Wallace was a prolific author who wrote on both scientific and social issues. His interest in natural history resulted in his being one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. In addition to his scientific work, he was a social activist who was critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain.
Wikipedia continues its description of Wallace with the following: )Īlfred Russel Wallace was an incredibly diverse and intelligent 19th century naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist, who wrote books about evolution, spiritualism, and social/political issues. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with some members of the scientific establishment. Wallace was strongly attracted to unconventional ideas. In the second paragraph the Wikipedia entry states the following: Part of the entry through relevant quotes from Wallace's writings and Arnold Brackman's commentaries about his writings (cf. But what concerns me can be seen from this same Wikipedia entry, and I will be filling in the details of this However, I am certainly by no means a historian, and I am quite content that David chose to at least refer to Wallace as a cofounder of the theory of evolution.
He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection, which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Even in the opening paragraph of the Wallace entry on wikipedia, it states the following: There are stimulating historical arguments which argue that in actuality Wallace-not Darwin-was the true originator of the theory of evolution, but that Wallace got overwhelmingly overshadowed by Darwin in what has been described as an unscrupulous “delicate arrangement” that involved Charles Lyell, founder of modern geology (cf. ), he makes a historical error that I find very disturbing, and which has prompted me to write this essay.ĭavid refers to the “co-founders” of evolution as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and I was glad to see David include Wallace in this designation. However, in David's recent Integral World video: Evolution in Four Minutes, which cleverly and vividly illustrates what I will refer to as the “physical” theory of evolution, inclusive of the description of evolution as having come about from “sightless forces” as a result of a “blind watchmaker” (cf. I generally have much respect for the scholarship of David Lane in his numerous Integral World essays.
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