That's right, Alfred Russel Wallace. I've got a two-part interview with the author of a very interesting new book that tells the story over at Evolution News & Views. (UPDATE: An AP story that you can read at MSNBC recalls Wallace's life and plugs Wallace promoter George Beccaloni. The story tries to gloss over the Wallace/proto-intelligent design connection in three paragraphs at the very end, in which Beccaloni's only response to Wallace's major defection from Darwinism is to "groan" and dismiss those seeking to dust off the truth of history as "grasping at straws." This is so typical, unfortunately.)
From my post at ENV:
To judge from previews, the new Darwin biographical movie Creation will emphasize the challenge Darwinian theory posed from the beginning to religious belief. Yet the life of evolution's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, suggests that properly understood, and that's a major proviso, evolution needn't upset faith at all. On the contrary, Wallace reasoned from what he knew about life's history to a belief that an "Overruling Intelligence" guided life's development, much as intelligent design (ID) does today. Science historian Michael A. Flannery calls Wallace's evolutionary thinking a "preamble" to ID.
An opportunity to evaluate this provocative claim is now before us in the form of Flannery's new edition of Wallace's great work, A World of Life (1910), which slims the dense and massive volume down to a manageable size and includes an illuminating introduction by Flannery. His book is Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press).
Wallace famously arrived at his own version of evolutionary theory while Darwin was still sitting on his. When Wallace made contact and shared his thoughts, Darwin panicked and rushed to make his theory public so as not to be scooped. Yet the two men did not formulate their ideas in exactly the same way. As Flannery writes, "Wallace emphasized the 'principle of utility,' namely, that 'no organ or attribute can exist in a natural species unless it is or has been useful to the organisms that possess it.'"
This emphasis led to the increasingly rapid unraveling of Wallace's confidence that natural selection by itself could account for the most interesting features of life: major items like sentience, the complexity of the cell and of the hemoglobin molecule, the origin of life itself, and more discrete features like a bird's wing and feathers (evidence of a "preconceived design," Wallace wrote) and the "unnecessarily elaborate" patterns and coloration of butterfly wings. Vladmir Nabokov -- novelist, lepidopterist, and Darwin doubter -- would make that same observation in the middle 20th century, as I've noted in this space previously.
Adding to all this Wallace's comfort with the idea of common descent, it starts to sound like a mix of Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski.
Wallace, Nabokov, Jefferson -- some pretty unlikely candidates to be ritually dismissed, per Darwinist practice, as ignorant, backwoods Fundamentalist Christians -- the phantom menace that haunts the secular mind.
By the way, in response to my Thomas Jefferson post, it's obviously true that he wrote what he did before Charles Darwin's name became associated with evolutionary theory. But Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had published his Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life in 1794, with its evolutionary theme, and the idea had circulated widely in Europe and America.
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As Rush Limbaugh says, FOLLOW THE MONEY. From Wikipedia:
Klinghoffer has published a series of articles, editorial columns, and letters to the editor in both Jewish and conservative publications seeking to promote opposition to Darwinian views of evolution.[3][4][5] Larry Yudelson has responded, in a piece directed at Klinghoffer, that rabbinical Judaism has accepted evolutionary theory for more than a century, and that Judaism has never rejected science.[6] Yudelson also charges that Klinghoffer IS PAID TO PROMOTE his ideas by his employer, the Discovery Institute, which Yudelson identifies as a Christian think tank that is funded by organizations that seek to promote a "Christian-friendly world view
David, your continued parroting of the Dishonesty Institute's lies is becoming too obvious - give it up.
The Dishonesty Institute and other creationist apologists can also stop trying to continue to fool the public into thinking that their brand of post-1987 US Supreme COurt Aguillard Decision "intelligent design" creationism is the same as Paley's "intelligent design" or Plato's "intelligent design." All this Darwin bashing is getting tiresome.
I think dogmatic religious types have a tendency to project. They worship a book as authoritative despite lots of human learning and experience that would improve it, so they have a hard time imagining that other's don't share this disfunctional epistemology.
It is not necessary as part of studying evolution today to ever read anything Darwin or Wallace ever wrote. Darwin was the founding genius of a branch of science, not a prophet. No one reveres him, or hesitates to contradict him in the particulars he was wrong about.
I know it's basically impossible to convince the faithful of this, but evolution stands on its own merit, on current evidence, on the overwhelming plausibility of its paradigm, and the astonishing power of its predictions. No one outside the choir cares what Wallace thought of intelligent design. It's like criticizing the Theory of Flight by citing an colleague of the Wright Brother's. The very fact that this is considered an argument demonstrates amply the bankrupt nature of this line of "reasoning".
Your name? By the way? Aren't most people who write for magazines paid? Aren't reporters, authors, journalists etc. paid to put down in words what they believe in? So, just be some one writes thoughts that are 'other thinking' than the status quo, does that mean they should not be paid to write it?
The scientists (Darwin the people who are part of the 'branch of science') that you referr to are or were paid to put their thoughts on paper or online (yes, I know Darwin is dead that is why I said are or were)?
If being paid for publishing his thoughts invalidates Klinghoffer, wouldn't that invalidate those who write in support of evolutionism?
By the way, ever read this quote by Richard Lewontin:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence (predetermined agenda) to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. "Billions and Billions of Demons"
Hmmmm... a 'proof' of a science built around a priori adherence ('we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations') ?... I don't know about you... I preferr to discover my world based on objective research... not research that will follow only one path because someone has decided that they will accept nothing but what they are setting out to prove and if they find evidence of something other they will reject it right out ('for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door')...
I find it interesting that you are reluctant to leave your actual name with your comments.
Thanks for all your great comments, Marie!
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