined the camp of natural theology his
and Darwin's theory so desperately sought to crush. After all, the
entire point of the new law of nature was that it held for all of
creation.
Troubling, too, was Wallace's turn to spiritualism, the belief that
departed souls and other nonmaterial entities can communicate,
through mediums, with humans still living on Earth. By attending
séances in which tables were levitated and messages from
dearly departed friends and relatives were miraculously scribbled on
slates, by defending the cause in the popular press and even
defending a skillful but unscrupulous medium in a court of law
(unsuccessfully), Wallace became an embarrassment to his fellow
scientific naturalists. "Better live a crossing–sweeper
than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea
a séance," Huxley snapped. Darwin was also appalled:
"The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish."
But Wallace remained steadfast, turning to radical politics and
gradually developing a full–blown teleological evolutionary
cosmology informed by spiritualism. He held optimistically that
nature, and indeed the entire universe, were advancing through the
guidance of Higher Intelligences toward the exalted goal of
universal brotherhood and the ultimate spiritual perfection of mankind.
Whereas some studies have tended to depict two Wallaces—the
one rational and heroic, the other absurd—separated by an
unfathomable "lapse," three recent biographies attempt to
come to a deeper understanding of the man. The titles of all
three—The Heretic in Darwin's Court, An
Elusive Victorian and In Darwin's
Shadow—recognize the fact that, for whatever reasons,
Wallace has been consigned to the dim recesses of Darwin's imposing
shadow. (This is, of course, reflected in the very term
"Darwinism," which Wallace himself played a major role in
establishing.) All three books aim to bring their subject into the limelight.
Martin Fichman has produced the most academic account of the lot.
An Elusive Victorian, a deft analytical
contextualization of Wallace, delineates his place in the broader
Victorian clashes over science, politics and religion. Fichman shows
that the very definitions of "science" and
"scientist" remained contested and far from resolved until
the early decades of the 20th century. He is thus able to portray
the kind of overt interaction between biology and ideology that
Wallace championed as a threat to the epistemological divides
between science, ethics and politics—divisions that scientific
naturalists of his day sought to safeguard as a requisite to the
professionalization of their trade. Invoking an "ideologically
pure" science that actually concealed their own varied
sociopolitical agendas, Huxley and company deliberately painted
Wallace as a friend turned crank, thereby affecting his reputation
in the annals of history. Wallace's unorthodoxies thus become
artifacts of historiography.
In reality, a cohesive thread runs through Wallace's life's work: He
was powerfully motivated to use knowledge from a wide range of
sources to articulate an evolutionary cosmology aimed at bettering
man's future. In Fichman's tale, Wallace's socialism, spiritualism
and support for phrenology and mesmerism; his campaigns for land
nationalization and against compulsive vaccination; and his advocacy
of women's rights and of the central role of humans in the universe,
alongside his championing of evolution by natural selection, are all
facets of a logically consistent and integrated worldview aimed at a
more just concept of what Wallace termed the
"Life–World." Far from lapsing into the
supernatural, he lived an unswerving life, consistently reconciling
his humanistic beliefs with his scientific investigations.
It may be true that Wallace's spiritualism and his attempts to
integrate science with culture and philosophy were not as bizarre as
previously supposed. And Wallace may have gone to great pains to
test supernatural phenomena as scientifically as he could. But I'm
left with the feeling that Fichman's corrective may be going a bit
too far. After all, as Fichman reports, even Wallace's friend
Frederic Myers, a founding member of the British Society for
Psychical Research who aimed to subject spiritualism to the canons
of scientific empirical research, said that Wallace was one of those
whose "natures . . . stand so far removed from the meaner
temptations of humanity that [they] thus gifted at birth can no more
enter into the true mind of a cheat than I can enter into the true
mind of a chimpanzee."
And what about Wallace's belief that female choice will necessarily
lead, in the words of the utopian Edward Bellamy, whom he so
admired, to the sure transmission to posterity of "the gifts of
person, mind, and disposition; beauty, wit, eloquence, kindness,
generosity, geniality, courage"? Wallace's commitment to
progress went well beyond what observation allows. After all, is it
not incredibly naive to believe that young women will always select
the wisest and most exalted as their mates, and even more so to hold
that young men will stand idly by and let this happen? Fichman has
written a solid and important book, but he could have been a bit
tougher on his subject.
Not so Michael Shermer, who—unlike Fichman—is not overly
concerned with making his subject look good. In Darwin's
Shadow takes a "scientific approach" to
psychobiography. Shermer constructs a "Historical Matrix
Model" to depict "the interaction of thought and culture
over time in the development of Alfred Russel Wallace's theory of
the evolution of man and mind." It incorporates five
"internal forces" (hyperselectionism, monopolygenism
leanings, egalitarianism, environmental determinism and heretic
personality) and five "external forces"
(pseudoscience/spirituality/phrenology, teleological purposefulness,
scientific communal support, anthropological experiences and
working–class associations), thus formalizing the conviction
that no single influence is sufficient to explain the result. If all
this sounds a bit quirky to you—well, it does to me too. And I
have yet to be convinced that using the "birth–order
effect" or an "interrater reliability score" or
"multivariate correlational studies" to explain Wallace's
heresies affords any insight into the problem. Nor do I need to be
told that multiple factors work in an "autocatalytic feedback
loop" in order to understand that various facets of one's
personality and environment help shape attitudes to the world.
Shermer is convinced that history can be studied with what he
believes are the methods of science, and that is his right.
Fortunately, when he drops the cumbersome theory and actually gets
down to telling Wallace's story, Shermer does an outstanding job,
painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of the heretic
personality that made Wallace prone to investigate unusual claims,
and to commit to and stand by them in the absence of substantial
evidence in their favor. When Wallace was right, as with the
discovery of natural selection, those qualities worked in his favor.
When he was wrong, as with spiritualism, the same qualities rightly
brought down upon him the scorn and ridicule of scientists, skeptics
and more conservative personalities.
Ultimately Shermer concludes that Wallace's spiritualism did not
influence his science or his teleological evolutionary worldview.
Rather, the spiritualism grew out of his unshakable belief
in science and its method: He simply assumed that a guiding
intelligence was a more likely inference from reality than the
reductionist view ascribing the mystery of mind to the properties of matter.
Last but not least is Ross A. Slotten's book The Heretic in
Darwin's Court. Neither a professional writer nor an
academic historian, Slotten is a family practitioner. He has an
amateur's enthusiasm for his subject, which lends his account a kind
of intimacy missing from the other two books. The result is that
here Wallace is given his most complete and colorful viewing, as a
leading evolutionary theorist, social philosopher, hopeless dreamer,
anthropologist and spiritualist, friend, explorer, and tireless
seeker of justice and of truth. This is a good, old–fashioned,
beautifully written biography, devoid of pretension and with both a
wonderful eye for detail and an impressive command of history and
fact. Those unfamiliar with Wallace's life will greatly enjoy
Slotten's fine book. When all is said and done, there's no
substitute for a well–told story.
Has Wallace finally been accorded his long–deserved place
alongside Darwin in the annals of history? Well, I think the answer
is yes. Darwin may rest augustly beside Sir Isaac Newton in
Westminster Abbey, while Wallace lies modestly in the little
cemetery in Broadstone, on a hill shaded by pines and cooled by
breezes from the nearby sea. But ironically, perhaps this is
fitting. Darwin's last major publication was a treatise on the lowly
earthworm that exemplified the meticulous scientific method that
brought him to fame. Wallace, by contrast, had abandoned minutiae in
favor of what seemed to him more humanly relevant problems, and no
doubt paid a price. At the age of 90, Wallace left this life musing
over the last two books to come from his pen, Social Environment
and Moral Progress and The Revolt of Democracy,
both aimed at ensuring a benevolent future for humankind.