Excruciatingly detailed biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, a 19th century naturalist who should be a household name.
Everyone knows about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, yet almost nobody knows that Wallace scooped Darwin. Darwin of course had been working on the idea for years, but it was Wallace who published first. The two men were credited as co-discoverers, in what appears suspiciously like a 19th century version of participation trophies.
But if Wallace was first, why is he barely known at all?
Now this question is extremely interesting, and it teaches us that it isn't just modern scientists who exclude and marginalize people for wrongthink and for failing to "support the current thing." Old school 19th century scientists did it too! Nobody knows who Wallace is today because he didn't tow the line of the fashionable scientific narratives of his day. He was a dissident thinker, and the scientific establishment of the 1800s didn't like it. There is nothing new under the sun.
And yet Wallace was among the most important scientists of the 19th century, a genuine polymath, publishing important work across an astoundingly broad range of domains: biology, geology, ornithology, entomology, botany, ethnology, linguistics, anthropology and paleontology. Contrast this with the typically hyperspecialized modern scientist, doing research in some narrow sub-sub-sub specialty.
What, then, were Wallace's alleged heresies, at least in the eyes of the scientific establishment of his day? There were quite a few: he was a socialist, a utopianist, a spiritualist, he researched (and even practiced) hypnosis. He had what were seen as odd spiritual beliefs and some of his political beliefs were really out there: like the crazy, ludicrous, totally unacceptable idea that women should have the right to vote. Wrongthink like this was beyond the pale for the scientific and political establishment of his time.
The richest irony of all, however, is this: if you look at Wallace's belief sets, he would mesh quite well with political fashion today. He'd get funding for whatever her wanted! If our modern scientific elites could really look downfield, they would cancel Darwin and rehabilitate Wallace.
Not quite as true as I thought, apparently
Radical By Nature has one primary weakness: it is too goddamn long. You will learn everything--and I mean everything--about this guy. You'll learn the name of every single bug he finds, and the names of all the bugs he doesn't find. You will learn all the places he goes to to do his research, and all the places he doesn't. You can't help but sense author James T. Costa's obvious affection for his subject, but you also can't help but think of Blaise Pascal's famous saying "if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter."
Finally, a few brief thoughts on biography itself. Obviously one way to tell the story of a person's life is to just tell it, from beginning to end. This is how our author handles things, although he also attempts to tie in certain general themes to help lug the reader along. But the best biographies don't lug a reader longitudinally across the subject's life. Instead, they find a way to structure the story arc so that it grips and propels the reader. See for example Emil Ludwig's famous, romantic biography of Napoleon, or Harold Lamb's short and tight bio of Tamerlane. There are other more recent examples: David McCullough's moving biography of Harry Truman (yes, it actually was moving), and finally, Einstein Defiant, Edmund Blair Bolles' striking biography of Albert Einstein, which reads like a Nietzschean narrative and transfixes the reader throughout. I write this merely to illustrate the often stark contrast between great biographies that truly grip the reader and workmanlike biographies that don't.
[Once again, a friendly warning: don't read any further. What follows are just my notes to the text.]
Notes:
Preface: Multitudinous
1) 2013 was the 100th anniversary of Wallace's death, note that some dozen books have come out about him over the past few decades. The author says here that his goal is to not do a contextual analysis or critical biography of Russell's works or his life but rather to "tell a good story" of "this remarkable individual's life." [I think we can agree he tells a long and very detailed story of his life.]
2) On the idea that Wallace didn't just focus on evolution which was Darwin's near-total focus. Instead Wallace pursued myriad scientific interests, social and political issues, even spiritualism. [Note that the author celebrates him for his "social justice" and a modern reader can't help but think: now that his once-heretical views are coming into fashion with today's establishment, maybe it's time to "rehabilitate" him and "cancel" Darwin! Wallace was contra-narrative in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but now he's right back in vogue.]
Chapter 1: A Happy but Downwardly Mobile Family
3) Alfred Russel Wallace's father Thomas Wallace: a bit of a socialite, he qualified as a solicitor but never practiced; gets into a bunch of disastrous business ventures; the family then had to move to rural South Wales, "where living was as cheap as possible."
4) ARW is an eclectic reader, learns most of his stuff outside of school.
5) The family has yet another financial disaster, his mother's brother-in-law blew the family money in a speculative building project in London; the family lost most of their income and assets; had to move around a lot for a while; Alfred gets pulled from school and sent to apprentice with his brother John as a carpenter/sawyer at age 14. It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him.
6) Ironically at that time, in 1837, Darwin was living about a mile away from them in Wales.
Chapter 2: Taking Measure in the Borderlands
7) ARW goes to live with his brother John, who was working as a carpenter's apprentice, this to help the family save money until Alfred can join his older brother William to apprentice as a surveyor. He works on odds jobs and hangs around in the carpentry shop, learning a ton.
8) On Robert Owen, socialist/utopianism, who ARW met when he was young; Owen founded a cotton mill offering workers labor rights, a school, eight-hour workdays, etc., and it survived until 1968; he also funded an even more scaled-up version of this type of enterprise in the USA on the Wabash River, called "New Harmony"; the spread of Owenism or "Owenite free thought societies" flourished across London from the 1830s to the 1860s; this was a sort of proto-socialism essentially. "Owen's influence on Wallace cannot be overstated."
9) Wallace comes into contact with Thomas Paine's book Age of Reason, criticizing corruption of the established churches, advancing deistic arguments.
10) Another irony: Wallace has a lot of surveying work to do as he begins his apprenticeship to a surveyor in Bedfordshire, but it is for the "enclosure movement" as well as land to be used for the commutation of tithes, these were policies that favored elites at the expense of everyone else. Per the author this made Wallace "an accessory to a crime, as he later saw it." On the acceleration of land enclosure during the 17th and 18th centuries after the 1773 "Inclosure Act" which practically made it national policy to fence in all common field lands.
11) On tithe rites and the commutation of tithes: people working the land would pay an annual rent of 1/10 of the production of crops, livestock, wool, fish, honey, whatever, originally this was paid to the church but over time as the monasteries faded from the scene it was paid to aristocratic landowners; the "commutation" turned these in-kind tithes into cash payments, basically a rent payment rather than sharecropping;
12) The surveying work helped him sharpen his skills of observation in the natural world.
13) He tries smoking like his older brother, overdoes it, gets a terrible headache and vomits... and was cured forever from any desire to smoke from then on.
14) [Interesting epistemic insight here as the author paraphrases geologist Charles Lyell]: "We need to perceive pattern to try to infer process since we cannot ask questions about what we do not even notice." This is a really good way to think about navigating any systems you can't actually see (examples would be things like like particle physics, investing, or even 5th generation warfare conducted in the modern era), any kind of power structures that are not directly visible but yet we can infer things about the system via observation of secondary effects, via experiment, via hypothesis testing, etc ...this is a really useful way to expand beyond the domain of geology to any domain.
15) Around the age of 19-20, in 1841-1843, ARW had more time between surveying jobs and was left to study topics on his own, not just geology but also astronomy, botany, etc. His brother and sister consider him to be kind of a slacker who wastes money on expensive books. Wallace also starts to think bigger too, dreaming about traveling to exotic places like Guyana for example.
16) He's anti-inspired by a local botanist "of some repute" who gave such a boring lecture that he wanted to try and do something better...!
17) 1843 Wallace's father dies age 72, and the family's finances get much worse; the family disperses: Wallace's mother moves into a housekeeping job for a well-off family, his sister Fanny goes to the US to teach in Montpelier Springs, Georgia, the brothers spread to different apprentice-type jobs, the surveying business gets slow enough by the end of the enclosure movement that his brother William has to lay Wallace off.
Chapter 3: Beetling and Big Questions
18) Parenthetical story here about how Wallace "became deathly ill with a lung infection after falling into a bog" and was prescribed leeches by his doctor.
19) 1844: Wallace he gets a job teaching at the Collegiate School in the town of Leicester; he continues learning, taking math instruction from the headmaster--although calculus completely stymies him and he learns he is not a math guy! Wallace has experiences with mesmerism/hypnotism and finds he can successfully hypnotize some of his students.
20) Tossed-off sentence here about Bradgate being the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey (Bradgate Park was where Wallace would take his students for local rambles in the Leicestershire countryside)... I thank the author for sending me down a rabbit hole of learning about Lady Jane Grey, the "Nine Days Queen," executed at age 17.
21) Wallace discovers a new obsession: beetles; there are as many beetle species in the UK as all other animal species combined; some 4,100 species of 100 families recorded in the UK.
22) Wallace is electrified by reading Alexander von Humboldt's book Personal Narrative which describes the great naturalist's travels in South America from 1799-1804. He's also influenced by Malthus and his book Principles of Population.
23) Just as Wallace is starting to get settled in and very much enjoying his work teaching at the school, his brother William suddenly dies, likely from pneumonia; Wallace sorts out his brother's affairs and decides to start his own surveying business, also expanding to include basic architecture, construction and engineering; he convinces his other brother John to join him; they have some success in 1845-1846 because of the railroad boom, the success here allowed the family to reunite.
24) On the anonymous publication in 1844 of (the then-anonymous) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which first talked about "transmutation" the general term then for "evolution" or "species change." This idea had been around for centuries, most recently in Lamarkian theory, and it was roundly rejected in those days because of its existential threat to religion and "values." On the idea of creation formed by "natural laws which are extensions of his [God's] will." The book "had a seismic effect on Wallace."
Chapter 4: Paradise Gained...
25) Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates hatch a scheme to go to South America, inspired in part by entomologist William Edwards' A Voyage up the River Amazon. They got advice from other important entomologists at the British Museum, even from Edwards himself; they begin the trip when Wallace is 25 and Bates is 23 [jeez, at that age I was still figuring out what the heck to do with my life]. They obtain funding, letters of introduction, all kinds of help. People would also pay them for interesting or rare bugs and butterflies that they might collect.
26) They collect all kinds of bugs, birds and plants to send back to England; they learn that ants can devour their samples, etc. Wallace sure bungles things sometimes too: he loses his glasses while trying to escape wasps; he grabs an (assumed dead) alligator by the leg and nearly swamps their boat; he picks up his gun by the muzzle, it fires and blows off part of his hand...
27) Bates and Wallace also split up during the trip, possibly quarreling, they hardly mention each other in later tellings of their adventure, although they remained friends the rest of their lives.
28) Really cool drawing here of the click beetle, bioluminescent enough that you can read by it in the dark. (!)
29) His brother Edward joins him, his other brother goes to California to be a forty-niner.
30) Note the discussions here of the Cabanagem: the extensive and destructive and depopulating ethnic riots that happened among the various peoples throughout Brazil; savage, genocidal violence among caboclos (mixed indigenous/European people) pardos (tri- or multiracial indigenous-European-African), other indigenous peoples, and whites. Many of the villages and towns that Wallace visited, years afterward, were still nearly or in some cases totally depopulated, long after these conflicts.
31) Wallace plans a ginormous voyage up the Rio Negro all the way to Venezuela, to places that no white settler had ever been.
Chapter 5: ...And Paradise Lost
32) Wallace's brother Edward takes ill with yellow fever, around the time he begins his huge voyage. Wallace doesn't know that he'll never see his brother alive again.
33) Wallace also starts to "go native" a bit here, he begins to sour on modern life; he makes many comparisons between life in Brazil and finds his own civilization wanting in many ways, compares the indigenous peoples' simple garments versus the ill-fitting and suffocating garments of his "modern" culture, cites the happiness of the people compared to his own, etc.
34) Wallace continues further and further upriver, visiting various malocas or longhouses of various Amazonian peoples; constantly taking notes, making sketches and drawings of plants, people, longhouses, collecting specimens, even doing mapmaking and surveying with a sextant and compass; he learns his guide is involved in human slave trafficking.
35) Wallace contracts malaria, becomes extremely ill and nearly dies from it; he's forced to remain in the Amazon region for some two and a half months, weak and emaciated; he begins to recover and returns to the coastal region, then leaves for home after four years in Brazil, he's now 29 years old.
Chapter 6: Down But Not Out
36) [This part of the story is incredible, a near-catastrophe] There's a catastrophic fire onboard the ship returning him home; Wallace loses nearly everything he brought with him, most of his papers, sketches and drawings (fortunately Wallace had already made several shipments back to England of bugs, bird and plants he had collected); the crew has to get into a couple of lifeboats that were barely seaworthy and they nearly died of thirst out on the open ocean; luckily they were rescued by another ship after ten days lost at sea. And then, that ship actually ran into a major storm on the way to London and barely made it home.
37) He didn't go to see his mother when he first reached land; Stevens, Wallace's agent got him some fresh clothes and fed him for a week first: "he was in too frightful a state in his weak and emaciated condition to see his own mother and sister."
38) Incalculable loss of his things on the ship: notes, records, drawings, observations, hundreds of new species, all of which would have made him wealthy and made his scientific reputation; he nearly lost his own life (more than once), he lost his brother, and now he lost most of his stuff from his huge research trip.
39) He starts making the rounds of the zoology, biology and geographical societies in England, giving talks, he writes certain papers that were well-received, including a paper about separation barriers between species leading to the concept of "speciation by isolation" or "allopatric speciation" as it later came to be called in evolutionary theory. Also he notes convergences of certain traits in separate species as well as other interesting, noteworthy evolutionary phenomena.
40) He publishes a book on palm trees and another book which is a travel narrative.
41) Against his better judgment he decides to go on another gigantic trip, this one to the far East; he's now 31 years old and plans to head to Singapore via a roundabout journey through Egypt, then overland to the Red Sea.
Chapter 7: Sarawak and the Law
42) Wallace arrives to Singapore, then goes northwest to Malacca; also interesting that he notes the evolution of the Portuguese language this far away from Portugal.
43) He connects up with Sir James Brooke who had a relationship helping protect the sultan of Brunei, Brooke was rewarded with the governorship of Sarawak, then later named hereditary raja after helping to restore the sultan back to his throne; also given a knighthood in England because he arranged for the sultan to cede the island of Labuan to England; all kinds of scientific debates in Brooke's "salon"; Wallace spent an entire rainy season with him, to the benefit of science.
44) Sidebar here on Darwin and his epiphany in 1837 about species change; note that Darwin wrote out a private essay containing his thinking on evolution and sealed it, instructing his wife to publish immediately should he unexpectedly die; in the meantime he was steadily amassing data to back up his claims, and sharing his views only with his trusted friend the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was a transmutation convert since reading Vestiges in 1845.
45) Another sidebar here on Wallace and how he made various intriguing comments in his personal scientific notebooks about the puzzle pieces leading up to his arrival at his theory of evolution. The author argues that this period Wallace spent in Borneo was a period of "synthesis" to put all his ideas together. "The result was a tour de force, and he quickly composed a paper 'on the law which has regulated the introduction of new species.' This paper contained The so-called Sarawak Law: "The following law may be deduced from these facts: every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species." The inference here is that it is derived from a pre-existing species, thus you can arrive at evolutionary lineages that branch which makes sense of classification, geographical distribution, comparative anatomy, etc.
46) He sent the paper back home to Stevens his agent, it was published in 1855, and seen as a criticism of Lyell, who was sufficiently "shaken" that he started a new notebook on the "species question" which began with a detailed summary of Wallace's paper.
47) Wallace then decides to head inland into Borneo. Interesting blurb here where Wallace pays a penny per insect to local workmen, while he probably sold these to collectors for a huge profit back home. Also notable that in a particular one square mile area in Simunjan on Borneo he collected more than a thousand species (mostly insects presumably).
48) Wallace of course hunts orangutans here as well; the author has a discussion here about differing standards in modernity about capturing/killing animals for study, particularly primates. Wallace also kills a female without realizing it had a nursing baby; he attempts to raise the infant at home without success.
49) Wallace experiences the durian fruit for the first time, and even writes a paper on it, introducing it to Europe; he also writes various speculations on the different ethnic groups in Borneo, thinking about geographical distribution and considering these peoples as well as plants and animals in the region in the context of "descent and branching"; this leads him to infer that the islands of Indonesia and Malaysia were once a closely connected or even perhaps a uniform body of land, based on shared flora and fauna similarities across the islands.
50) Back to Wallace's Sarawak Law paper: Lyell discussed Wallaces paper with Darwin, and then Darwin revealed his theory of transmutation by natural selection to Lyell, astounding Lyell; with Lyell "clearly seeing the implications of Wallace's paper, soon urged his friend to publish his theory immediately."
Chapter 8: Crossing the Line(s)
51) Interesting side comment here on the clockwork administrative system of the Dutch colonial system, descended from the Dutch East India company (although it had been defunct by over half a century by then), but the remaining colonial administrative systems handled mail, as well as other things that really aided the work of naturalists like Wallace. Note also a footnote here where the author writes: "There is some irony in Wallace benefiting from and supporting the Dutch colonial apparatus that the VOVC [Dutch East India Company] established while deploring the capitalist system it was based on."
52) Wallace moves on to Bali and the surrounding region, this is around 1856. Discussion here about volcanic, seismic and tectonic activity in the region, and how various naturalists were trying to infer movement of the seabed, rising and sinking of different strata of rocks, basically trying to understand why you might see unusual geological phenomena like coastal uplift; likewise, Darwin wrote about seafloor uplift due to the 1835 earthquake in Concepcion, Chile, where the sea bed was raised, killing all the then-exposed marine life.
53) Paragraphs of extensive lists of the various birds found on a given island, or given place; the author notes that Wallace found two nearby islands, Bali and Lombok, which were only 15 miles apart, with many environmental and geological similarities but radically different fauna; this was in conflict with Buffon's Law [Comte de Buffon was a French polymath from the 18th century] which held that environmentally similar regions should have the same types of organisms with some differences. But in this case, however, Wallace found two essentially identical islands side by side with totally different birds and none of the expected Buffon Law-type similarities.
54) Amusing blurb here about macassar oil, this is referring to the trading port town of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi, macassar oil refers to a hair oil that was extremely popular in the late 18th century, to the point where it was mentioned in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass as well as mocked in Lord Byron's poem Don Juan; maybe we can think of it as the Jheri Curl of 1700s England...
55) On this island few of the people had ever seen white men, they tended to run away, children would scream in terror; Wallace was treated as a sort of strange and terrible monster which depressed him.
56) Sidebar here on the heavy enslavement of the Timor people (both Dutch and Portuguese traders would enslave them) and how Wallace, although he was not favorable towards slavery, did not protest it openly.
57) Journey to the Aru islands; noting the striking ethnic differences between Malay people and the Papuan people. Also on the debate between polygenist anthropologists and monogenist anthropologists: polygenists thought that humans races were separate and distinct entities (like not quite different species), this of course helped justify slavery of certain races; whereas monogenists saw humans as more of a "we are all one" kind of species, that human diversity was simply variants of a single species.
58) Hunting birds of paradise with the people of Papua on Aru Island. Wallace was the first Westerner who had ever seen these birds in the wild, watched their courtship rituals etc.
59) The author calls out Wallace for considering the Papuan people fairly inferior: "barely human."
60) While in the far East he gets a letter from Darwin, "I can plainly see that we have thought much alike & to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions."
61) Wallace is setting out to prove that "varieties" are no different from species; they are based on the same process and are but intermediate steps.
62) Also by examining the various correspondence among these naturalists (Darwin, Wallace, Lyell, Blyth, etc.) you can see who was further along on what theory at what time.
Chapter 9: Eureka: Wallace Triumphant
63) Wallace notes that Borneo and New Guinea have nearly identical climates but significantly different fauna, while at the same time New Guinea and Australia have significantly different climates but virtually identical fauna. This is the existential threat to Lyell's anti-transmutation view. [Essentially Wallace was doing in the far East Darwin was doing in the Galapagos and in South America]
64) Exploring plant selection: grasses adapt to an area quickly and can prevent trees from getting a foothold, a type of competition dynamic among plants for capturing and holding ground.
65) [Wallace fleshing out other aspects of natural selection to arrive at a complete theory that completely scooped Darwin] Wallace wrote later how aspects of this idea came to him while he was in a malarial fit; he was thinking of Malthusian "checks" on population, and concluding that must hold true for animals too. "There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest... I thought out almost the whole of the theory, and in the same evening I sketched the draft of my paper, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out in full, and sent it by the next post to Mr Darwin." This was February 1858, Wallace was only 35. (!) Our biographer writes "It was a stupendous insight!" The paper was ultimately titled "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type: a reply to Sir Charles Lyell."
66) Darwin is "staggered" by this paper, Wallace beat him to the punch. Darwin writes to Lyell, "I never saw a more striking coincidence... So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed... Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters."
67) Note how we have a textbook example of "scientific elites" from that era--Darwin, Lyell and Hooker--who decided to present Wallace's essay back home in England, but also along with some of Darwin's private writings... and to present Darwin's material first. Wallace was of course in New Guinea at this time and was totally out of pocket and couldn't do anything about this. Also note that Darwin in these same days lost his infant son to scarlet fever and was despondent over it.
68) Wallace is also sick during his entire trip to New Guinea: he has ulcers in his foot and ankle, a weird inflammation of his mouth and gums, and then one of his assistants dies of dysentery.
69) Wallace on trying to connect the Papuan and Malay peoples somehow. Note also that all of this natural selection and transmutation research really derives from the famous anonymous work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a piece of genuine scientific samizdat literature that scandalized a lot of scientists as early as 1845, more than a decade earlier; this book introduced many controversial views that would be later borne out by Wallace and Darwin: for example, it posited that humanity had a single origin, and that it could be traced by looking at lines of migration, and that you could draw human heritage back to related species like primates.
70) Fascinating to think how you can send out a paper back home and then several months later (!) get a letter from Darwin himself in response with what happened... Wallace takes the high road and seems actually happy with the overall result: that Darwin was "first" but Wallace would be considered co-discoverer and "first to publish." He was glad he reached out to Darwin rather than just publishing first. Darwin wrote at the time, "He must be an amiable man."
Chapter 10: Island Hopper
71) He does a major excursion through dozens of islands in the Malaysian archipelago with his trusted assistant Ali.
72) Back and forth correspondence with Darwin, where Darwin sends Wallace the table of contents of his book, and shares with him what was going to be in it; it's quite beautiful how the two of them sorted out both credit for the discovery and also Wallace basically stepped aside and let Darwin write his work.
73) Aspects of this particular trip are catastrophic, many of the islands are complete flora and fauna deserts with nothing interesting; he has some close escapes from Papuan headhunters and then has a terrible time trying to navigate among the various islands, getting lost, getting swept by currents, etc., over a 40-day miserable period where he and his team couldn't seem to get where they wanted to go. Finally, at age 39, after several years in the far East, Wallace decides to return home.
Chapter 11: First Darwinian
74) It takes Wallace several months to get back home, via Singapore, then Suez, then overland to Alexandria, to France, and of course looking for flora and fauna throughout this return trip as well.
75) There's a cute story here, jumping ahead to many years later: one of Wallace's intellectual descendants, Thomas Barbour, happened to meet Wallace's assistant Ali in 1907. Ali was an old man by this time, and he had taken Wallace's last name as his last name. Quite beautiful.
76) Wallace manages to bring two live birds of paradise back home, they would fetch a lot of money when sold.
77) Wallace starts to engage in debates about evolution, references here to Thomas Henry Huxley who was "Darwin's bulldog."
78) We also see a sort of evolutionary meta-debate about the human mind: whether it can be also a product of natural selection or (as Wallace came to believe) that the human mind was somehow separate, different, and thus perhaps designed.
79) Other evolutionary discussions: on types of mimicry as well as "warning coloration" and how natural selection could bring these to be; Wallace often to help Darwin see the big picture with "their" theory, helping apply the paradigm more effectively than Darwin himself could.
80) Wallace falls in love and unexpectedly proposes to Marion Leslie, she rejects him, he's crushed.
81) Wallace starts to get interested in the paranormal and seances; this becomes something that starts to embarrass Wallace's peers on his behalf: even Darwin was upset with this part of Wallace's intellectual journey, even though while Wallace is doing amazing work in other more "approved" scientific domains.
82) Wallace then marries Annie Mitten, 20 years his junior, they have three children fairly quickly.
Chapter 12: A Tale of Two Wallace's?
83) More discussion of Wallace's various apostasies, in particular how he felt that a complex organ like the human brain couldn't possibly be a product of the same natural selection mechanism as everything else; note here that Darwin considered the human brain and mind part of the same continuum as any other aspect of biology/anatomy.
84) Discussion of Wallace's "growing spiritualism": interestingly, he wasn't religious at all, but he did believe in some sort of separate power or force, this kind of talk was eye-rolling to his peers and harmful to his reputation.
85) He gets involved in a bet with a flat-earther named John Hampden, thinking it would be easy money; it ends up Hampden was a near-psychopath who tied Wallace up with legal problems for several years afterwards.
86) Wallace starts to have some money problems, he takes a job as a test examiner for students, then his oldest son Bertie dies from scarlet fever at age 6.
87) Wallace publishes The Geographical Distribution of Animals in two volumes in May 1876; this was a tremendously well received work; he also published works on modern spiritualism and miracles; he also gets caught up in the trial of fraudulent medium Henry Slade, an American who ended up being convicted, then appealed and overturned on a technicality, and then Slade fled the country; Wallace's reputation was again compromised because he acted as an expert witness for the defense!
88) [An interesting, and sadly familiar, example here of consensus-forcing in scientific thought via economic incentives]: Darwin asks Hooker to help arrange a pension for Wallace to help him economically, these pensions were available to English scientists to support scientific discovery. Hooker shoots down the idea: "Wallace has lost caste terribly." [You can see how a "scientific consensus" can be easily enforced by mechanisms like this: stray too far outside the consensus, a little too far outside "approved" science... and no pension for you!]
Chapter 13: A Socially Engaged Scientist
89) [This chapter covers a lot of Wallace's social movements on land reform. Fascinating to learn that Wallace actually was, shockingly, a big supporter of expropriation and redistribution of land, albeit he wanted to execute it over a period of generations. An example of his utopianist thinking.]
90) He stumbles on to Henry George's remarkable book Progress and Poverty which influences his thinking on economic inequality.
91) Darwin and others were again deeply unsettled with Wallace's dalliances outside of true science, the author offers examples where Darwin wrote letters to Wallace and others indicating his concerns.
92) Darwin dies, 1882.
93) Wallace attempts unsuccessfully to publish his book Land Nationalization addressing his thoughts on land redistribution; his publisher backs out of publishing this hot political potato of a book, he does find another publisher however.
94) Wallace also gets involved in the late 19th century controversy about smallpox vaccination using cowpox injections, Wallace actually looks at the data and sees low efficacy and high harms from these injections, he criticizes the government for mandating these vaccinations (mandates began actually way back in 1853 but became much more stringent in the 1870s). The author here has to make sure that he makes clear for modern readers how the anti-vax movement today is wayyyyy more disinformed, but back then Wallace really looked at the real data and "and had a solid leg to stand on." Interesting obligatory catechism here from the author. He wants his reader to know, for sure, that Wallace would never be anything like a modern antivaxxer today.
95) Note also that there was clear data showing elevated mortality and injuries from the smallpox vax then, as well as robust data showing a lack of efficacy, but the authorities refused to look at the data and refused to change their mandates. Again, striking and unsettling to see this. [I encourage any readers curious to learn more about this rather vile chapter of totalitarian public health history to read A Midwestern Doctor's substack and his extensively researched series on the topic.]
96) I think it's also worth noting that biography of Wallace was published in 2023, just as claims about the validity of COVID vax mandates began collapsing under robust evidence of low (even negative) efficacy and increasing evidence of harms. Yet the author still felt he needed to recite the "anti-anti-vaxxer" catechism cited in note #94 above. Very, very interesting.
97) Wallace plans a huge trip to Australia, with a tour across the continental United States on the way; it will be a lecture tour; the steamboat ride to New York went so poorly, though, that he canceled the Australian part of this trip; Wallace does a successful lecture tour all across the United States, travels all the way to California, where he meets his brother and his family for the first time in many years, the lectures were generally very successful despite Wallace being in his 60s now.
98) In California, Wallace meets with John Muir. Wallace also meets with then-president Grover Cleveland, although it doesn't go all that well: "I had nothing special to say to him, and he had nothing special to say to me, the result being that we were both rather bored, and glad to get it over as soon as we could."
Chapter 14: Onward and Upward
99) Wallace's daughter Violet never married.
100) Wallace wrote a number of extremely important books late in his life, see in particular Darwinism, which was interesting on a few levels: that he automatically gave it a title that eclipsed Wallace's own independent discovery of natural selection; it also included many new elements of Darwin's theory including aspects like mimicry, as well as reinforcement (now called the Wallace Effect) and other factors.
101) See also the mini-debate about hybrids in evolution: one major criticism of natural selection was that as species start to diverge the phenomenon of hybridization would actually make that divergence non-adaptive (meaning: these two near-species might continue to intermix but they would produce weaker offspring or no offspring at all, thus they would be less reproductively fit). This is an interesting way to think about the "adaptativeness" of a divergence. Wallace had many debates, some quite vicious, with biologist George John Romanes on this point.
102) Wallace's view on hybrids was that they would actually reinforce the divergence: Wallace's logic here is that since hybrid offspring impose a fitness cost on the parents, then selection will favor mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of hybridization to begin with. Thus we would have mechanisms of avoidance like shifts in courtship signals, or shifts in species recognition, or visual or pheremonal drivers of avoidance that would alter behavior. This would drive an acceleration of divergence and reinforce it. Hence the "reinforcement" which was later called the Wallace Effect. [I hate to say it but if you think it through this is circular reasoning, nothing more.]
103) Wallace starts getting all kinds of awards, starts getting invited to all kinds of ceremonies late in his life. He declines nearly all of them.
104) Other political activities: he gets involved in women's rights, including women's rights to work and women's suffrage.
105) Wallace is tremendously productive even in the last decade or so of his life, publishing some seven books in the last thirteen years of his life (!) including a two-volume autobiography. Wallace dies after a short illness in 1908, at age 90.
Vocab:
anadromous: (of a fish such as salmon) migrating up rivers from the sea to spawn.
herps: the collective name given to reptiles and amphibians, from the word “herpeton” the Greek word for “crawling things.” Herpetology is the branch of science focusing on reptiles and amphibians.
To Read:
Michael Shermer: In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace
Ross A. Slotten: The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace
Thomas Paine: Age of Reason
Robert Dale Owen: Lecture on Consistency
David Williams: The Rebecca Riots: A study in Agrarian Discontent
Alfred Russel Wallace: The Malay Archipelago (1869)
Alfred Russel Wallace: Darwinism
Henry George: Progress and Poverty