Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life
By Peter Raby
Chatto & Windus, 2001
340 pages, $75 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
In an ironic illustration of the concept of "survival of the fittest", Charles Darwin's name has successfully survived as the originator of the theory of evolution whilst his fellow scientist, Alfred Wallace, who independently arrived at the same theory, has passed into dim obscurity.
In the struggle for successful recognition in the class environment of capitalism, Darwin, the wealthy, socially conservative and well-connected gentleman of leisure was bound to crowd out his less socially endowed contemporary who left school at 14, was a socialist and who lacked the flamboyant display of social status to attract the reputation-makers of the establishment.
Peter Raby's worthy and engaging biography of Wallace plots the colourful life of this field naturalist, his adventures up the Amazon and down amongst the islands of Indonesia, and the revolutionary scientific breakthrough that he shared with Darwin.
From a downwardly mobile middle-class family, Wallace, born in 1823 in Wales, had very few material advantages in life. Wealth, education and social connections were not his lot but a "driving intellectual curiosity" about the natural world and how it worked propelled him through a crash course in scientific theory via the self-help institutions of mechanics' institutes and lending libraries.
Left cold by religion and dedicated to the cooperative socialism of Robert Owen and the radical democracy of Tom Paine, Wallace was also captivated by botany. He scoured the countryside of Wales in his spare time as a poorly paid surveyor, collecting bugs and butterflies before undertaking a four-year expedition to the Amazon River in 1848.
Wallace was struck by the combination of "natural riches and human poverty" in Brazil. He was in field naturalists' heaven, collecting beetles and plants for sale back in England, and surviving encounters with crocodiles, snakes and jaguars, but he was shocked to find estate owners who still owned slaves.
After years of difficult and dangerous fieldwork, Wallace tragically lost most of his specimens in a shipwreck which almost ended his own life as well.
Irrepressible, however, Wallace organised an eight-year expedition to the Malay Archipelago where, in 1858 during a bout of malaria on the Indonesian island of Ternate, he was to have his insight into the mechanism (natural selection) underlying species evolution which Darwin had developed (but not published) 20 years earlier.
Darwin, the orthodox Anglican, had sat on his discovery that all species have evolved from a common ancestor, and specifically homo sapiens from the apes.
"I was anxious", Darwin had written in 1856, "to avoid prejudice" — to avoid upsetting orthodox religious and social ideology.
God, as creator of "Man", and the Church as a wealthy beneficiary and ideological prop of capitalism, were both in line for a dumping if word got around that humans were just the evolutionary outcome of natural processes.
Materialism was a doctrine of the socialists. Marx was to honour Darwin. Lenin was to keep a bust of Darwin on his desk in the Kremlin.
Wallace had none of the political-religious baggage that weighed so heavily on Darwin, so he had no hesitation in committing his theory to paper and sending it off to Darwin. Wallace admired Darwin and collected for him, but he was unaware that Darwin was keeping the lid on scientific dynamite.
The fuse having been lit by Wallace, however, Darwin's hand was now forced. Darwin had temporal priority over the theory but had dallied because of its social implications.
Should he satisfy his desire for priority and go public first ("I certainly should be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrines before me", Darwin had written earlier) or should he do the "decent" thing and share the spotlight with Wallace?
Darwin consulted his friends and, to his credit, agreed to the "delicate arrangement" whereby Darwin's earlier private papers and Wallace's later notes from Indonesia were jointly presented at a meeting of the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858.
Wallace, untainted by vanity and free from jealousy, accepted this arrangement, content to have advanced the cause of science.
Darwin welcomed Wallace as an ally, because Wallace "spoke out boldly" for evolutionary theory when conservative flak started being fired at Darwin.
Wallace entered the hottest spots, for example, presenting the theory and its implications to a meeting of the Anthropological Society, then controlled by white supremacists who supported slavery and the South in the American Civil War and who maintained that white and non-white "races" descended from different stock.
Wallace showed that all humans have a common animal ancestor and that social inequality could not be justified in terms of a scientifically fraudulent racial inequality.
Wallace created a stir, indeed, by arguing that, compared to more "primitive" peoples, European society was morally and socially deficient — "compared with our wondrous progress in physical science and its practical applications, our system of government, of administering justice, of national education, and our whole social and moral organisation, remains in a state of barbarism".
On a lecture tour of America, Wallace's socialist instincts were confirmed by the barbarities of the rising capitalist power — Southern slavery, the supremacy of the dollar, deforestation, poverty, the plight of women forced to work long hours or forced into marriage for economic subsistence, whilst the wealthy indulged in "an endless round of pleasure and luxury, with almost inconceivable wastefulness and extravagance".
Wallace took up the battle against the conservative political abuse of the theory of evolution — the influential creed of "social Darwinism".
Wallace, like Darwin, had initially found the key to the mechanism of evolution in the works of the conservative social philosopher, the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus had argued that disease, war, famine and other checks to population growth were a good thing, especially in the poor and the "savage races", because otherwise they would outstrip the food supply.
Wallace believed that, in the non-human animal world where animals were dominated by their environment, those variations which enabled some to better resist disease, escape predators, or cope with famine ensured that "the best fitted survive" and passed on these adaptive advantages to their offspring.
But Wallace found the way conservatives applied this mechanism of natural selection back to human society to be scientifically bogus and morally repellant.
Applying the concept of "survival of the fittest" to justify the inequalities of class society, capitalists and their politicians lauded competition and opposed state intervention or trade union pressure to regulate industry or to assist the poor as "against a law of nature".
Wallace argued that although humans came from apes, we were a very highly evolved animal with a highly developed culture which enabled people to adapt the natural environment to their needs instead of simply having to adapt to the environment, and that people could fashion their own social environment on conscious principles of equality and cooperation rather than inequality and competition.
Wallace wrote many books and articles on social reform in the last decades of his long life until his death in 1913.
As a left-wing social critic, Wallace slipped out of official favour after his death, and was overshadowed by Darwin, whose great book, The Origin of Species, cemented his pre-eminent scientific profile.
Wallace also did not aid his cause by taking up a number of crank issues such as opposition to vaccination and support for spiritualism, from paranormal table-rapping seances to the seriously heretical view that the human brain was not explicable by material evolution but the result of a "Higher Intelligence" directing human affairs.
These eccentric lapses aside, however, Wallace remained firm on the basics of the theory of evolution, and on socialism, until the end.
Wallace "championed the rights of the underprivileged, the exploited, the deprived, the dispossessed: the rural poor in Wales, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon or Papua New Guinea, the urban workers of London tenements, the victims of colonial oppression and misgovernment and militarism".
As Raby concludes, there is much that is highly admirable, even heroic, "about a man who independently constructs a theory of natural selection, which can be written, in its simplest form, as the accidental survival of the fittest, and then spends the rest of his life proclaiming the ideals of cooperation and altruism as a way to hasten the perfecting of the human".