I’m a big fan of the cover of James T. Costa’s new biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was born two hundred years ago in Wales. Most biography covers would of course go with a picture of the subject. In this case: yet another bearded Victorian. Wallace certainly sported the ample facial hair of his day, but he was not your typical Victorian. (Or, maybe, in fact, he was…)
Instead, this long-horned beetle on the cover is perfect for the beetle-mad co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection. (Late in life he noted that he and Darwin thought the same way and came to the same conclusions because they both started as beetle collectors….) Although not at all shy about arguing his positions, which got him in plenty of hot water, he was in many ways sacrificially self-effacing when it came to his own achievements. Even his major book about evolution is entitled Darwinism. He wouldn’t have wanted his picture on the cover.
The Wallaces were middling class, fallen on hard times. Alfred trained as a surveyor. In 1848, when he was twenty-five, he and his friend Henry Walter Bates, later of Batesian mimicry fame, went to Brazil as natural history collectors. They were hoping to earn a living sending exotic bird, insect, other animal, and plant specimens home to wealthy collectors and institutions. Demand was strong enough for good collectors to go pro. Costa makes the point that Wallace was already thinking about the transmutation of species, as it was then called, and looking for evidence. He was a lot more than just a skillful hunter and skinner of specimens.
In 1852, as Wallace was sailing back to England, the ship he was aboard caught fire and sank. He spent more than a week in a lifeboat with other survivors. Everything he’d packed aboard was lost. Luckily, this was only the last of his Amazonian collection work; his earlier shipments had already made his name back in London.
From 1854-1862, Wallace was in the Malay Archipelago (Indonesia +). This is where, recovering from yet another fever, his thoughts about transmutation coalesced. He wrote “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” in early 1858 and sent it to Charles Darwin to see what he thought. Darwin had basically come up with the same ideas almost two decades earlier but had been leery of publicizing them. Wallace forced him into action. In typical Darwin fashion, this meant letting others handle the situation. They engineered the reading of both Wallace’s paper and Darwin’s write-up at the same meeting of the Linnean Society of London on July 1st for duel credit. (Darwin didn’t attend; he was at the funeral of his infant son.) Out in the jungle, Wallace had no idea what was happening, but he doesn’t seem to have had any complaints even though priority technically belonged to him because he wrote for publication first. (Back in England, Darwin jump-started On The Origin of Species, published the next year.) Of course, both of them followed in the intellectual footsteps of others, for speculation about transmutation/evolution was very much in the air. Both, for instance, had been very much influenced by Robert Chamber’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), a popular and scandalous book of speculation that riled the theocrats but softened others up, Darwin at least believed, for the acceptance of evolution.
Though a fierce proponent of evolution, Wallace drew the line at the human brain: this, he thought, couldn’t have been produced by natural selection. Darwin, Huxley, et al. despaired of Wallace’s stubbornness on this issue. But it was mostly Wallace’s whole-hog support for spiritualism that disappointed his scientific allies and dimmed his reputation. (Arthur Conan Doyle was another who disregarded the unmasking of such frauds as the table-knocking Fox Sisters.) Wallace was also a committed changer: socialist, the leader of a radical land reform organization, and, after the usual misogyny of young manhood, a strong supporter of women’s rights and suffrage. In 1907, the year he turned 85, he was feistily arguing against the possibility of life on other planets…
All in all, definitely worth reading this book, right there with Janet Browne’s two-volume Darwin bio.
*BTW, I don’t love the material the dust cover is made of: a coated paper that actually attracts dust and feels unpleasantly plastic.