Alfred Wallace
From Philosopedia
Wallace, Alfred Russel (8 January 1823 - 7 November 1913)
Wallace, doing scientific research in the Malay archipelago, sent Charles Darwin] an 1858 manuscript, “On the Tendencies of Varieties to Part from the Original Type.” Wallace’s concept of evolution was so like that of Darwin’s that he asked his fellow English naturalist to look it over and show it to other scientists. Darwin was troubled by the work’s similarity to his own thinking, remarking, “I would far rather burn my whole book than that Wallace or any other man should think that I behaved in a paltry spirit.”
A compromise was reached, one in which a short abstract of Darwin’s theory was read at the Linnaean Society, along with Wallace’s manuscript. Both had been influenced by the works of Malthus and Lyell, but Wallace’s specialty was biogeography, shown in his The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876). That work postulated a dividing line, which is still called Wallace’s Line, between Asian and Australian fau na in the Malay Archipelago.
When Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, Wallace remarked, “The one great result which I claim for my paper of 1858 is that it compelled Darwin to write and publish his Origin of Species without further delay.”
As reported in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), Wallace was “in no way connected with Christianity, for he had long before given up all belief in revealed religion.” “Unfortunately,” wrote Joseph McCabe, “Wallace allowed himself to be duped by a fraudulent and impudent Spiritualist medium and the works of his later years were pathetic. He refused to admit the evolution of the mind. But he never returned to the Christian Church.” McCabe added that most of Wallace’s distinctions were awarded on the ground that he was the co-discoverer with Darwin of Natural Selection, whereas “in point of fact there was nothing like equal merit, and he owed his recognition to Darwin’s modesty and generosity. For Darwin, it was the outcome of twenty years of research; in the case of Wallace, a sudden and rather superficial guess.”
Michael Shermer, in Skeptic (Vol. 3, No. 1 and 2, 1995), goes into detail as to how Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, came to believe in the supernatural, which he calls a lesson on the limitations of science.
Gordon Stein has written in The American Rationalist that Wallace was anything but a freethinker, that he “was as credulous a believer as there ever was.”
