Alfred Russel Wallace

Our friend and colleague Michael Flannery notes a fascinating letter written by evolutionary theory’s co-discoverer that anticipates the intelligent-design argument in Metamorphosis.

Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin discovered and advanced the theory of evolution, was, unlike Darwin, a deeply spiritual man who was convinced that materialistic natural selection did not fully explain the origin of man. Unlike so many of his philosophically materialistic scientific colleagues, Wallace was a fierce critic of eugenics and the arrogant scientism of his day. Wallace wrote: Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have had enough of this kind of tyranny already…the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight … Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft.1 Commenting on our modern scientific priestcraft, Steven Lenzer has a superb essay Read More ›

There’s a longstanding debate among scholars about whether it was Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, or someone else who first conceived of the idea of natural selection. Many credit Alfred Russel Wallace, who with Darwin co-presented their theory of natural selection to the Linnean Society of London, exactly 150 years ago today. (For a nice news piece on this topic, see here.) Some people celebrated this event by proclaiming, as Johnjoe McFadden did yesterday in the London Guardian, that “Darwin and Wallace destroyed the strongest evidence left in the 19th century for the existence of a deity.” Darwin might have agreed, since he once wrote that “[t]here seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and Read More ›