First published: Creation 27(4):33–35 September 2005 Browse this issue Subscribe to Creation magazine

Alfred Russel Wallace – ‘co-inventor’ of Darwinism

By Russell Grigg

Alfred Russel Wallace was a 19th-century English explorer, naturalist, social critic, and spiritist. However, he is far more renowned for having formulated a theory of evolution by natural selection ahead of Charles Darwin’s book Origin of Species.

Born at Monmouthshire, UK, in 1823, Wallace was educated at Hertford Grammar School until aged 13, when he had to withdraw due to family financial failure. A voracious reader, books on philosophy and rationalism soon undermined what little religious teaching he had absorbed in his teen years from having been sent to church on Sundays.

many churches refused or were unable to defend the faith

Concerning this church-going, he wrote in his 1905 autobiography: ‘[T]he only effect of this was to deepen my spirit of scepticism, as I found no attempt in any of the clergymen to reason on any of the fundamental questions at the root of the Christian and every other religion. … by the time I came of age [i.e. 21] I … could be best described by the modern term “agnostic”.’¹ So even back then, many churches refused or were unable to defend the faith (1 Peter 3:15; Jude 3) and demolish contrary arguments (2 Corinthians 10:4–5).

At age 21, while temporarily employed at the Collegiate School in Leicester as a teacher of English, arithmetic, surveying and drafting, he saw his first demonstration of mesmerism, and found that he, too, could induce a similar hypnotic trance in some of his students. He referred to this as ‘psychical research’.²

The explorer

In the mid-1840s, Wallace read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which promoted the idea of long ages of Earth history, and Robert Chambers’ anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which argued against biblical creation and promoted transmutation of species.

This inspired in him a desire to collect data to try and find a possible cause of biological evolution, and he decided to do this in South America after reading another book, A Voyage Up the Amazon River, by W.H. Edwards.

From 1848 to 1852 Wallace explored the middle Amazon and Rio Negro regions of South America. He ascended the Rio Negro system further than anyone else had done at that time, and drafted a map which proved accurate enough to become the standard for many years. In 1852, ill health caused him to return to England. The sailing-ship on which he was travelling caught fire and sank, taking with it all the specimens he had collected. After spending 10 days in a leaking lifeboat, he was rescued by a passing cargo-ship, and eventually returned home.

Then it suddenly flashed upon me that ... the fittest would survive. Russel Wallace, 1823–1913

Wallace then decided to continue his natural-history collecting in the Indonesian islands of the Malay Archipelago. Here, from 1854 to 1862, he travelled 225,000 km, visiting every significant island, and collecting 125,660 specimens,³ including more than a thousand which were then new to science. He became the greatest living authority on the region.⁴

The ‘co-inventor’ of evolution by natural selection

In February 1858, at Ternate in the Molluccas, he had the experience for which he would become most famous. Wallace described it thus: ‘I was suffering from a sharp attack of intermittent fever, and every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits had to lie down for several hours … . Then it suddenly flashed upon me that … the fittest would survive. … I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species. … I waited anxiously for the termination of my fit so that I might at once make notes for a paper on the subject. The same evening I did this pretty fully, and on two succeeding evenings wrote it out carefully in order to send it to Darwin’⁵ [with whom he had begun a cordial correspondence two years previously].

The paper was entitled ‘On the Tendency for Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’. Had Wallace sent it to a publisher, perhaps the world might now be talking about ‘Wallace-ism’ rather than Darwin-ism!

When Darwin received it, he was devastated. What he had been thinking about and putting off publishing for virtually all his working life, Wallace had done ‘while in a fit of delirium, in the space of a couple of hours between the onset of chills and their subsidence in a pool of sweat.’³

Darwin’s influential friends Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker immediately arranged for a joint presentation of Wallace’s paper and an abstract of an unpublished essay by Darwin written in 1844, plus an abstract of an 1857 letter from Darwin to the American botanist Asa Gray, to be read at a meeting of the Linnaean Society on 1 July 1858.

This was a very dubious tactic, as Darwin later said that his two contributions ‘had neither been intended for publication, and were badly written’,⁶ and also it was done without Wallace’s knowledge or permission. However, it assured Darwin of a flimsy chronological priority. It also galvanized Darwin into putting together and publishing, in November 1859, his major work, On the Origin of Species. It also led people to think that Wallace was a full supporter of all Darwinian doctrines. In fact, he was not.

The Spiritist

‘Natural Selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.’^7,8 When Darwin read this, he scribbled ‘No’ in the margin, underlined it three times, and added a shower of exclamation marks.

Wallace: A Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends. Darwin to Wallace: I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.

In the same article Wallace added, ‘… we must therefore admit the possibility, that in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws [of variation, multiplication, and survival] for nobler ends.’⁷ Darwin was aghast. He wrote to Wallace, saying that he differed grievously from him,⁹ and in another letter said, ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’¹⁰

Wallace’s ‘Higher Intelligence’ was not the Lord Jesus Christ, the Creator/Saviour God of the Bible,¹¹ but some unidentified and unspecified ‘superior intelligence/power’.¹² Wallace had become involved with spiritism and believed that departed souls could communicate through mediums with people living on Earth. In later life he ardently attended séances, where he believed he received messages from dead relatives.

The grand old man of miscellany

For the rest of his life, Wallace lectured widely and wrote many hundreds of essays, letters, reviews, and monographs on spiritism, scientific matters, social topics such as women’s right to vote (he was pro), vaccination (he was anti), life on Mars (anti), free trade, socialism and economics, as well as many books. He received honourary doctorates from the Universities of Dublin (1882) and Oxford (1889), as well as medals from several scientific societies. In the early 1900s, he was probably Britain’s best-known naturalist.

When Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey on 26 April 1882, Wallace was one of the pall-bearers, along with Darwin’s other anti-Christian friends, Huxley and Hooker. Wallace died in 1913, aged 90, and on 1 November 1915, despite his self-confessed agnosticism and his occultic spiritism (clearly prohibited by God in the Bible) a medallion bearing his name was placed in Westminster Abbey.

Conclusion

Darwin realized that the full materialistic consequence of evolution was atheism,¹³ which was one reason why he had procrastinated over publishing his theory, until beaten to the start by Wallace. Wallace, on the other hand, wanted the comfort of ‘religion’ without accepting that the ‘superior intelligence’ of the universe is the Creator/Lawgiver/Judge and Saviour of the Bible.

Like many today, he wanted the solace of believing in a pleasant spiritual hereafter, without the need for a Saviour from sin, or the obligation to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ in this life or the next.

Darwin and Wallace were both grievously in error, not only scientifically about evolution (for instance, neither they nor anyone since has ever shown how encyclopedic information can arise by any alleged evolutionary mechanism), but also in their different views of life after death. The Bible says, ‘… it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment’ (Hebrews 9:27). And ‘[God] has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead’ (Acts 17:31). The good news is that the Resurrection of Jesus is also the assurance that we can know the forgiveness of our sins, and have life everlasting by believing in Him (John 3:16; 1 Corinthians 15).

References and notes

1. Wallace, A., My Life, Chapman and Hall, London, 1:226–228, 1905. Return to Text
2. Ref. 1, pp. 233–236. Return to Text
3. 310 mammals, 100 reptiles, 8,050 birds, 7,500 land shells, 13,100 butterflies and moths, 83,200 beetles, and 13,400 ‘other insects’. Source: Harman, O.S., The Evolution of a Naturalist, American Scientist online, September–October 2004, www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S146.htm, 18 October 2004. Return to Text
4. He was especially interested in zoogeography, and proposed that a hypothetical boundary, now known as ‘Wallace’s Line’, existed between the islands of Bali and Lombok, and Borneo and islands to the east, which marks the eastern extent of many Asian animals and the western extent of many Australasian ones (see Encyclopaedia Britannica 12:469, 1992). Return to Text
5. Ref. 1, pp. 361–363. Return to Text
6. Barlow, N., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Collins, London, pp. 121–122, 1958. Return to Text
7. Wallace, A., Essay S146: 1869, titled ‘Sir Charles Lyell on Geological Climates and the Origin of Species’. Source: www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S146.htm, 18 January 2005. Return to Text
8. Wallace may here be somewhat misrepresenting Darwin, who did not believe that direct selection was the sole source of evolutionary change. Later evolutionists argued that organs could be ‘pre-adapted’ for a different function to that which is later selected for. See Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C., ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 205(1161):581–598, 1979. Return to Text
9. Letter from Darwin to Wallace, 14 April 1869.Return to Text
10. Letter from Darwin to Wallace, March 1869. As this one was written just before the publication of Wallace’s Quarterly Review article, Darwin apparently had a good idea of what was coming. Return to Text
11. See Grigg, R., Is Jesus Christ the Creator God? Creation 13(3):43–45, 1991. Return to Text
12. Wallace, A., ‘Notes Added to the Second Edition of Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection’ (S716: 1871). Source: www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S716note.htm, 19 October 2004. Return to Text
13. See Wieland, C., Darwin’s real message: have you missed it? Creation 14(4):16–19, 1992. Return to Text