Nature's Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology
280
Nature's Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology
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Overview
A spiritualist, libertarian socialist, women’s rights advocate, and critic of Victorian social convention, Alfred Russel Wallace was in every sense a rebel who challenged the emergent scientific certainties of Victorian England by arguing for a natural world imbued with purpose and spiritual significance. Nature’s Prophet:Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology is a critical reassessment of Wallace’s path to natural theology and counters the dismissive narrative that Wallace’s theistic and sociopolitical positions are not to be taken seriously in the history and philosophy of science.
Author Michael A. Flannery provides a cogent and lucid account of a crucial—and often underappreciated—element of Wallace’s evolutionary worldview. As co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, Wallace willingly took a backseat to the well-bred, better known scientist. Whereas Darwin held fast to his first published scientific explanations for the development of life on earth, Wallace continued to modify his thinking, refining his argument toward a more controversial metaphysical view which placed him within the highly charged intersection of biology and religion.
Despite considerable research into the naturalist’s life and work, Wallace’s own evolution from natural selection to natural theology has been largely unexplored; yet, as Flannery persuasively shows, it is readily demonstrated in his writings from 1843 until his death in 1913. Nature’s Prophet provides a detailed investigation of Wallace’s ideas, showing how, although he independently discovered the mechanism of natural selection, he at the same time came to hold a very different view of evolution from Darwin.
Ultimately, Flannery shows, Wallace’s reconsideration of the argument for design yields a more nuanced version of creative and purposeful theistic evolution and represents one of the most innovative contributions of its kind in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, profoundly influencing a later generation of scientists and intellectuals.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/07/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Wallace on Man
A Match Lit in the Vapor of Controversy
Wallace established himself in the anthropological community with a controversial address delivered before the Anthropological Society of London on March 1, 1864, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection.'" The field at this time was mired in controversy and contention over longstanding arguments between the polygenists (proponents of multiple origins of human races) and monogenists (proponents of a single origin of human races). The question was simple enough: were the races of the human species departures from a single basic type or from several types? Representative polygenists could be found among Southern apologists for the institution of slavery in ethnologically inclined physicians like Josiah Clark Nott (1804–1873) of Mobile, Alabama, and Samuel A. Cartwright (1793–1863) of Natchez, Mississippi. Separate racial origins suggested separate physical and mental characteristics, and the proponents of "states' rights medicine" calculated differences — real or imagined — with meticulous care. Nothing escaped their notice, from cranial size and brains to blood and skin color. Nott and Cartwright confirmed "scientifically" what every Southerner "knew" intuitively: blacks were inherently inferior. Others, like the former slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), argued for monogenism, equating black equally with the unity of all mankind, and the American Lutheran minister and ornithologist Rev. John Bachman (1790–1874) argued the monogenist case on biblical grounds.
Such firmly held commitments were mirrored in England where polygenism found congenial company among an imperialist Britain at the height of empire. The camps were divided between the Ethnological Society of London (ESL), founded in 1843 by Richard King (1811?–1876), Ernst Dieffenbach (1811–1855), James Cowles Prichard (1876–1848), and others. The Anthropological Society of London (ASL) had recently broken away from the ESL on the initiatives of Charles Carter Blake (1840–1897) and James Hunt (1833–1869), both of whom were staunch pro-Southern, pro-slavery apologists. The rhetoric of the ASL was openly racist, but in some measure, it merely reflected the reigning views of British elites at the time. William Gladstone (1809–1898) was openly pro-Confederate, and although Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) was more reticent to take a position, he fully expected Southern victory and declared what most believed when he said, "Race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance." Nevertheless, Hunt's polemical tone against Darwinian evolution irked some of Darwin's strongest supporters. Huxley despised Hunt and considered him unfit for the ASL. Jeremy Vetter has accurately characterized the differences between the two organizations, each having its own social composition and political ideology, "with the upstart ASL being led by marginalized conservatives and the older ESL being increasingly dominated by professionalizing liberals."
It is within this volatile and politically charged atmosphere that Wallace delivered his paper "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man." It was like a match lit in the vapor of controversy. Wallace began by stating his purpose in reconciling the two views "to eliminate the error and retain the truth in each" by upholding the theory of common descent by means of natural selection. He then sought to explain how by slow gradual change, in Lyell's true uniformitarian style, animals changed form. Admitting the powerful action on animals in preserving those with selective advantages and eliminating those less fit in the struggle for life, Wallace pointed out that humans were different from animals in several important respects. Homo sapiens were "social and sympathetic," they preserved and protected the weak and sick and had a division of labor completely absent among any others in the animal kingdom. These attributes, as they slowly accumulated, would have been preserved by natural selection because "such qualities would be for the well-being of man; would guard him against external enemies, against internal dissensions, and against the effects of inclement seasons and impending famine, more surely than could any merely physical modification." Locating the origin of hominids in deep history (perhaps as early as the Eocene or Miocene epochs) as "a single homogeneous race," Wallace ingeniously argued that physical differences of stature, hair, and skin color would have occurred due to differences in climate and geography as they overspread the world "still subject, like the rest of the organic world, to the action of 'natural selection,' which would retain his physical form and constitution in harmony with the surrounding universe." But the issue, as Wallace suggested, was exactly when do we call a man a man. If we measure a human by intellectual capacity, Wallace suggested, it could be argued that there were indeed many original distinct origins of man; if, on the other hand, humans were gauged by their form and structure alone then a common origin for all could be argued. It was a question less of fact than of perspective.
Then Wallace marked out his special position. The unique "social and sympathetic" capacities arising from an advanced mental development set humans apart and freed them from the tyranny of natural selection. The ability to clothe and shelter each other, to act in concert as a cohesive society, to hunt collectively, to domesticate animals, to cultivate the land, not only released humanity from the vicissitudes of nature but also gave them a measure of control over it. Wallace went so far as to exclaim, "we may admit that even those who claim for him a position as an order, a class, or a sub-kingdom by himself, have some reason on their side." Somewhat surprisingly, he reiterated this claim by calling on Richard Owen (1804–1892), Darwin's leading critic and champion creationist: "We can thus understand how it is that, judging from the head and brain, Professor Owen places man in a distinct subclass of mammalia, while, as regards the rest of his body, there is the closest anatomical resemblance to that of the anthropoid apes." Wallace ended on a progressivist utopian note, claiming that the development of man's "higher nature" would "convert this earth ... into as bright a paradise as ever haunted the dreams of seer or poet." Like most Victorians of the period, however, Wallace did not think all were equally equipped to do so, and within the paper lurks the assumption of racial hierarchies. Wallace casts a Eurocentric vision in which "all the great invasions and displacements of races have been from North to South, rather than the reverse; and we have no record of there ever having existed, any more than there exists to-day, a solitary instance of an indigenous intertropical civilisation."
The audience was largely unimpressed. Luke Burke (?–1885) objected to the naturalistic implications of the paper and, alluding to William Paley's watchmaker argument for design, complained that changes within a single animal according to "organic law" was one thing, but to insist on transformations across individuals and species was something else, "you might as well say that a change in one part of a watch would superinduce the change in another. Yes, if the change was made by the watchmaker." Referring to Wallace's claim that the special mental attributes of humans were an effect of natural selection, he complained, "Surely a non-intelligent cause cannot produce an intelligent effect." George Witt (1804–1869) complained that Wallace had wasted the society's time with such metaphysical ramblings. James Hunt (1833–1869), president and cofounder of the society, was even more strident. Hunt charged Wallace with "philosophic speculation" and dismissed the "Darwinian hypothesis" as merely "a question to be proved." He even demanded that Wallace withdraw his claim of natural selection's "inherent power." Wallace refused and held his ground on all points.
More broadly, this new position staked out in the ASL paper received a mixed reception. Although Hooker was quite taken with the essay, calling it "a very great move in advance," he worried that Wallace might be signaling an abandonment of Darwin's cause in allying with Owen. Would it just be a matter of time before he announced common cause with the creationists? Wallace reassured Hooker by stating he didn't completely agree with Owen and then merely reiterated his position, hedging a bit by saying that human beings were a distinct family but part of the order that includes the great apes. Wallace was eager to get Darwin's reaction and wrote him on May 10, "I send you now my little contribution to the theory of the origin of man. I hope you will be able to agree with me. If you are able, I shall be glad to have your criticisms." At first Darwin delayed in replying, then he offered a measured response: "But now for your Man paper, about which I should like to write more than I can. The great leading idea is quite new to me, viz. that during late ages the mind will have been modified more than the body. ... The latter part of the paper I can designate only as grand and most eloquently done. I have shown your paper to two or three persons who have been here, and they have been equally struck with it." Then he added, "I rather differ on the rank under the classificatory point of view which you assign to Man: I do not think any character simply in excess ought ever to be used for the higher division. Ants would not be separated from other hymen-opterous insects, however high the instinct of the one and however low the instincts of the other."
Joel Schwartz believes Wallace's paper was perceived as weakening the case for natural selection and represented to some degree a distancing of himself from Darwin. It is hard to see otherwise. Darwin rejected Wallace's special classification of mankind, and Hooker thought it might warn of hypostasy. But there was no open break, and Wallace defended himself to the apparent satisfaction of both. Lyell, a less ardent Darwin follower, thought highly of Wallace's anthropological effort, only questioning the age of humans dating as ancient as the Miocene epoch. Lyell had already written on this subject and was more sympathetic to Wallace's view of a distinct separation of man and beast. To him, there was nothing in natural selection requiring an assumption of absolute human/animal continuity. The development of a species of such "transcendent genius" without precedence was worthy of notice and suggested that special "breaks" must have occurred in human "psychical" development. Schwartz suggests that perhaps Wallace's paper may have served as a catalyst for Darwin's Descent of Man, a proposition for which there seems to be some circumstantial evidence. In any case, there is little question that he was moving away from Darwin on this key issue of Homo sapiens and evolution.
One enthusiastic endorsement of Wallace's views came from a young, twenty-two-year-old William James (1842–1910). James applauded him for his "important contribution towards the clearing up of the great controversy of the Monogenists and the Polygenists." Extrapolating long passages from the paper, James called the ideas expressed therein "most reasonable, indeed obvious." He then left the reader with a fertile question: "Why may there not now be lying on the surface of things, and only waiting for the eye to see it, some principle as fertile as Natural Selection, or more so, to make up for its insufficiency (if insufficiency there be) in accounting for all organic change?" Darwin's answer was sexual selection, a subsidiary theory that Wallace always found unconvincing, at least in reference to animals. Wallace would look deeper, and in so doing Fichman is right in concluding that "James could clearly read a great deal more into Wallace's 1864 essay than the theoretical resolution of the anthropologists' racial controversy." Wallace and James would meet again and find other common causes.
THE RACIAL DEBATE IN A LARGER CONTEXT
In the end, the monogenist-polygenist controversy was more polemical than scientific. Speculations about when to call an early hominid a "man" were irrelevant, at least to this discussion. Darwin had always been reticent to discuss the applications of his theory to human beings, but his Descent of Man (1871) gave a complete account. For the old monogenist-polygenist debate, Darwin pointed out the futility of determining on the basis of such infinitesimal change from one generation to the next the point at which a "man" arrived on the earth: "But this is a matter of very little importance. So, again, it is almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated, or are ranked as species or sub-species; but the latter term appears the more appropriate. Finally, we may conclude that when the principle of evolution is accepted, as it surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death."
He was right on one level, but not the racism that lurked within it. Writing to the American archaeologist Ephraim Squier (1821–1888) in the summer of 1860, Nott weighed in on Origin, somewhat gleefully declaring, "the man [Darwin] is clearly crazy, but it is a capital dig into the parsons — it stirs up Creation and much good comes out of such thorough discussions." By 1866 Nott could accept Darwin's theory since the theory suggested to him that the races of man "if not distinct species, are at least permanent varieties." In any event, elevating blacks to a position of equality with white society, Nott argued in an open letter from the ASL to Freedmen's Bureau chief O. O. Howard, was sheer folly since such racial interaction would only serve to degrade blacks as they inevitably fell into corruption and vice.
Similarly, the American progressive reformer Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890), who proudly claimed to have read Origin of Species thirteen times, was a vocal opponent of slavery and ardent supporter of Darwin. But, as historian George M. Fredrickson has pointed out, Brace made "the Darwinian case for differentiation of the races by natural selection ... [and] ended up with a view of racial differences which was far from egalitarian in its implications." Fredrickson explains that Brace's pioneering attempt to establish a Darwinist ethnology in opposition to the polygenists had elements of antislavery humanitarianism, but more importantly simply demonstrated that the polygenists' hierarchical assumptions could be justified under a Darwinian framework, perhaps better.
Huxley certainly saw no equality among men. In the wake of Union victory and the final abolition of slavery, Huxley delivered a harsh and rather self-serving verdict in May 1865. "It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some whites," he admitted, "but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And if this be, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with this bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest that is to be carried on by thought and not by bites." Huxley confidently believed that emancipation meant eventual extermination of African Americans by the sheer selective pressures of nature — natural extermination of the less fit. But the war had served a purpose. "The white man may wash his hands of it," he concluded, "and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore."
Even Darwin didn't completely escape the racism of imperial Britain. While it is true that Darwin was always opposed to slavery (as was Wallace), he, like his "bulldog defender," accepted simplistic assumptions about cranial size, mental capacities, and racial characteristics. For example, in Descent of Man the craniometry of Paul Broca (1824–1880) is referenced approvingly. While Darwin was careful to avoid the implication that "the intellect of any two animals or of any two men can be accurately gauged by the cubic contents of their skulls," he seemed to give accumulated aggregate craniometric data some evidentiary weight. "The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties," wrote Darwin, "is supported by the comparison of skulls of savage and civilized races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series." Citing the work of physician-craniologist Joseph Barnard Davis (1801–1881), who had amassed a collection of crania of some 1,700 specimens, Darwin noted that Europeans had a cranial capacity of 92.3, Americans 87.5, Asiatics 87.1, and Australians 81.9 cubic inches.30 Desmond and Moore have argued that Darwin passionately believed in the brotherhood of man, but that didn't necessarily translate into an equality of mankind. Darwin wound up no different from the rest of his generation and even served as the intellectual legitimizer of racism under the guise of "science."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Wallace on Man
Chapter 2. The Spirit of Science
Chapter 3. Darwin’s Heretic
Chapter 4. The Science of Spirit
Chapter 5. Wallace’s Integrated World
Chapter 6. Divided Legacy
Chapter 7. Wallace Today
Epilogue. Wallace and the Historian’s Craft
Appendix. The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace: Three Representative Essays
Notes
Bibliography
Index