9/26/2023 0 Comments Alfred russel wallace familySlotten and “An Elusive Victorian,” by Martin Fichman. Since 2000, at least five biographies have been published: “The Forgotten Naturalist,” by John Wilson “Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life,” by Peter Raby “In Darwin’s Shadow,” by Michael Shermer “The Heretic in Darwin’s Court,” by Ross A. Phrenology was one of several commitments-like his campaign against vaccination and his credulous defense of spiritualist mediums-that did not endear him to the scientific establishment, or to posterity.īut there are signs that Wallace’s time has finally come. Wallace cracked one of the greatest scientific mysteries of all time but continued to believe throughout his long life that a stranger had read the riddle of his character by feeling the bumps on his head. Still another reason for Wallace’s obscurity has something to do with that phrenologist. Most unluckily of all, Wallace, having completed his explosive paper on evolution, chose to send it to Darwin himself, who then kicked into high gear and brought out “On the Origin of Species” the following year. Wallace never found steady work and was instead forced to make a living by his pen-risky for a scientist with a restless imagination in a cautious age-supplementing his income by working as a lowly test examiner. When, in his youth, he sailed to the Amazon to seek his scientific fortune, his ship caught fire and sank on the way home, taking with it thousands of specimens, a number of live monkeys, and his dream of an easy life. Wallace grew up poor and was always an outsider in the gentlemen’s club that constituted the scientific world of his day. This utter independence from public opinion is one of several reasons that he has all but vanished from popular consciousness.Īnother is simple bad luck. Unlike Charles Darwin, who spent twenty years keeping a similar conclusion to himself in private dread, Wallace didn’t give a damn what people thought. It was wonder that drew him to nature, and an instinctive disregard for authority that made it easy to challenge an entire civilization’s religious convictions, as he did when, in 1858, he dashed off a paper proposing a theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Wallace was so struck with the accuracy of this report that, sixty years later, he mentioned it in his autobiography. When he was twenty-four years old, Alfred Russel Wallace, the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century, had his head examined by a phrenologist who determined that, while his “organ of wonder” was very big, his “organ of veneration,” representing respect for authority, was noticeably small. Wallace’s turn toward spiritualism hastened an eclipse that had begun when Darwin published “On the Origin of Species.” DAVID HUGHES
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