Alfred Russel Wallace (1913) near the end of his life

First Theory of Natural Selection

The works of Alfred Russel Wallace, last reprinted only one hundred years ago, are perhaps as little known to our generation as the noncanonical scriptures of the ancients. His first major essay, “On the tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type,” first appeared – without the author’s knowledge or consent – on July 1, 1858, at the famous meeting of the fellows of the Linnaean Society of London that introduced to the world Darwin’s theory of natural selection. At this meeting, Darwin’s two closest friends presented Wallace’s uncorrected manuscript draft as a foil for the famous naturalist’s incomplete work on the theory of natural selection, along with a few notes by Darwin.¹ Years later, Wallace published the essay himself, clarified with section headings and footnotes, together with other essays on man and nature in Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (1891). Darwin’s celebrated Origin of Species continues to be reproduced annually by the thousands, despite the length of the volume and its assuming and domestic nature. Wallace’s ten pages of force and clarity have gone unnoticed and out of print. It is my purpose in these pages to raise up to view again Wallace’s version of the theory as it applies to Man so that it may be seen in the light of the new spirit of our age.

Wallace’s theory – when it is absolved of all exemplary beings (all woodpeckers, house sparrows, wild cats, rabbits, mollusks and crustacea, antelope, horses, and plants), all specific references (to wings, feet, velocity, defensive weapons, and the retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes), all general discussion (of number, animal fecundity, migratory patterns, vicissitudes of seasons, escapes from enemies, peculiar variations in color, compensation for deficiencies, temporary superiority of special varieties), all mention of Tartarean deserts and luxuriant American prairies and pampas, and all of Wallace’s own personal renunciations (of the prejudiced and false assumptions of his Victorian contemporaries) – may be purely expressed thus:

There is a general tendency in nature which will cause a certain variety to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations departing further and further from that original type, and which also produces, in varieties induced by the directing influence of men, the tendency to return to the parent form.

This colorless and abstract statement reflects nothing of the remarkable volcanic island in the Moluccas where the theory was conceived, nothing of the bright robe of its verdant rain forest, and nothing of the exotic splendors of Ornithoptera priamus (the rare bird of paradise) and rarerbutterflies. Neither does this statement reflect the mental and psychological circumstances: the catastrophic drought in Aru or the Galela men bearing sago and rice, the author’s extensive travel and long residence in the wild, the fever of imagination in which the theory had its origin. The sentence does, however, suggest a fundamental tendency or law that, according to Wallace, once governed the dramatic mutations of Man’s physical body and continues to govern the transformation of Man’s mind. Few researchers of our century have given their assent to Wallace’s variant of the theory of natural selection. The dissenters – those who have produced, and who maintain, the species of thought currently dominant – are legion.

Thanks to the efforts of our biologists, it is now common knowledge that 98 percent of all identified species have vanished from the face of the earth over time. The remnant of natural beings that now exist, the 2 percent, of which we are a part, are subject to the same fate as the other 98 : the inability to adapt, whether to showers of meteors and comets, to floods of waters or ice, to the elimination of food sources, to predatory attacks, or to radiations still mysterious to us. Students of ecology have added to this list of natural delimiters the unnatural menace of modern pollutants that may artificially induce or accelerate the process of our extinction. Our physicists have gone further. They have predicted the ultimate destruction of our terrestrial abode, the sun that nourishes it, and the entire space-time continuum that we know as the physical universe. In the popular terminology of physics, an abstract language more familiar to us today than the mythic narratives of ancient metaphysics, they have projected eschatological images that are perhaps more exact (more tedious and more limited in dimension) than the portraits drawn in ancient literature – and in several possible versions. None of them, however, varies substantially from either the traditional fire of New Testament eschatology or the in-breathing of multiple universes by Brahma. ²

Each of us is more or less resigned to the inevitable extinction of the physical organism of our individual beings. But what of our species? Our physicists have made it possible for us to conceive of this final event of nature. Is it also possible for us to conceive of a variety of our species able to survive the promised catastrophe? Certainly, this variety would require no body subject to natural laws (for there will then be no nature) and no mind to process the perceptions of physical senses (for there will then be no physical bodies); what is required is a being more radiant than the sun and a consciousness more extensive than space and time.

The law that Wallace has uncovered thus appears to me, in a more general form, to be applicable beyond terrestrial nature, beyond even the stars. Wallace, of course, never imagined his theory of evolution to be so all-encompassing. He, who postulated a spiritual origin for Man³ and a spiritual destiny,⁴ was not able to conceive of the means by which we humans may be able to produce, and reproduce, our spiritual (nonphysical) natures to become an Eternal Race; neither was he able to conceive clearly of the parent form of such a spiritual variety.

All natural laws remember, to some degree, the patterns of Heaven. The general law behind Wallace’s first theory in its precise and limpid form – angular, crystalline, almost transparent – does reflect the image of Man-becoming – the sequence of variant species of changing physical and mental forms over millions of years, from the time of the descent into matter (the time presupposed in Christian cosmogony and called “The Fall”) to the present time and our present varieties – as well as the image of the possible Man-to-come – a sequence of forms more and more spiritual, more transparent, more resistant to radiation, et cetera. This general law also reflects the image of the special variant of the human that each of us may realize now, individually: the spiritual being proposed for us long ago and exemplified in the Diamond Body of Lao Tzu and Lu Yen, the Golden Body of Buddha, the Sun Body of Viracocha, the Light Body of Jesus and his promise (John 14:2).

It is a demonstrated corollary of Wallace’s theory that procuring a constant supply of wholesome food is almost the sole requisite for ensuring the increase of a given species.⁵ The doctrines of the Eternal Race speak of a supranatural food, but its members were not permitted to reveal to the uninitiated either its nature or its source or how it may be procured. Their writings assure us, however, that this spiritual food is accessible and as abundant as daylight.

Robert G. Petrovich, 2000

FOOTNOTES

1. I refer the reader to my summary of the events surrounding the hidden public life of both the document and its author in “The Modesty of A. R. Wallace,” an address delivered in 1996 before the Advocates for Religious Rights and Freedoms at a celebration in Wallace’s honor.

2. The basic theory of the physicist may be stated in this way: The first law of thermodynamics declares that the energy of the physical universe is constant; the second, that this energy tends to noncommunication and disorder, although the total amount does not decrease (this gradual disintegration of the forces that compose the universe is called entropy). Once all different temperatures have been equalized, once the action of one body on another has been barred or compensated for, the world will be a fortuitous concurrence of atoms. In the deep center of stars, it is said, that difficult and fatal balance has been accomplished. By dint of interchanges, the entire physical universe will achieve it; and it will be tepid and dead. The variations of this basic statement involve time and the concept of single or multiple universes. One variation has it that light is losing heat, that the universe is becoming invisible minute by minute, and that, at some point, it will be nothing but heat – balanced, immovable, equal heat; then it will have died.

3. See Part 3: “A Postulate on Man’s Spiritual Origin.”

4. See Part 2: “A Postulate on Man’s Spiritual Destiny.”

5. For a discussion of this corollary and its application to a spiritual variation of the human, see Part 6: “First Corollary to the General Theory of Natural Selection Applied to Homo sapiens sapiens.

< PART 2 >

Alfred Russel Wallace (1913) near the end of his life

FOREWORD

The series of notes collected here under the generic title “On the Tendency of Humans Toward the Spiritual” attempts to expand and develop, in a preliminary manner, the theory of Alfred Russel Wallace on the spiritual origin and nature of the human species. In his own time, the statements Wallace made as a scientist on Man’s spiritual nature, especially as the codiscoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, drew popular attention. His statements also attracted the attention of the antithetical and antispiritual proponents of Darwin’s version of Man’s nature, a series of men who, from that time to the present, have attributed to themselves the character of mean-spirited dogs—from the agnostic “bulldog” Thomas Huxley in Wallace’s time to the atheistic “rottweiler” Richard Dawkins in our time—in the interest of keeping modern science purely materialistic.

My purpose in these brief notes is to take the topic of the evolution of Man out of academic kennels and intellectual fighting pits and into more spiritually elevated pockets of general human consciousness. To accomplish this task, it seems to me best to arrange these little pieces of theory and mulled-over thoughts (each of which, I hope, is nourishing in itself and assimilable in a single bite) simply in the order in which they occurred to me. The first note expands upon Wallace’s first general statement of his theory on natural selection and applies this statement to the spiritual nature of man. The next two summarize Wallace’s thought on the spiritual origin and destiny of Man. The fourth note applies Wallace’s general statement on natural selection to the nature of Man as a physical being; the fifth, to the present varieties of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. The sixth posits a spiritual variety of the species and suggests what is needed to encourage the progressive development of this special and endangered variety.

Future notes will attempt to extend Wallace’s thesis into new dimensions, primarily as expansions of the notion of “angels and archangels, spirits and demons so long abolished from our belief as to have become actually unthinkable as actual existences” that are mentioned by Wallace in a footnote in one of his essays and that have nothing yet in modern philosophy to take their place.

December 24, 2012

< PART 1 >

 I

The cosmology implicit in this universal doctrine gives rise to an endless interpretation of human events. I am invoking it now to assist me in a modest plan: to trace the history of the evolution of an idea through the heterogeneous texts of three authors. The first one is by Alfred Russel Wallace; it is an excerpt from the collection of essays he published one century ago this year (i.e., 1895) titled Natural Selection (pages 167–83):

We know positively that man was contemporaneous with many extinct animals, and has survived changes of the earth’s surface fifty or a hundred times greater than any that have occurred during the historical period. . . . But while these changes had been going on, his mental development had, from some unknown cause, greatly advanced, and reached that condition in which it began powerfully to influence his whole existence, and would therefore become subject to the irresistible action of natural selection. This action would quickly give ascendancy to mind…and from that moment man, as regards the form and structure of most parts of his body, would remain stationary. But from the moment that the form of his body became stationary, his mind would become subject to those very influences from which his body had escaped. . . .

We may trace back the gradually decreasing brain of former races, till we come to a time when the body also begins to materially differ. There we shall have reached the starting-point of the human family. Before that period he had not mind enough to preserve his body from change, and would, therefore, have been subject to the same comparatively rapid modifications of form as the other mammalia. . . . Man may continue to exist through a series of geological periods which shall see all other forms of animal life again and again changed…while he himself remains unchanged, except in two particulars – the head and face, as being immediately connected with the organ of the mind and as being the medium of the most refined emotions of his nature.

I wonder what my reader thinks of that proposition. To me it is nearly perfect. It seems impossible to deny, for it has the integrity of a statement ipso jure, an outgrowth of the law of natural selection itself. And, of course, it is just that. His formula reconfigures clearly an event that is evidently complex: the face expressing a mind developed in a culture that manifests, however imperfectly, an expression of spirit. In chapter 9 of the same collection, Wallace suggests that man is gradually moving or evolving toward participation in the Eternal. He contemplates the possibility that the development of the specifically human portions of man’s structure and intellect have been determined by the directing influence of more highly intelligent beings, perhaps encompassing layers of them, and that some general and fundamental law underlies the law of natural selection “too deep for us to discover it.” Behind Wallace’s idea is the general and ancient idea of the Fall of Man and the generations of humans who long for redemption.

< Read Part 2 >

THE PROTAGONIST: 

Alfred Russel Wallace (1878)

Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823 in the Welsh village of Usk in Monmouthshire, a remote pastoral district of low rents and country food. About the time that Darwin was secretively preparing the journal of his famous Beagle voyage for publication at his Down House estate in Kent, Wallace reached the age of fourteen and left home to glimpse the marvelous streets of London. He attended workingmen’s lectures, read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, and gazed into the windows of the best shops before he went back into the country to support himself as a surveyor. 

Wallace spent the next seven years near the North Downs as a solitary student of the fossils he saw lodged in the ancient strata of wild streams and valleys he wandered through between intervals of surveying. Later, for a little over a year, he was a school teacher in Leicester. In the town library he became a reader of Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology), Alexander von Humboldt (Personal Travels in South America), and Thomas Malthus (An Essay on the Principles of Population). There he also met and befriended Henry Walter Bates, the young entomologist who would later accompany him on his journey to South America. 

When a death in the family called Wallace away to Neath, he read there Darwin’s Journal of Researches; he also read Chamber’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. From Neath, Wallace wrote a letter to Bates. In it he expressed his desire to study some one family of life thoroughly – “with a view to the theory of the origin of species” – twelve years before the publication of Darwin’s first famous volume. 

THE ANTAGONIST: 

Thomas Huxley (1880)

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), despite his youth, was one of the three scientists whose blessing Darwin sought before publishing his Origins of Species. (The other two were Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell.) It was through him that science declared its independence from theology; but Huxley, with typical candor, never to the end of his life concealed the fact that Darwin’s theory was for him nothing more than a good working hypothesis. 

Huxley himself was deeply interested in theology. He insisted that atheism was untenable on purely philosophical grounds and coined the term “agnostic” to indicate his own intellectual position. He occupied his later years with contributions to periodical literature on subjects touching philosophy and theology. A passage from “An Apologetic Eirenicon,” an essay he wrote three years before his death, illustrates his personal creed, a kind of scientific Calvinism: 

THE MODESTY OF A. R. WALLACE 

To remember a man is to recall his name and give an account of his deeds. To celebrate him is to speak of those deeds as victories of the spirit. At this celebration in honor of the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace,(1) it would seem appropriate, therefore, to recount his theories and concepts on the spiritual nature of man. The list is long and varied . . . but Alfred Russel Wallace is a man we barely know. His counterpart Charles Darwin, however, is a man whose name and, to some extent, whose doctrine we are all acquainted with. 

That is because history belongs to the victors. In our age, book burning is an ineffectual ritual; and the destruction of libraries in order to eclipse a people’s knowledge of its origins and history is impractical – yet this truism of history remains valid.(2) Before Wallace’s writings are completely extinguished – put out of print or removed from library shelves to make room for more current volumes – I want to make a note on the event that led to his almost complete anonymity. Today the event itself has been generally forgotten. 

Wallace, by nature modest and retiring, led a life that was quietly spectacular. He was a collector of natural specimens who lived by his collections – for four years in the Amazon, and for eight years in Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Celebes, the Moluccas, Timor, New Guinea, and the Aru and Ke Islands. He was a lecturer in Boston, New York, New Haven, and Baltimore. He was a botanizer in the Sierra Nevada, a visitor to the Yosemite Valley and the Redwood Forests, an essayist of clear and incisive style, an experimenter in spiritualism, and a discoverer of the law of natural selection. Above all, Wallace was a gentleman; and in 1858 he began to commit an extended act of courtesy that remains our misfortune to this day. A brief account should serve to explain. 

Charles Darwin (1854)

In 1855 Wallace’s first paper on species (“The Law which has regulated the Introduction of Species”) is brought to Darwin’s attention by the geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell points out that the ideas bear an alarming resemblance to Darwin’s own. Darwin replies to Lyell with vexation over the notion of writing for priority and over the possibility that someone else may publish his doctrines before him. 

Two years later, Wallace initiates a direct correspondence with the well-known naturalist. His first letter to Darwin arrives at Down House in May. The young man (then in the Celebes) puts questions to his senior on varieties and the breeding of domestic animals. A second letter, which arrives in December, puts questions on distribution. Then a critical and unexpected event occurs. In February 1858, the theory of natural selection is born to Alfred Russel Wallace in the Moluccas. Muffled in blankets in the cold fit of a severe attack of malarial fever, Wallace begins to think of Malthus’s Essay on Population; and the idea of the survival of the fittest flashes upon him. He thinks out the theory during the rest of the shivering fit, drafts it the same evening, writes it out in full during the two succeeding evenings, and sends it to Darwin by the next post. 

Wallace’s third parcel shocks Darwin and fills him with awe. The older naturalist recognizes that the conception of organic change which he has held for nearly twenty years, and pocketed for time to develop a larger body of evidence, has been given a viable and independent form by a stranger in the middle of a tropical rain forest. A marsupial, long evolved in isolation from her eutherian counterpart and bearing her own embryonic young in her pouch, might feel a similar awe at the witness of a live birth. Darwin (whose powers of conception resemble the characteristics of that branch of mammal – the lesser powers of integration, the embryonic offspring pouched until fully developed, the heart more like a bird’s than a man’s) cannot help noticing that the ideas, which are familiar to him, are conveyed with unfamiliar force and clarity. 

On that same crucial day, Darwin writes to Lyell: “I never saw a more striking coincidence. . . . if Wallace had my Ms. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters . . . so all my originality . . . will be smashed . . . .” With his letter to Lyell, Darwin encloses Wallace’s essay. Darwin begins another letter, one to Wallace, in which he will renounce all claims to the theory; but he cannot bring himself to finish it. 

A week passes, or perhaps a month, and Darwin begins to have second thoughts about establishing priority over Wallace. On June 25th, in another letter to Lyell, Darwin expresses his concern over publishing honorably. To this letter he adds a portentous note: “About a year ago I sent a short sketch, of which I have a copy, of my views to Asa Gray, so that I could most truly say and prove that I take nothing from Wallace.” Shortly after Darwin posts the letter, scarlet fever appears in his household and consumes his infant daughter. Under the pressure of this morose circumstance, Darwin sends his short sketch and an abstract of his views on natural selection to his friend, the biologist Joseph Hooker, in London and writes: “I cannot think now. . . . I am quite indifferent, and place myself absolutely in your and Lyell’s hands.” 

Hooker and Lyell move rapidly. On July 1, 1858, Darwin’s two closest friends oversee the reading of Wallace’s uncorrected essay “On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type,” together with some of Darwin’s notes and sketches as a joint paper at the meeting of the Linnean Society of London. The natural sequence of events that leads to this conjunction, and the modifications of the future that result, ultimately develop only one variant of the theory of natural selection – Darwin’s – into the dominant species of thought.(3) 

Neither Wallace nor Darwin attend the Linnean Society meeting. At the time, Wallace is traveling the Malaysian islands in pursuit of the rare bird of paradise and rarer butterflies. He does not learn that he has forced Darwin’s hand until three months later. By that time, Darwin has aborted the “Big Book” he was expecting and conceives of a series of papers made of the same materials; he begins a period of gestation at the King’s Head Hotel on the Isle of Wight and by 1859 recognizes that his “Abstract of an Abstract” too will be born a book. Wallace, still in the remote jungles, continues to increase his observations and collections, unaware that the moment of strange and wonderful insight he once felt is about to lead Western thought onto a new path. 

Alfred Russel Wallace (circa 1860)

Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, comes into print in 1859. Wallace receives his copy from the publisher early in 1860 while he is still in the islands. He reads the entire volume before he embarks at the end of February on his last and most hazardous exploration of the eastern Spice Islands. Later Wallace states in a private letter to his brother-in-law that he backs Darwin “in his conclusions” and looks upon him as “the Newton of Natural History.” After Darwin’s famous volume is published, its author still cannot point to a single case he has observed in the wild; unlike Wallace, Darwin has to draw analogies between what he has observed man do with artificial selection in English barnyards and what nature does with natural selection. As a result, his book ends up reading like a long legal argument prosecuting the Creation Theory. It is received by the public with outrage. 

When the first wave of frivolous abuse dies down, criticism of a more serious nature arises. Questions come to face Darwin – who reads so slowly, writes so slowly, even thinks so slowly, that he always feels himself desperately behind, like the Galapagos tortoise who concentrates his energy on every next step as he creeps in haste towards the perpetual horizon. These questions Darwin’s knowledge is inadequate to answer. 

It is now that one of the cool young new thinkers present at the famous Linnean Society meeting, T. H. Huxley, takes up position as Darwin’s general agent and bulldog. In a short time Huxley becomes the most formidable scientific debater of the century. He takes on the hostile armies of bishops and archdeacons while Darwin remains at home and conducts his program of biological experiments in the quiet of his garden at Down, content to answer his critics in successive editions (or mutations) of the Origins. Wallace, reassuring and generous, and sometimes a little trying, continues to anticipate Darwin’s ideas and sends them to him from the jungle in the form of letters and collections of notes. 

In 1862 Wallace turns homeward with birds of paradise as his companions. Two years later he publishes a paper on man in Anthropological Review (“The Development of Human Races under the Law of Natural Selection”). Darwin, who believes that he and Wallace should agree on everything scientific, invites Wallace to write the indispensable book on man and offers Wallace all his bibliography and notes. Wallace, busy with a book on his travels in the Malay peninsula, courteously declines. The current of opinion in the meantime moves strongly in favor of evolution. Darwin, fifty years old when the Origins appeared, is revered before he reaches sixty as the “Newton of Natural History” (a reiteration of Wallace’s appreciative phrase), and “Darwinism” (another term generously advanced by Wallace) becomes almost a synonym for biology. 

Wallace publishes a second article on man (“Limits of Natural Selection Applied to Man,” 1870). In it he posits the natural origin and evolution of man’s animal at the same time that he posits a supranatural origin to be the only possible origin for man’s otherwise unaccountable faculties. Huxley – who senses deeply that the universe is really only a single hostile action – now steps out from the ring of educational controversy and attacks Wallace ferociously in public. Joseph Hooker (one of the two scientists who originally communicated the papers of Darwin and Wallace to the Linnean Society meeting) writes to Darwin about Huxley’s denunciation of Wallace with curious emotional enthusiasm: “The tumbling over of Wallace,” he says, “. . . is a . . . service to science.” Now, without too much reluctance, Darwin himself undertakes the project he once offered to Wallace; and in 1871, at the age of 62, he publishes the Descent of Man, the book in which he maintains that the difference between man and the lower animals is merely one of degree and not of kind. 

Charles Darwin (circa 1880) near the end of his life

For the next several years, public disregard forces Wallace to earn a meager livelihood by grading examination papers. Darwin and Huxley, perhaps out of shame or embarrassment, arrange in 1879 to alleviate Wallace’s impoverished condition (an arrangement in which Joseph Hooker refuses to take part). The modest government pension Wallace receives through the efforts of these two men, whose ignorance and bravado had done so much to injure him, allows Wallace to continue writing articles and books until he is nearly ninety-one. Darwin’s last decade, by contrast, is valedictory, even posthumous. Upon Darwin’s passing, Wallace serves, with Hooker and Huxley, as one of the ten pallbearers who carry Darwin’s body to lie in the grave beside Newton’s in Westminster Abbey. On the golden anniversary of the Linnean Society meeting at which the Wallace-Darwin papers were first presented, the living members of the Society gather to celebrate the event and award the first Darwin-Wallace medal to Wallace. In 1908 Wallace claims for himself no more than he had claimed in 1858. 

Alfred Russel Wallace (1913) near the end of his life

Thus the tale ends. It comes to pass that Wallace’s portrait never appears beside Darwin’s in our children’s textbooks or in the innumerable books and journals that extol Darwin’s scientific achievements. The respectful deference Wallace paid to Darwin throughout his life not only permitted but, it seems, even promoted Darwin’s popular image as the originator of the theory of natural selection and all its related species of thought. Yet, what may not have been? A truly compelling science, one more comprehensive and accurate than our own, is still visible in the record of reasoning and observation which Wallace has left to us. 

One final comment. I would have preferred to present you with something more than the documentation of a single historic moment – a review of Wallace’s argument for man’s place as a spiritual being in the world of life, for example, or an application of his first biological theorem to illustrate how on earth a spiritual variety of the human could grow into a new species of spiritual beings – but circumstances, and my ignorance, require that I first make this note, perhaps poorer (and longer) than you would have wished. Let us hope that the future will permit us other, more delightful and more useful, literary varieties. 

Robert G. Petrovich 

1996, 2010 

ENDNOTES 

(1) This note is based on a talk given at the Human Spiritual Rights Conference sponsored by the Advocates of Religious Rights and Freedoms, Reno, Nevada, Fall 1996. 

(2) The following titles by Wallace are still in print: Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, The Action of Natural Selection on Man, Tropical Nature, The Malay Peninsula, Narrative of Travels on the Amazon & Rio Negro, Darwinism, Miracles & Modern Spiritualism, My Life (2 volumes), and Island Life. Only one is a soft-cover trade book; the remainder are relatively inaccessible library editions. 

Among the number of Wallace’s writings out of print are two that we should have considered essential to consult for this essay: Man’s Place in the Universe; a study of the results of scientific research in relation to the unity or plurality of worlds and World of Life; a manifestation of creative power, directive mind and ultimate purpose. Both of these volumes have been out of print for more than eighty years. Why this is so may be explained by a statement Wallace made in a letter to a fellow scientist in 1913. These two works, he said, “form together a very elaborate, and I think conclusive, scientific argument in favour of the view that the whole material universe exists and is designed for the production of Immortal Spirits.” The demise of these books, it would seem, is simply a matter of political science. 

(3) To make clear the nature of the connivance carried out by Darwin’s two friends requires the insertion here of a few specific details. First, the body of this joint contribution comprised four elements arranged in chronological order: an introductory letter signed by Lyell and Hooker; an abstract from an unpublished manuscript on species by Darwin “sketched in 1839, and copied in 1844”; an abstract of a private letter to “Professor Asa Gray, of Boston, U.S.” dated September 5, 1857; and last, Wallace’s essay “written at Ternate in February, 1858.” Lyell and Hooker listed the parts of the joint contribution according to the date of composition in order to justify the order of their presentation. Most scientists would agree that the etiquette of publication would allow Lyell and Hooker, at best, to append their letter and Darwin’s excerpts to Wallace’s manuscript, which is complete and prepared for publication. To add fragments from Darwin’s papers never intended for publication was exceptional. To assign these fragments priority in the presentation was unjustifiable. 

Second, Wallace’s manuscript was entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” The title on the page of the Linnean Society Journal of Proceedings reads: 

“On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Selection. By Charles Darwin, Esq. F.R.S., F.L.S., & F.G.S., and Alfred Wallace, Esq. Communicated by Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S., F.L.S., and J. D. Hooker, M.D., V.P.R.S., F.L.S. & c.” 

The title of the Journal article magnifies Darwin and the communicators, Lyell and Hooker, with academic titles that diminish the standing of Wallace; the Journal title also presents a message that is quite different from Wallace’s contribution. In his essay, Wallace presents a concept of how a variety could become a new species; the printed Journal title speaks to the formation of varieties from species, and to the perpetuation of both by natural selection. This is a drastic shift in emphasis. 

The third detail concerns the introductory letter written by Lyell and Hooker. The text of the letter states: 

“Two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace, . . . having independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearances and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry. . . . neither of them having published his views. . . .” 

Lyell was acquainted with Wallace’s 1855 essay; for him to write that neither of them had published his views was a departure from the truth that was likely deliberate, and intended to justify publishing Darwin’s private papers. From these three examples, it should be clear that these two powerful members of the scientific community – Lyell and Hooker – attempted to ensure Wallace’s anonymity from the outset of his public career. 

FURTHER READING 

John Langdon Brooks: Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution. (Columbia University Press, New York, 1984) in which the twentieth-century biologist John Langdon Brooks provides a re-assessment of A. R. Wallace’s contribution to the theory of organic evolution and attempts to reconstruct, step by step, Wallace’s elaboration of his ideas about the laws of organic change – what we now call evolution. The final three chapters re-examine the influence of Wallace’s ideas on Darwin’s own conceptions and expose the anomalies surrounding the events of Wallace’s initial discovery, the presentation of Wallace’s essay at the Linnean Society meeting, and Darwin’s completion of the theory he published as his Origins.