Silenced Partner
Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life
by Michael A. Flannery
Discovery Institute Press, 2011
(152 pages, $14.95, paperback)
reviewed by Terry Scambray
In April 1869, as Charles Darwin finished reading an article by Alfred Russel Wallace, he scratched an emphatic “No!!!” in the margin. Wallace, as the co-discoverer of evolution along with Darwin, had written that natural selection could not produce something as complex as the human mind; some other cause, namely, an “Overruling Intelligence” must have played a role.
Why was Darwin upset that Wallace saw limits to the power of natural selection? This is the question Michael Flannery answers in his slim but revealing study, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life.
For Flannery, a professor at the University of Alabama, Wallace’s challenge to Darwin is not a mere historical footnote but goes to the heart of the origins debate, with Wallace entering the lists as an early advocate of intelligent design. Flannery’s complementary goal is to undermine the belief that Darwin’s mind was a blank slate when he began doing science, and even less so when he sailed around South America in the Beagle.
Deep significance is commonly attached to the story of Darwin as the dispassionate scientist. He is regularly hailed as a personification of the Enlightenment view of mankind’s development (which many of us have imbibed): that man first understood the world through myth and superstition (religion), that he next ascended to reason (the ancient Greeks), and then finally reached the highest plateau, science.
Flannery, however, avers that this heroic portrait of Darwin is inaccurate, agreeing with the late physicist, historian, and Benedictine priest Stanley Jaki, whom he quotes:
The publication in full of Darwin’s Early Notebooks forces one to conclude that Darwin consciously lied when he claimed that he slowly, unconsciously slipped into agnosticism . . . [for] his Notebooks resounded with militant materialism. The chief target of the Notebooks is man’s mind, the “citadel,” in Darwin’s words, which was to be conquered by his evolutionary theory. (p. 42)
Wallace, by contrast, found that a materialistic account of evolution could not explain the great discontinuities in nature, particularly the chasm separating man from the rest of the animal kingdom. As he explained in his book, The World of Life: “Some of man’s physical characters and many of his mental and moral faculties could not have been produced and developed by the law of natural selection alone, because they are not of survival value in the struggle for existenceî (p. 114, his italics).
Two Theories of Evolution
Then as now, the argument against design and teleology was this: If the world is designed, why is it imperfect and burdened with pain and suffering? Tragically, both Darwin and Wallace suffered the agony of seeing children of theirs die. However, “Darwin simply found suffering a by-product of the vicissitudes of materialistic chance; for Wallace, used to privation and inured to struggle, pain was a necessary and sometimes instructive thread woven into a complex fabric of life” (p. 94).
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