The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace
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The Heretic in Darwin's Court explores the controversial life and scientific contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace-Victorian traveler, spiritualist, and scientist who proposed the theory of natural selection with his noted colleague, Charles Darwin. In this biography, Ross A. Slotten recounts Wallace's twelve years of harrowing travels in the western and eastern tropics, which place him in the pantheon of the greatest explorer-naturalists of the nineteenth century. The remaining fifty years of Wallace's life were just as controversial. In addition to diverging from Darwin on two fundamental issues-sexual selection and the origin of the human mind-Wallace pursued topics that most scientific figures of his day conspicuously avoided, including spiritualism, phrenology, mesmerism, environmentalism, and life on Mars. The Heretic in Darwin's Court casts new light on Wallace's intellectual investigations into the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe itself. His achievements remain some of the most inspired scientific accomplishments in history. Publishers Weekly In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), a self-educated British naturalist collecting specimens in the Malay Archipelago, sent a brief manuscript to Charles Darwin outlining the concept of natural selection and explaining its important role in the creation of new species. Darwin, who had been working on this topic for 20 years but had not yet published anything, feared that Wallace's paper would take precedence over all of his own earlier work. In fact, Darwin's scientific allies arranged for a joint presentation of his ideas alongside Wallace's to the Linnean Society of London while Darwin rushed to complete On the Origin of Species. Physician and amateur historian Slotten does a very good job of contextualizing this critical moment in the history of biology within the life and times of Wallace. He demonstrates that Wallace was a brilliant, complex man and argues persuasively that Wallace never resented Darwin's receiving much more credit for the theory of natural selection than he did. Wallace, perhaps more than Darwin, took on all comers and was an articulate and forceful spokesman for natural selection. But, as Slotten shows, he was very much interested in other causes as well. As a socialist, he was an ardent proponent of social justice, working for land reform (he was himself from the lower classes). He believed in spiritualism, was against smallpox vaccination and, to the chagrin of many scientists, claimed that human intelligence was divinely inspired. Slotten's enjoyable exposition provides insight into the scientific process and the role of class structure in Victorian England. Illus., maps. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
AcknowledgmentsVIIIntroduction1Chapter 1Origins of a Heretic10Chapter 2The Struggle for Existence22Chapter 3A Daring Plan32Chapter 4Travels on the Amazon ...47Chapter 5... And the Rio Negro63Chapter 6Disaster at Sea ... and a Civilized Interlude84Chapter 7The Malay Archipelago105Chapter 8The Mechanism Revealed141Chapter 9Beautiful Dreamer186Chapter 10A Turn Toward the Unknowable225Chapter 11The Olympian Heights and the Beginnings of the Fall249Chapter 12Wallace and The Descent of Man280Chapter 13The Descent of Wallace298Chapter 14The War on Spiritualism326Chapter 15Phoenix from the Ashes352Chapter 16To the Land of Epidemic Delusions379Chapter 17The New Nemesis401Chapter 18Thoroughly Unpopular Causes422Chapter 19Satisfaction, Retrospection, and Work456Chapter 20A National Treasure Celebrated477Genealogy of the Wallace Family494Notes497Biographical Index549Select Bibliography559Index577
