The Alfred Russel Wallace Reader: A Selection of Writings from the Field

Edited by:
  • Jane Camerini
Johns Hopkins University Press: 2002. 248 pp. $42.50, £29.50 (hbk); $18.95, £13 (pbk)
Credit: DAVID NEWTON

Charles Darwin kept many of his opinions, especially on politics and religion, under his hat. As a result, biologists, historians, marxists, keynesians, atheists and fundamentalists have all enjoyed debating ever since what Darwin 'really' meant. This kind of parlour game is no fun with Alfred Russel Wallace. A far more colourful and opinionated Victorian, he promulgated his beliefs to anyone who would listen. Ranging through socialism, geography, exobiology, phylogeny, female suffrage, natural selection, land reform and spiritualism, his sheer breadth of interests creates a challenge for the anthologist: how to group his writings to give the truest impression of his life and work.

This is a healthy challenge. Darwin's silence on contentious issues has obstructed a truly historicized understanding of his natural history, suggesting to some that the theory of evolution may be understood (could, even, have been created) in isolation from its social milieu. Wallace allows no such facile judgements. How should we appreciate the remarkable practical and theoretical achievements of this man, knowing that he promoted table-tapping and utopian community with equal seriousness and fervour?

Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology

Edited by:
  • Andrew Berry
Verso: 2002. 320 pp. £19, $27

Stephen Jay Gould, in his preface to Andrew Berry's Infinite Tropics, appears somewhat unnerved by this paradox, referring uncomfortably to Wallace's “promiscuous... outpourings” of non-scientific writing. Berry responds to the challenge by grouping Wallace's writings thematically, while recognizing that this artificially categorizes his interdisciplinary thought.

Jane Camerini's solution for her slimmer collection is to gather Wallace's writings chronologically. Each section is introduced by a succinct and historically sensitive essay, locating Wallace in his social and political context. She is at pains to show that his spiritualism and socialism were not intellectually anomalous, but were interwoven with his motives and methods for natural history. Where Berry leads the reader from extract to extract, patiently glossing each development in Wallace's thought, Camerini is more inclined to let Wallace's writing speak for itself, allowing the variety of material to suggest its own connections.

One interesting thread thus highlighted is the significance of land in Wallace's life and thought. Time and again it recurs in his writings: his youthful land surveys in Wales; his records of the relationship between the Welsh farming community and the land; the sense of injustice with which he describes the effects of the General Enclosure Act of 1845. In the same period, Wallace records his frustration that a botany book contained no information about plant distribution. Soon after, we see his punctilious mapping of the Amazon; his vital evolutionary connection drawn between phylogeny and distribution; and his socialist writing for the Land Nationalisation Society. Towards the end of his life he was critical of US land use. We also read his children's recollections of their mutual chagrin over their father's disregard for 'No trespassing' signs during family walks, and the consequent confrontations with farmers and landowners. This is an instance of how Wallace's science (in this case, what we now refer to as biogeography) was inextricably embedded in his experiences, and within social and political issues. These cannot be removed to leave the 'bare ideas' behind — they simply would not have existed without them.

Wallace's 1858 paper 'On the tendency of varieties to depart infinitely from the original type' was famously read at the same Linnaean Society meeting as Darwin's hastily penned description of natural selection, in a gentlemanly resolution of the question of priority. Infinite Tropics contains more technical papers than The Alfred Russel Wallace Reader, but this one is rightly central to both collections. A close reading of Wallace's paper reveals two interesting differences in emphasis between it and Darwin's writing of the same era.

First, Wallace stressed competition in relation to the environment (whether organic or inorganic) and between species, rather than the interspecific competition, or “ten thousand wedges”, which forms a major part of Darwin's On The Origin of Species and has retrospectively been defined as its crucial argument. In this respect, Wallace is more responsible than Darwin for the layperson's understanding of evolutionary factors — a struggle against predators rather than against one's fellow-species.

The second difference is that Wallace emphasizes the distinction between domestic and natural varieties. The latter are defined for him by the organism's need for the variant characteristic, its competitive advantage against other varieties, and (in 1858 at least) its strengthening through use. Together these factors produced an irreversible directionality in the genesis of new varieties in nature. Darwin, meanwhile, although he agreed with all these points individually, preferred to stress the similarities between natural and domestic variants in the construction of his argument. Readers were prepared for the idea that nature might select by comparison to the acts of a pigeon breeder, amongst other homely examples. Here, Darwin's version subtly but powerfully altered the reception of his argument, making selection more anthropomorphic and less environmental — less a product of the land, as Wallace would have had it.

The geologist Charles Lyell, the botanist Joseph Hooker and Darwin all failed to pick up on these differences while discussing the presentation of Darwin and Wallace's work as simultaneous discovery. This corroborates the arguments of recent historians (Gillian Beer, Adrian Desmond, James Moore and Robert Young) that Darwin's ideas were by no means as clear-cut as the authors of the 'new synthesis' — and biology textbooks — would have us believe. Wallace's 'problematic' interests and perspectives are revealed by these excellent anthologies (especially Camerini's) to be key to understanding the mid-nineteenth- century debates about evolution in their true cultural complexity.