A Spiritual Radical

Book review on

Natural Selection and Beyond

by Smith, Charles; Beccaloni, George (eds) (2008)

Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2009 published in Network Review No 99

Subtitled ‘The intellectual legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace’ this extensive collection of essays was
launched at the Linnean Society at the end of last year at a conference organised by the Network
and reported elsewhere in this issue. The famous joint presentation of the theory of natural
selection by Darwin and Wallace took place at the Society in July 1858. Wallace lived another 55
years, and was hence able to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his paper in 1908, but his work
has largely been forgotten and ignored in the intervening period - at the time of his death, he was
arguably one of the best-known scientists in the world. I will come back to the reasons for this
neglect below. The volume itself covers the full range of Wallace’s activities, which were very
considerable: his extensive fieldwork, geography, conservation, socialism, land nationalisation,
anti-vaccination campaigns and spiritualism. This made him an anti-establishment figure, a
spiritual radical who stood out independently against many of the trends of his time. In addition,
he did not come from the upper echelons of society, unlike Darwin and many of his scientific
contemporaries.

Beginning with his activities as a naturalist, Andrew Berry explains how both Darwin and
Wallace were ardent beetle-hunters, a fact which predisposed them both to think in terms of
natural selection. Beetles make up about a quarter of the 350,000 named species, which made
JBS Haldane exclaim that the Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. Wallace
himself comments on this similarity with Darwin in saying that ‘there is certainly no group of organisms that so
impresses the collector by the almost infinite number of specific forms, the endless modifications
of structure, shape, colour, and surface markings that distinguished them from each other, and
their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments’. And since beetles cannot move very fast
or far, numerous varieties are specifically adapted to these diverse environments. This interest is
reflected in the number of specimens sent back by Wallace from the Malay Archipelago in the
early 1860s. Staggeringly, they total 125,660, representing over 1,000 species; Of these, 310 are
mammals, 100 reptiles, 8,050 birds, 7,500 shells, 13,100 butterflies, 13,400 diverse insects and
83,200 beetles.

The first section also contains essays on places where Wallace lived (this is a substitute for a
straight biographical introduction), an analysis of Wallace’s annotated copy of the Darwin Wallace
paper on natural selection, which makes fascinating reading, work on species, sexual
reproduction, the colour of animals, biogeography and the ice age. At the end of this section there
is a very interesting contribution from Sandra Knapp which throws light on attitudes to
conservation in the 19th century. Like many of his contemporaries,

Wallace put human beings at the centre, which was reinforced by his convictions on equity and
social justice. One can’t argue that he was a conservationist as such, but he would clearly have
supported sustainable development and indeed deplored the way in which many habitats were
being destroyed wholesale even then. He observed how forest clearance for coffee plantations
resulted in much of the soil being washed away by tropical rains and proposed the creation of
‘reserves’ for the protection of the environment, adding presciently that in some places the
creation of such reserves was ‘absolutely necessary in order to prevent further deterioration of
climate and destruction of the fertility of the soil’. Sociologically, he saw that the struggle for
wealth was accompanied by ‘reckless destruction of the stored-up products of nature, which is
even more deplorable because more irretrievable’. One can only imagine how he would have felt
100 years on.

The second part looks at his work beyond natural science, covering his interests in socialism,
eugenics, land nationalisation and spiritualism. Martin Fichman suggests that there is a
correlation between Wallace’s radicalism and his interest in Swedenborg and spiritualism. Unlike
his contemporaries, Wallace insisted on the importance of final as well as efficient causes, seeing
evolution in terms of a progression from physical to mental to spiritual in what he calls ‘the
progression of the fittest’. Darwin, Huxley and Lyell took a naturalist view, effectively equating the
scientific approach with materialism in an effort to remove spiritual and final causes from the
world picture. Programmes featuring Wallace towards the end of last year took a patronising
attitude to his involvement with spiritualism or what we would also call psychical research. The
usual discourse, repeated here to some extent, involves words such as conversion factors which
were not considered by Wallace himself. Wallace rejected the Anglicanism of his parents,
insisting that he was a thorough and confirmed materialist, to such an extent that he could not at
that time ‘find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other
agencies in the universe than matter and force’. He goes on to observe that facts are stubborn
things and that in the case of his investigations, it was the facts that beat him: ‘they compelled me
to accept them as facts long before I could accept the spiritual explanation of them’ because he
could not find a place in his fabric of thought into which they could be fitted. The same applies to
many scientists today. Wallace went on to fit these facts into a wider understanding of evolution.
His contemporaries, by and large, were unable to do this, as James Moore explains. The
underlying metaphysic proposed by natural selection was to show that life, mind and morality are
the outcome of uniform material processes. Hence miracles and mysteries are finished, and the
new scientific culture will be secular. For Huxley, the term scientific meant investigating natural
phenomena on naturalistic assumptions, in other words the argument between Huxley and
Wallace was about what should count as science. For Wallace, being scientific meant
investigating all alleged phenomena, ‘even those deemed impossible or absurd’. Hence there
was a social struggle about which view of science would prevail. In the event, it was materialism
that triumphed, partly because of a court case involving a medium with whom Wallace had also
worked. Interestingly, Darwin bankrolled the prosecution and the medium was convicted, leaving
Wallace with egg on his face, even if this did not involve his own sittings. Before this storm blew
up, Wallace had allowed a paper by WF Barrett (later Sir William Barrett) on thought transference
to be read at the 1876 meeting of the Anthropology section of the British Association. This caused
an uproar in The Times which seems uncannily similar to the rumpus created in 2006 when the
Network arranged a meeting at the British Association including a paper by Rupert Sheldrake on
telepathy. By 1878, Huxley was able to declare as the new chair of the Anthropology section that
no member should travel outside what he defined as the lines of scientific evidence.

It is fascinating that the politics Spiritualism’ in which he has an amusing and devastating
demolition job on Hume’s essay on miracles. All this explains why Wallace has been ignored by
the materialist establishment, but perhaps his influence will now increase, as people now try to
find ways of integrating a more spiritual perspective into science and transcending the limits of
dogmatic materialism, which can only be sustained by ignoring a great deal of evidence in the
parapsychological literature. This book does indeed celebrate the intellectual legacy of a Victorian
radical, but I would advise readers unfamiliar with his work to begin with Peter Raby’s 2001
biography - Alfred Russel Wallace. A Life - which I reviewed at the time, before moving on to this
more specialised volume.

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