Alfred who?

Alfred Russel Wallace

Today I bring you a short extract from my book Beyond the Frontiers of Human Intelligence. Yep, it's another one in the closet unpublished, but who knows, maybe I'll pull it out again one day! In line with yesterday's post about forgotten geniuses, today I bring forward the contrasting tales of the two men at the forefront of evolutionary theory in the mid 19th century. One would be effectively canonised in the halls of science, the other given a footnote in science history.

Darwin’s name lives on well beyond his death, and Darwinism has reached almost mythical proportions in modern science. Yet few people outside of evolutionary theory know of Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was an instrumental figure in the development of evolutionary theory. The reason for this is perhaps best stated by popular writer Bill Bryson, who relegates Wallace to a single sentence in his book A Brief History of Almost Everything. Bryson writes that Wallace: “…fell from scientific favour by taking up dubious interests such as spiritualism and the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe” (Bryson 2003 p 389). Likewise, science writer John Gribbin in Science: A History finds that Wallace’s interest in vitalism and spiritualism “tainted his scientific reputation” (Gribbin 2003 p 357). 

Darwin developed the theory of natural selection, but Wallace also made a tremendous contribution to evolutionary theory. As early as 1855, Wallace had written in his “Sarawak Law” essay of his belief in an organic evolutionary process which could account for geographical differentiation of species. It is unlikely however, that he appreciated the process of natural selection. Wallace continued to make great contributions to the field, but in 1866 he came out publicly in support of “spiritualism.” His “scientific reputation” never fully recovered after that point, and his contribution to evolutionary theory remains understated. More significantly, the kinds of mystical evolutionary processes within nature which he avowed had became relegated to the status of "superstition", and thus dismissed without consideration.

In an essay originally published in 1885, Wallace wrote:

…man consists essentially of a spiritual nature or mind intimately associated with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed in and by means of a material organism. Thus the whole raison d'être of the material universe--with all its marvellous changes and adaptations, the infinite complexity of matter and of the ethereal forces which pervade and vivify it, the vast wealth of nature in the vegetable and animal kingdoms--is to serve the grand purpose of developing human spirits in human bodies. [i]

This is clearly a mystical/spiritual worldview, where mind animates nature.

Further it is fascinating to note that Wallace got the inspiration for his ideas on evolution during a non-ordinary state of consciousness. He had a series of visions while experiencing a fever. Non-ordinary states of mind are another effective taboo in modern science.

Wallace’s excommunication from mainstream science was effectively because his worldview was influenced by mystical spirituality.  He failed to heed the "psi taboo". That his interests are deemed “dubious” indicates the degree to which such issues have become ridiculed and scorned within modern scientific discourse. So Wallace became the “other man” (Gribbin 2003 p 350) in early evolutionary theory, and a point of potential debate in the development of science and evolution became incontestable. The Western mechanistic hegemony continued unabated.

I have to say I have some sympathy for Wallace, and can relate to how he must have felt. Despite having a PhD and scores of academic publications no university has thus far been willing to hire me, not even for a part-time position.  Meanwhile I see uni positions go to PhDs who have studied relatively uncreative subject matters and done a fraction of the work that I have. As parapsychologist Marilyn Shiltz wrote in one of her papers, there is a genuine price to pay for being a "proponent".

Marcus

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[i] Wallace, A.R.1885, “Are the Phenomena of Spiritualism in Harmony With Science?” Originally published in The Sunday Herald (Boston) of 26 April 1885. http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/index1.htm

THE AGONY OF ROMANES

Today on 22c+ I bring you a fascinating extract from Dr David Loye's new book, Darwin's Second Revolution. David Loye is a former Princeton and UCLA faculty of medicine academic and psychologist. For some years now he has been writing about "Darwin's lost theory of love". This is important and intriguing research which shows that Darwin clearly was not the dry mechanist that he is often purported to be in science text books of the modern era. Instead he a a man who believed that there were overriding agencies in life and nature which were above and beyond natural selection.

The following extract centers on the final years of the life of a man who knew Darwin intimately, George Romanes. The last days of Romanes life are shown to be somewhat tragic, but deeply informative, because he left record of his personal knowledge of Darwin the man. It's definitely worth the read. For more information about Darwin's second Revolution, see www.davidloye.com.

“Why?”

Up from the yellowed pages, over the confusion and bloodshed of a whole century, long forgotten but now of urgent meaning for our time, still rises Romanes’ dying cry.

Rich, widely respected, known throughout the science of the time as Darwin’s disciple and a foremost British psychologist, George Romanes was the founder of the field he called comparative psychology. In keeping with Darwin’s own strong interest, considerable research and thought, Romanes’ goal for this new field was to probe the similarities between the minds of animals and humans.

 George Romanes

Typical among Romanes’ pioneering books were Mental Evolution Among Animals, and then Mental Evolution in Man. Of special interest today, however, is a book that quickly dropped out of science and history. In keeping with the mysterious disappearance of Darwin’s own completion of theory, following publication in 1897, Romanes’ Darwin and After Darwin virtually dropped out of print until picked up and published online in its entirety first by Project Gutenberg in 2008 and then more recently by Google Books. Almost wholly ignored for a century, today it looms as a prophecy of  haunting accuracy.

Why, Romanes wrote, “not only do the Neo-Darwinians strain the teachings of Darwin; they positively reverse those teachings— representing as anti-Darwinian the whole of one side of Darwin’s system ...”

Why, he asked, was one of the new Neo-Darwinians “unjustifiably throwing over his own opinions the authority of Darwin’s name.” More specifically, why “so greatly have some of the Neo-Darwinians misunderstood the teachings of Darwin, that they represent as ‘Darwinian heresy’ any suggestions in the way of factors ‘supplementary to,’ or ‘cooperative with’ natural selection.”

The great man himself, Romanes wrote with difficulty but determination as he lay there dying, “was always ready to entertain ‘additional suggestions’ regarding the causes of organic evolution—several of which, indeed, he himself supplied.” What was being done to Darwin was, for Romanes, like a knife being twisted in the fatal wound.