In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History

by Michael Shermer

Book Overview

"Shermer does an outstanding job, painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of the heretic personality that made Wallace prone to investigate unusual claims, and to commit to and stand by them in the absence of substantial evidence in their favor."--Oren Solomon Harman, American Scientist Virtually unknown today, Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin and an eminent scientist who stood out among his...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195148304
• ISBN13: 9780195148305
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Interesting biography

A nice story of the scientist who came to a similar conclusion about natural history as his elder and more famous colleague, Darwin. I enjoyed reading about Wallace's background (quite different than Darwin's), his world travels, and the ways in which his theories differed from Darwin's. The author uses multivariate analysis on personality traits to attempt to explain some of these differences; I'm not fully convinced of the validity of that (for every statistical rule there are exceptions, and as Mark Twain colorfully observed, "there are lies ..."), but it's an interesting possibility.

Cursing the darkness

Restoring Albert Russell Wallace's reputation is an occasional occupation with historians. Some wish to elevate him over Darwin, usually on the question of "priority" - who first thought up evolution by natural selection? Others portray him as the victim of Britain's class structure - doomed to obscurity because of his humble background. Shermer, although the title implies otherwise, makes an attempt to reconcile Darwin and Wallace, at least over natural selection. From that point, Shermer follows Wallace through a complex life. This readable, if somewhat shallow, biography does Wallace justice, but at the cost of shedding the broader context. In support of his programme, he relies heavily on Frank Sulloway's research on "birth-order" and creativity. This innovative study has had a rocky career, but Shermer finds it useful. For him, the findings have meaning, but their validity remains unclear. Especially when comparing but two subjects.Wallace was a complicated personality, perhaps even more so than Darwin himself. In order to build a coherent image of his subject, Shermer creates a "historical matrix model". This is a three-dimensional visual aid of the elements he's utilising in erecting Wallace's biography. Mixing time, Wallace's various excursions and interests, Shermer ties the whole structure to his subject's views on evolution of humanity and the mind. Whether this method works may depend on your attitude about applying mathematical structures to a man's life. Fortunately for readability, Shermer keeps the application of this device at a low key, saving his analytical summation to the end of the book - where it falls flat.Shermer traces the voyages Wallace was virtually forced to undertake. Financial woes dogged the naturalist throughout his life, although it's hard to see that from Shermer's portrayal. Although Shermer puts Wallace "in Darwin's shadow" he was easily as fluent a correspondent as his more famous counterpart. Yet few of the cited letters contain appeals for employment. Instead, Shermer takes us through Wallace's views on social questions, spiritualism and variations on natural selection. He also shows how Wallace traveled and dealt with a broad spectrum of issues and the people associated with them. Darwin, of course, maintained almost a hermit's life at Down. It's strange that Shermer makes little note of the contrast of the two since much of Darwin's information leading to natural selection came from a global correspondence. Wallace, ever the field researcher, relied more on his own collections for evidence. Although providing us with a highly readable biography of the man, Shermer is virtually silent on the general social scene of Victorian Britain. In pursuing his subject's life, we are given quirky events and some questionable people. There's an excuse for avoiding the tumultuous politics of the era, but Shermer follows Wallace in his admiration for socialist Robert Owen and the role of Mechani

Well-rounded bio.

Interesting read of Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution.This book details Wallace's relationship with Darwin, his own evolutionary theory which 'evolved' toward spirituality, and his place in the science of the Victorian age. It attempts to clear many misconceptions about Wallace and delves heavily into what he actually wrote (he was very prolific).The book is also interesting for Shermer's 'skeptical' take on writing a biography.

Continuing Prelude

Michael Shermer's study of Wallace contributes to the recent rise of interest in this fascinating Victorian scientist by presenting a fair-minded biographical account, while attempting to analyze the various components of Wallace's personality through various objective methods. The results are interesting and well worth digesting, but there are still weaknesses in the treatment that have the effect of leading us down blind alleys. To begin with, Shermer has relatively little to say about Wallace's science, and how it has (and hasn't) affected more recent thought. This is a critical matter, because the most important thing about Wallace is the level of prescience he exhibited in dealing with both scientific and social subjects. A wholly successful biography of Wallace cannot be just a biography (as in the case of the recent, and very nice *written*, one by Peter Raby), it must be an analysis of his *ideas*. This Shermer does not attempt to do, partly because he is not a scientist, and partly because he has the good sense to realize that any such effort that will stand the test of time will not be possible for a good long time yet. Instead, he concentrates on establishing a psychological profile of Wallace, based largely on meta-data approaches developed by Frank Sulloway. The profile Shermer comes up with, that of the "heretic scientist," is interesting in a descriptive sort of way (assuming one believes the approach is well-advised in the case of someone as unusual as Wallace to begin with, and many knowledgeable observers, including ones interviewed by Shermer in the book, don't think it is), but in the end tells us almost nothing about the man's actual accomplishments, or why we need continue delving into them.The danger in Shermer's approach is that it breeds preconception and red-herring...whether Wallace's ideas on dozens of different subjects might have been seriously under-examined in the context of modern times?On the other hand, between Shermer and Raby and the numerous other studies and anthologies of the past few years we now have a solid foundation of *identity* upon which to move ahead. Shermer's work is well written and carefully constructed (though there are some typos and factual errors: for example, Wallace's visit to California included a trip to the *future* site of Stanford University, not its operating one, as Shermer implies), and covers the main biographical points more than adequately. Hopefully, this will be the last of the necessary "continuing preludes" to Wallace studies, and we can now move on to some more revealing insights.

Delicate arrangements

This an important and readable contribution to the biographical lore of Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the selectionist theory of evolution, and later a dissenter on the question of the descent of man, both theoretically and in relation to his interest in Spiritualism. Although I differ considerably in perspective, the book is well worth reading and interesting and useful even to a critic of Darwin.It also contains compelling 'for the defense' material (Darwin's, not Wallace's) on the controversy-debate over the priority question of Wallace and Darwin and the 'delicate arrangement' to use the phrase of Leonard Huxley and the title of A.Brackman's book by that name. Shermer's response to the charges of Brackman (and also Brooks in _Just Before the Origins_) is a needed analytical rejoinder from a Darwinist, whether successful or not remains open. The question of divergence and plagiarism seems partly settled, but still it is all fishy. And is it the real strategy of our Wallace biographer to rescue Darwin? Even if the specific charges made by Brackman and Brooks, and it is an if, were found untrue, the fact remains that something is strange in the whole episode. As noted by Brooks, there is the more general question of Darwin's great delay in publishing his work. If we are confirmed Darwinists, this is one thing. But if we realize that the theory of selectionism, as Wallace finally realized, is not the full picture, we should wonder if Darwin was unconsciously unsure of his own theory, prodded only under duress to 'out with it'. His strategy would be obvious in that case. Does it all matter if Darwin's theory is in fact not a true or complete theory of evolution? Surely, the theory is a strange case of 'why people believe weird things' and call their superstition about natural selection 'science',and why this snowball effect created by Darwin's book over a mechanism of evolution a host of dissenters found obviously wrong, a process continuing to this day in spite of the immense rigidity of social conditioning on the matter. Here we have missed the point of Wallace, altogether. For he realized finally there was a problem. In the final analysis, Darwinists have remained blind in their dogmatic mythology of Darwin's achievement, and we should be more attentive to the fact that the man in the 'shadow of Darwin', Wallace, the co-discoverer, finally shares a dialectical symmetry of dissent in the account of the descent of man. To shunt Wallace aside here is a strategy of the paradigm defenders, and it is Wallace who will be vindicated in the end. For he saw all too clearly that there was something extra required to account for man's evolution, and said so in no uncertain terms. That this must be a spiritual exception is not the issue, and Wallace's naivete does not change his important insight. This has been confused by the issue of Spiritualism, whose silliness does not gainsay the issue that Darwin's theory is as silly in reverse on