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MEET ONE OF THE GREATEST SKEPTICS OF ALL TIME…Even in his own day, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) drove his friends and admirers mad. Werethere two Wallaces? One was Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection, the inventor of biogeography, anddiscoverer of Wallace’s Line, the invisible boundary between Asian and Australian fauna. The other Wallacewas convinced that the human mind was shaped by an evolutionary boost from “the unseen universe of Spirit.”

This Special Section of Skeptic is part of the Alfred Russel Wallace Centenary Celebration Project,which began in 2013 when Sir David Attenborough lectured on Wallace and the Birds of Paradise at theAmerican Museum of Natural History. As we wind up the three-year Project, settle in for some excellent reads.

It has been a delight to serve as Guest Editor for this Special Section, partnering with my longtimefriends and colleagues Michael Shermer and Pat Linse. We thank the John Templeton Foundation for theirgenerous support of the Wallace Centenary Celebration, and are delighted that so many top scholars and writersenthusiastically contributed their time, talents, and resources. As one of our writers put it, “Anything for Wallace!”

Richard Milner, Guest Editor andDirector, Alfred Russel Wallace Centenary Celebration

Special Section

Alfred Russel Wallace

Illustration by Pete Von Sholly

“I’m afraid the ship’s onfire. Come and see what youthink of it,” the captain said.It was after breakfast, August1852, and the writer recount-ing this awful moment wasAlfred Russel Wallace. Hewas the only passenger onthe 235-tonne brig Helen,aflame, in the middle of theAtlantic. Wallace wanderednumbly down to his cabin,through the suffocatingsmoke and heat, to retrieve asingle tin box with a fewnotebooks and drawingsfrom his travels. He left be-hind three years of journalsand a large folio of drawingsand notes. In the hold of theship were boxes and boxes ofspecies never seen outside the Amazon. He had gath-ered it all by means of long, difficult travel, compli-cated by malaria and other hardships. He was stillrecovering from a bout of fever as the ship burned,and he felt “a kind of apathy about saving anything.”

When the time came, Wallace went over thestern on a rope, tearing up his hands as he sliddown into a boat that was “rising and falling andswaying about with the swell of the ocean.”

Lost at SeaThe extent of his loss did not dawn on him until heand the crew were finally rescued, seven days later,by a ship bound for London from Cuba. Then Wal-lace reflected:

How many times, when almost overcome by the ague[malaria], had I crawled into the forest and been re-

warded by some unknown andbeautiful species! How manyplaces, which no European footbut my own had trodden, wouldhave been recalled to my mem-ory by the rare birds and insectsthey had furnished to my collec-tion! How many weary days andweeks had I passed, upheld onlyby the fond hope of bringinghome many new and beautifulforms from those wild re-gions… And now everythingwas gone and I had not onespecimen to… [illustrate] thewild scenes I had beheld!

It was as if Darwin’s Beaglehad sunk with all his Gala-pagos treasures still un-mined for scientific insights.But “I tried to think as little

as possible about what might have been,” Wallacelater wrote, “and to occupy myself with the stateof things which actually existed.”

Arriving back in England that October, after al-most three months at sea, including a week in anopen lifeboat, Wallace was tattered, unwashed, thin—and jubilant. “Oh glorious day!” he cried, goingashore at Deal in Kent. “Oh beef-steaks and damson-tart, a paradise for hungry sinners.” In London, hisagent Samuel Stevens got him a new suit of clothesand his mother nursed him back to health at the fam-ily home. Stevens had taken the precaution of insur-ing all shipments from his collectors. So Wallace atleast had the £200 insurance payout, small compen-sation for his loss, but enough to live on for now.

Within days of his return, Wallace was already

Alfred Russel Wallace—Species SeekerExtraordinaireBY RICHARD CONNIFF

ARTICLE

Alfred Russel Wallace at age 25

contemplating his next expedition. Over the nextyear, he also busied himself writing four scientificpapers and two books, one a technical treatise onAmazonian palms, the other his A Narrative of Trav-els on the Amazon and Rio Negro, cobbled togetherfrom memory and letters home.

Ruffling FeathersWallace was, as he later put it, “the young man in ahurry.” It showed. At a meeting of the Zoological So-ciety of London in December 1852, just two monthsafter his return, he gave his fellow naturalists a cor-dial earful. To his dismay he had found that the la-bels in museums and in natural history books seldomrecorded more than the vaguest hint of where a spec-imen came from: “Brazil,” “Peru,” even “S. America.”

Conventional naturalists still mostly treatednew species as the result of separate and seeminglyrandom acts of creation by God. But Wallace wasseeing connections and asking what they signified.Why did clusters of similar species all occur withina single small area? Why did species often vary onlyslightly from one island to the next? Wallace feltthat these questions could not be satisfactorily an-swered until the exact geographical limits of aspecies were accurately determined.

This idea that they’d been going about their

business in the wrong way irritated other natural-ists, not least because it came from a field collectorwho earned his wages like a shoemaker on a piece-rate basis.

Asking QuestionsWallace was thinking far more deeply about speciesthan the experts and connoisseurs who bought hisspecimens. Though he was careful not to say so outloud, he was still focused on testing the idea, putforward by an anonymous writer in an 1845 book,Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, that natu-ral laws could drive evolutionary change. The veryidea of evolution (or transmutation, as it wascalled) was still considered radical and heretical bymost scientists. Such a law was already forming inhis mind, and he might well have come to it, and tothe idea of natural selection, far more rapidly ex-cept for the loss of so much valuable evidence.

Wallace cast about for ways to renew his attackon what he later called “the most difficult and…in-teresting problem in the natural history of theearth”—the origin of species. The Malay Archipel-ago, sweeping from Malaysia to Papua New Guinea,seemed to offer “the very finest field for the explor-ing and collecting naturalist” on account of its“wonderful richness” and relatively unexplored

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

volume 20 number 3 2015 WWW.SKEPTIC.COM 9

NewGuinea

ThePhillippines

Malaysia

Sumatra

Borneo

Java

Celebes

The Moluccas

Timor

Bali

Lombok

Halmanera

Wallace's Line(1863-1880)

Wallace's Line (1910)

Weber's Line (1904)Lydekker's Line(1896)

AruIslands

Transition zones are adjusted whenthe focusis placed on differentspeciesof animals.

AUSTRALIAN F

AU

NA

Australia

ASIA

N FAUNA

Wallace was one of the creators of the science of evolutionary biogeography, the study of species dispersal acrossgeographical regions. One of the most striking examples carries the eponymous name Wallace’s Line because he was thefirst to note the distinct break in species across the deep channel between Borneo and the islands to the east, due to thefact that during the last ice age these islands were not connected by land bridges and thus species could not migrate easily.Additional lines have been drawn, including by Wallace, as knowledge of species dispersal improved over the decades.

state. It bridged the gap between the very differentfauna of Asia and Australia, and its 17,500 islandsoffered an almost infinite variety of habitats, of allsizes, and all degrees of isolation. Wallace needed,as he later explained to his bewildered family, to“visit and explore the largest number of islands pos-sible and collect animals from the greatest numberof localities in order to arrive at any definite re-sults” about the geography of species.

By the start of 1855, Wallace was holed up dur-ing the monsoon in a small house at the mouth ofthe Sarawak River, just opposite the blue mass ofSantubong Mountain, on the north coast of Borneo.His books had arrived belatedly by the long routearound Africa, and now he took time to consultthem and brood over his findings about the puz-zling distribution of hummingbirds, toucans, mon-keys and other species in the Amazon. Theresulting article in that September’s Annals andMagazine of Natural History proposed a simple law:“Every species has come into existence coincidentboth in space and time with a pre-existing closelyallied species.” They hadn’t just dropped down fromheaven. Wallace titled his article On the Law WhichHas Regulated the Introduction of New Species. Aknack for compelling titles clearly eluded him. Butthe text struck an unmistakable note of urgency:

Hitherto no attempt has been made to explain thesesingular phenomena, or to show how they havearisen. Why are the genera of Palms and of Orchidsin almost every case confined to one hemisphere?Why are the closely allied species of brown-backed

Trogons all found in the East, and the green-backedin the West? Why are the Macaws and the Cocka-toos similarly restricted? Insects furnish a countlessnumber of analogous examples... and in all, themost closely allied species [are] found in geographi-cal proximity. The question forces itself upon everythinking mind—why are these things so?

Natural WonderWallace avoided the language of evolution. Insteadof saying new species had “evolved” he said “cre-ated”, and instead of connecting them to an “ances-tral species” or “common ancestor” he used theunfamiliar word “antitype.” This vocabulary ob-scured his logical conclusion that allied speciesoccur close together because one species hasevolved from another. Wallace also neglected topropose a mechanism for how this kind of evolu-tion could occur. So even Darwin missed the pointwhen he read the article, scribbling “nothing verynew” and “it seems all creation with him.”

Wallace recorded both his developing theoriesand his field notes in a journal now kept at the Lin-nean Society of London. The cardboard covers,quarter-bound with faded old leather, are fallingapart and many of the pages are loose and have brit-tle, broken edges. But the greatest field collector ofthe nineteenth century still lives between the lines.Capturing an Ornithoptera (now known as Wallace’sgolden birdwing), “the largest, the most perfect,and the most beautiful of butterflies” in the Aru Is-lands near New Guinea, for instance, Wallacerecorded the moment of discovery: “I trembled

10 SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 20 number 3 2015

NewGuinea

Malaysia

Borneo

Java

Celebes

The Moluccas

Aru Islands

TimorBali

Lombok

Halmanea

Ternate

Wallace’s Routes Through the Southern Part of the

MALAY ARCHIPELAGO

Wallace’s travels throughout the Malay Archipelago in the late 1850s and early 1860s are noted on this map in darklines. On the a tiny island called Ternate on the upper right side of the map Wallace wrote his essay on natural selection,which he feverishly (literally and figuratively) wrote down in a letter and sent it to Charles Darwin in March of 1858.



Wallace struggled to solve the species problem of how newspecies arise from existing ones. He puzzled over this butter-fly species Ornithoptera priamus (top) and how it differed fromthe Ornithoptera poseidon (botton) by only the simple spotpattern in their bottom wings (four spots versus three spots).The butterflies were discovered in different locations in theAru Islands (see map) in the Malay Archipelago. If these but-terflies constitute different species merely by the difference inspot patterns, how many other ways may species come toseparate in other regions of the world?

In Wallace’s best selling book The Malay Archipelago, at once a great work of science, travel, and adventure, Wallacerecounts awakening one morning to discover a giant python curled up three feet from his head that had kept him up muchof the night with a rustling noise. The account was illustrated in the book with this engraving of his Malaysian assistantstrying to remove the intruder from his hut. The bearded man holding rifle, at right, is believed to be Wallace himself.

priamus: four spots

poseidon: three spots

with excitement as I saw it come majestically to-ward me and could hardly believe I had really ob-tained it till I had taken it out of my net and gazedupon its gorgeous wings of velvety black and bril-liant green, its golden body and crimson breast. Itwas six and a half inches across its expanded wingsand I have certainly never seen a more gorgeous in-sect.” Wallace thought he had discovered a newspecies and named it Ornithoptera poseidon. “I hadalmost by heart the characters of all the knownspecies,” he wrote, “and I thought I could not be de-ceived in pronouncing this to be a new one.

Worlds ApartThough Wallace thought it had sunk without no-tice, his 1855 paper the Introduction of New Specieshad in fact stirred up interest in important circles.Charles Lyell, Darwin’s friend and mentor, tookWallace seriously enough to open his own series ofnotebooks on the species question.

Lyell had long espoused the Creationist dogmathat all species were adapted from the start to theplaces of their origin and did not change signifi-cantly thereafter. But his anti-evolutionary convic-tions were beginning to waver. His first notebookentry, two days after reading the Wallace article, dis-puted the idea that limb rudiments in a snake-likereptile were evidence for its evolution from aquadruped ancestor. “Arguments against such vari-ability of species are too powerful,” he wrote—andseemed almost to add, “Aren’t they?” Wallace mean-while was jotting notes to himself about how justsuch limb rudiments in whales revealed their de-scent from quadruped mammals, not fish. For thenext few months, at a distance of 12,800 kilometres,Lyell and Wallace harrowed each other’s thoughts.

The two men inhabited distinctly differentworlds, and not just geographically. Lyell had “aLord Chancellor Manner” according to one acquain-tance. He was also “clubbable and cultured; a friendto peers and Prime Ministers,” according to Darwinbiographer Adrian Desmond. “He was a lawyer bytraining and a gentleman by status: he lived on hiscapital and made geology his vocation.” Meanwhile,Wallace was a friend to funny old men in remote vil-lages and, of course, still a glorified manual laborerwho lived by catching birds and insects.

But Lyell’s 1,200-page Principles of Geology wasa continuing influence. With lawyerly precision, itmade the case that natural rather than miraculousforces had caused the raising of seabeds, delving ofcanyons and upthrusting of mountains. Lyellthought geologic changes had occurred gradually,

from forces still operating in the modern world. Hedebunked Georges Cuvier’s romantic vision of anEarth alternating between epochs of catastrophicupheaval (when waves of extinction swept acrossthe planet) and periods of relative calm (when newspecies sprang up). In contrast to this catastrophistworldview, Lyell’s uniformitarians saw a steadier,slower process of change, with the past not all thatdifferent from the present, give or take a few ex-tinctions. But catastrophists and uniformitariansalike believed that new species, and particularlyhuman beings, were the result of “special creations”by God, and also mostly permanent in character.

Lyell had devoted the second volume of his Prin-ciples to refuting the evolutionary thinking of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. But reading and rereadingPrinciples in the field, Wallace thought that the slowpower of natural forces could produce majorchanges, not just in geological phenomena but alsoin living plants and animals, even leading to the ori-gin of new species. It bothered Wallace that Lyell didnot also see it. Lyell’s reliance on “special creations”set Wallace off on a transmutationist tear in his jour-nal: “In a small group of islands not very distantfrom the mainland, like the Galapagos, we find ani-mals and plants different from those of any othercountry but resembling those of the nearest land. Ifthey are special creations why should they resemblethose of the nearest land? Does not that fact point toan origin from that land.” It was just a quick note tohimself, jotted down too fast for proper punctuation.But it wasn’t really a question, anyway.

Making WavesFrom one island to the next, Wallace’s thoughts cameback to Lyell, often in a spirit of contention. The geol-ogist’s talk of the “balance of species” pushed Wallaceto the brink. “This phrase is utterly without mean-ing,” he began. “Some species are very rare and othersvery abundant. Where is the balance?” And then thekey phrase (italics added), “To human apprehensionthis is no balance but a struggle in which one often ex-terminates another.” In his state of high critical dudg-eon, Wallace seemed to miss, for the moment, thefull import of his own words. What he was describingwas natural selection.

For almost 20 years, Darwin had managed toconceal the full extent of his evolutionary thinkingfrom Lyell, the top anti-evolutionary voice of hisgeneration. But during a visit in April 1856 theshocking truth came out—Darwin believed in thealmost infinite possibility of species to vary andevolve, by natural or artificial selection. Lyell was


alarmed. This wasn’t some dubious continental likeLamarck. Darwin was a cautious and highly re-garded naturalist, and, no small thing, a member ofhis own social class. He grew more alarmed laterthat month when Darwin convened a gathering atDown House where he subtly lobbied for the evolu-tionary cause with his guests, the biologist andwriter T. H. Huxley, the botanist Joseph Hooker,and entomologist T. Vernon Wollaston, who hadjust published a book on variation in beetle species.

But Lyell also could not help seeing that Dar-win’s “species-making” mechanism—natural selec-tion—might actually make sense. So despite hisown lingering anti-evolutionary beliefs, he did theright thing as a scholar and friend, urging Darwinto publish at least “some small fragment of yourdata… and so out with the theory and let it takedate—and be cited—and understood.”

If Darwin didn’t strike now, somebody elsewould.

By now, Wallace and Darwin were also corre-sponding. Through his agent, Wallace sent Darwinpoultry specimens from Bali and Lombok. Darwinreplied in May 1857 with encouragement, cau-tiously praising Wallace’s paper on the introductionof species, “I can plainly see that we have thoughtmuch alike and to a certain extent have come tosimilar conclusions…I agree to the truth of almostevery word of your paper.” But he also gentlywarned Wallace off: “This summer will make the20th year (!) since I opened my first notebook onthe species question,” he wrote, adding that itmight take him another two years to go to press.

In Sickness and in HealthEarly in the new year, at the other end of the earth,Wallace’s travels took him to a ramshackle hut witha leaky roof on the coast of a mountainous island hecalled Gilolo, now known as Halmahera, just westof Papua New Guinea. He seems to have passedmuch of the trip prostrate, wrapped in blanketsagainst the hot and cold fits of malaria. Sicknessmade him think, if only by forcing a pause in hisrestless collecting.

As he lay there he mulled over the species ques-tion and, one day, the same book that had inspiredDarwin came to mind—Thomas Malthus’s An Essayon the Principle of Population. “It occurred to me toask the question, why do some die and some live,” helater recalled. Thinking about how the healthiest in-dividuals survive disease, and the strongest orswiftest escape from predators, “it suddenly flashedupon me…in every generation the inferior would in-

evitably be killed off and the superior would re-main—that is, the fittest would survive.”

Over the next three days, literally in a fever, hewrote out the idea. On 9 March, 1858, back on thevolcanic island of Ternate, the commercial centrefor the region, he posted it to Darwin.

It was arguably the greatest career miscalcula-tion in the history of science. Wallace was clearlyflattered to be treated as a colleague by the eminentCharles Darwin. He could perhaps contemplate nogreater success than contributing to the manuscriptDarwin had been working at (and dawdling over)for 20 years. One of Darwin’s recent letters had alsomentioned Lyell’s favorable impression of Wallace’swork, and in his cover letter Wallace asked Darwinto show the new manuscript to Lyell, if he deemedit worthy. But had he simply followed his practicewith his previous articles, sending the manuscriptvia Stevens to the editors of Annals and Magazine ofNatural History, credit for the discovery of naturalselection would have been entirely his, and thename Wallace might now be as famous as Darwin.

Great Minds AlikeWallace may simply have been too distracted by hisspecies seeking to think about the manuscript morestrategically. Upon his return to Ternate, he immedi-ately became caught up in plans for “my four-monthcampaign” in New Guinea. By the end of March Wal-lace was off exploring “those dark forests” of NewGuinea that had given birth “to the most extraordi-nary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabi-tants of the Earth, the birds of paradise.”

One morning a few months later, in mid-June1858, Charles Darwin wandered out of his study toleaf through the mail on the hall table. A fat envelopeawaited his attention, containing Wallace’s 20-pagehandwritten manuscript, On the Tendency of Varietiesto Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. Darwinread it with dawning recognition—and horror. “Thelife of wild animals is a struggle for existence,” Wal-lace wrote, and “the weakest and least perfectly or-ganised must always succumb.” He described some ofthe variations that occur normally within a species,and theorised about how different forms could deter-mine whether animals lived or died: an antelope withshorter or weaker legs would be easier prey for bigcats. A passenger pigeon with less powerful wingswould have a harder time finding enough food, “andin both cases the result must necessarily be a diminu-tion of the population of the modified species.” Onthe other hand, a change in circumstances—adrought, a plague of locusts or the appearance of



some new predator—could make the parent form ofa species extinct and enable some modified offshootto “rapidly increase in numbers and occupy the placeof the extinct species and variety.”

Wallace devoted a lengthy section of his essayto showing how his theory differed from Lamarck-ian evolution—it wasn’t about giraffes gettinglonger necks because they “desired” to reach highervegetation. On the contrary, individual giraffes withsomewhat longer necks simply got favored overtime because they could secure “a fresh range ofpasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of

food were thereby enabled to outlive them.” It was,in a nutshell, natural selection.

Darwin had long recognised that someonemight beat him to the natural selection jackpot and“fancied that I had grand enough soul not to care,” helater wrote. But now he saw how mistaken he hadbeen. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to,will be smashed,” he lamented in a note to Lyell.

Set in HistoryWhat happened next was, for some modern critics, acase of gentlemen friends using their social class andprofessional status to protect one of their own. Lyelland Hooker made a “delicate arrangement” to placeDarwin and Wallace as co-authors of the theory onthe same date; their papers were read together at ameeting of the Linnean Society of London. Wallacedid not feel robbed of priority when he found outabout the joint presentation three months later. Hewas, he later wrote, honored that his “sudden intu-ition” had received credit “on the same level with theprolonged labours of Darwin.” His essay had been“hastily written and immediately sent off.” But Dar-win had worked for years “to present the theory tothe world with such a body of systematized facts andarguments as would almost compel conviction.” In-stead of publishing his essay outright, Wallace hadmerely sent a letter from one naturalist to another, asdid Darwin some years earlier. .

On 5 September 1857, six months before Wal-lace sent his letter, Darwin had outlined his theoryin a letter to American botanist Asa Gray. His word-ing foreshadowed Wallace’s almost point for point:“I cannot doubt that during millions of generationsindividuals of a species will be born with someslight variation profitable to some part of its econ-omy…this variation…will be slowly increased bythe accumulative action of Natural selection; andthe variety thus formed will either coexist with, ormore commonly will exterminate its parent form.”In addition to this letter, Darwin had also showedhis 1844 manuscript on natural selection to Hooker.

The joint presentation of the papers was read ata meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, withneither author present. Lyell and Hooker wrote anintroductory letter in which the “two indefatigablenaturalists,” Darwin and Wallace, started out onequal footing, having “independently and unknownto one another, conceived the same very ingenioustheory.” But they also made it clear that Darwin hadcome first, emphasizing the 1844 manuscript, “thecontents of which we had both of us been privy tofor many years”—a stretch in Lyell’s case, as he had


Wallace in his garden at Broadstone standing next to a fully bloom-ing king’s-spear plant in 1905, the year his two-volume autobiogra-phy My Life was published. Wallace lived another eight years, duringwhich time he remained highly productive writing additional books,scientific papers, and social commentaries on the most controver-sial issues of the day.

only heard about Darwin’s theory for the first time inApril 1856. The letter ended by emphasizing Dar-win’s “years of reflection,” incidentally reducing Wal-lace to “his able correspondent.”

The reading took place in a narrow, stuffy meet-ing room of the Linnean Society in BurlingtonHouse, just off Piccadilly Circus. An audience ofabout 30 men heard an excerpt from Darwin’s 1844manuscript, then an abstract from his letter to AsaGray and finally Wallace’s essay. Both authors hadgood reason for not attending the meeting: Darwinhad buried his infant son that day, and Wallace washunting for birds of paradise in New Guinea, half aworld away. Darwin himself later expressed surpriseat the order of the presentation, having thought that

the Lyell-Hooker letter and his own letter to AsaGray “were to be only an appendix to Wallace’spaper.” He had half-written a letter conceding allpriority to Wallace “and should certainly not havechanged it” except for the maneuvering by Lyell andHooker. “I assure you I feel it and shall not forget it,”he wrote to Hooker, with good reason.

At Burlington House, the Linnean Society meet-ing ended, after a long series of other scientific papers,with no discussion of natural selection. The society’spresident went home muttering about the lack of any“striking discoveries” that year. And so began thegreatest revolution in the history of science.

Note: This essay is adapted from his book The Species Seeker, and anarticle in Evolve magazine, Issue 15, 2013 by permission of the author.



Wallace at 86 beside a pond in the garden of his house Corfe View, Parkstone, Dorset. © GeorgeBeccaloni

Perhaps the most remarkable attribute of thethoroughly remarkable naturalist Alfred Russel Wallacewas his uncanny ability to see patterns in naturewhere others could not—or would not. This camenaturally to Wallace, whether readinglandscapes, geological formations,anatomical structures, or the re-lationships and distributions ofspecies—he was an intuitive ob-server whose ability to read thenatural world ultimately gave hima hand, like Thomas Paine, in tworevolutions: founding modernbiogeography and co-foundingevolutionary biology. But if highachievement is as much perspira-tion as inspiration, Wallace cer-tainly had sweat equity in spades.Penetrating deep into Amazoniaduring his first 4-year expeditionand then criss-crossing the MalayArchipelago over the subsequent 8years Wallace collected thousandsof specimens, but also an astonish-ing range of observations on every-thing he saw: people and places,species and varieties, structure and function, habitand instinct, and geographical distributions— myr-iad strands of evidence he would methodically weaveinto an overarching explanatory framework. It wasan exciting if heretical view of the organic world: thetransmutation and common descent of species, whatwe now call “evolution.” He was sure that a deep andessential relationship linked all species in space andtime, a pattern that pointed to a grand, unending,branching and re-branching cascade of ancestor-de-scendant relationships. Of that much he was con-vinced from the start of his expeditions; what took

him longer to uncover was how this happened. Until recently it has been little appreciated just

how systematic Wallace was in these pursuits; farfrom a mere “specimen-collector” who dabbled

in grand philosophical ideas and got lucky,Wallace was pursuing a research pro-gram that reflected the very latestthinking on a rather intuitive ap-proach to the study of nature. Thisapproach was a highly useful philo-sophical yardstick for taking themeasure of scientific explanations, orvera causae (true causes) in nature, asNewton had put it, and Wallace (likeDarwin) brought it fruitfully to bearon the species question. This yard-stick was recognized with a name:Consilience. For this we can thankWilliam Whewell [pronounced“Hyule”], polymathic Cambridgephilosopher, mathematician, theolo-gian, architect, naturalist—and invet-erate coiner of terms.

What is Consilience?William Whewell (1794–1866) was

the “go-to” wordsmith for fellow academics insearch of a pithy moniker for their ideas and discov-eries, and several of his neologisms are now long-fa-miliar fixtures of our scientific lexicon. Theseinclude the terms “physicist,” “ion,” “cathode,”anode,” “catastrophism,” and “uniformitarianism.”The word “scientist” itself came from Whewell’s pen,a term he proposed as an alternative to the time-honored but imprecise “natural philosopher” in hislandmark 1840 work The Philosophy of the InductiveSciences, a founding treatise on philosophy of sci-ence. “As we cannot use physician for a cultivator of

William Whewell (1794–1866)coined the terms “science,”“physicist,” and “consilience.”

ARTICLE


THE CONSILIENTMR. WALLACEHow He and Darwin Independently Used the SameMethod to Arrive at Natural SelectionBY JAMES T. COSTA

physics,” wrote Whewell, “I have called him aphysicist. We need very much a name to describe acultivator of science in general. I should incline tocall him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as anArtist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is aMathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.” Anotherterm Whewell coined in this seminal treatise,which is much less well-known but still highly use-ful is consilience. The term was intended to expressan intuitive brand of philosophical reasoning—Whewellian “Philosophy of Science 101.” An impor-tant current in the intellectual ferment of thenineteenth century was the attempt to define sci-ence itself—how one knew when one was doing sci-ence, and the proper or most efficacious methodsfor figuring things out scientifically.

It was a time when the belief reigned supremethat from the patient accumulation of careful obser-vations the general truths of nature and her lawswould emerge: the method of Inductive Reasoning.(This method was later superseded by explicit hy-pothesis-testing, the so-called “hypothetico-deduc-tive” method, which also involves induction despiteits name.) Consilience expresses those situationswhere different and apparently unrelated sets of ob-servations combine and reinforce one another, giv-ing the investigator added confidence that he or sheis on the right track. As Whewell put it in his 1840treatise: “…the cases in which inductions fromclasses of facts altogether different have thus jumpedtogether, belong only to the best established theorieswhich the history of science contains…I will takethe liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; andwill term it the Consilience of Inductions.”

The key here is the congruence of “classes offacts altogether different”—and the more the better.Whewell put his finger on an appealing way of deter-mining if one is on the right track with a pet explana-tion or theory: one set of observations might beconsistent with it, but that could be a fluke. Better ifanother and altogether different set of observationsis also consistent, the two reinforcing one another.And better still if a third set points in the same direc-tion, then a fourth, and so on. Whewell argued thatthe more such unrelated sets of observations arebrought under a common explanatory umbrella—the more disparate sets of observations are con-silient—the greater our confidence should be in theveracity of that explanation. It’s akin to the approacha prosecutor takes in making a case for guilt “beyonda reasonable doubt” in a court of law. Making senseof disparate clues, the more independent lines of evi-dence that are consistent with a posited scenario the

more persuasive the case. Applied to the scientificpursuit, Whewell argued that the consilience princi-ple is so powerful that it should be regarded as “a testof the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.”

Indefatigable naturalistsAlfred Russel Wallace agreed. Or certainly wouldhave. The self-taught Wallace read widely and vo-raciously including all manner of scientific andphilosophical works. There is no evidence that heread Whewell’s Philosophy, but he certainly em-braced consilience in his pursuit of the burningquestion of species origins, that “mystery of mys-teries” as John Herschel (the chemist/astronomerwho was Whewell’s friend and Cambridge col-league) had put it.

One day in the fall of 1845, the 22-year-old Wal-lace read a work that was to alter the course of hislife: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Thiswildly speculative “evolutionary” reverie was pub-lished anonymously the previous year and promptlytook England by storm—not to high acclaim, how-ever, but universal condemnation. Well, nearly uni-versal: Wallace, sometime surveyor and schoolteacher, was quite taken with its central thesis thatthe history of organic life was one of constant and in-exorable change. This is an idea we take for grantedtoday, but it was roundly condemned at the time, anidea considered as pernicious as it was erroneous, athreat to the scientific, religious and political estab-lishments of Britain at the time. But Wallace had acontrarian streak, and readily embraced ideas andcauses dismissed by the traditional guardians of re-ceived knowledge. His embrace of the evolutionarymessage of Vestiges is a case in point. Even his friendHenry Walter Bates, a kindred spirit who turned Wal-lace on to the joys of beetle collecting and scientificnatural history, was tentative about endorsing thescandalous tract when queried by Wallace about it.Wallace replied to Bates, chastisingly:

I have rather a more favourable opinion of the “Ves-tiges” than you appear to have—I do not consider itas a hasty generalisation, but rather as an ingenioushypothesis strongly supported by some striking factsand analogies but which remains to be proved bymore facts & the additional light which future re-searchers may throw upon the subject – it at allevents furnishes a subject for every observer of na-ture to turn his attention to; every fact he observesmust make either for or against it, and it thus fur-nishes both an incitement to the collection of facts& an object to which to apply them when collected.



Indeed, “an incitement to the collection of facts” nicely captures Wal-lace’s plan. In April 1848 the two young naturalists landed in Amazonia,pulling off an amazing coup. High on chutzpah but low on funds, formal edu-cation, or social connections, the two nonetheless managed to secure thegood offices of an agent in London and a passage to the New World tropics,bent on paying their way through specimen collection. At the time a brisktrade in natural history curios was flourishing, and their agent was to selltheir specimens to museums and wealthy private collectors. They collected topay for their expeditions, and kept thousands of duplicate specimens for theirown prized “natural history cabinets,” while Wallace made copious writtenobservations and drawings.

It is impossible to say just what insights regarding transmutation mighthave emerged from the many “facts” Wallace collected in Amazonia, as practi-cally all of his notebooks and two years’ worth of specimens went up in flameswhen his homeward-bound ship caught fire at sea. (Along with the ship’screw, he drifted in a lifeboat for ten days, until they were rescued nearBermuda.) His ideas were taking shape, however, and in some of the papersthat Wallace was able to piece together from memory and surviving lettersand papers we see certain evolutionary speculations—such as his suggestionthat the “youngest” or most recently-arisen species of Heliconia butterflies areto be found in the geologically most recently formed parts of the Amazonbasin, advanced in his paper “On the Habits of the Butterflies of the AmazonValley.” This paper was read at the Entomological Society of London in De-cember 1853 and published the following April, the very month that Wallacearrived in Singapore at the start of his second grand adventure—eight years ofexploring what he called the Malay Archipelago (modern-day peninsularMalaysia, Indonesia, and western New Guinea).

The Consilient Mr. WallaceEarly in 1855 Wallace waited out the rainy season at the foot of SantubongMountain in northern Borneo, in a small bungalow that the “White Rajah” ofSarawak, Sir James Brooke, had kindly provided for his use. There he wrote apaper that was to be (later) hailed as a landmark contribution in evolutionarybiology: the “Sarawak Law” paper, showing Wallace at his philosophical bestin cutting through reigning confusion and seeing patterns that eluded others.Here Wallace pointed out a seemingly obvious but profound correspondencebetween species relationships in time (their distribution in the fossil record)and space (their geographical distribution): “Every species has come into exis-tence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species”(which Wallace italicized in the original for emphasis).

In consilience mode, Wallace realized the deeper significance of his“law,” how it “connects together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and hitherto unexplained facts.” He listed them: “The naturalsystem of arrangement of organic beings, their geographical distribution,their geological sequence, the phaenomena of representative and substitutedgroups in all their modifications, and the most singular peculiarities ofanatomical structure, are all explained and illustrated by it.” Wallace may aswell have been describing his research agenda of the next half-dozen yearswith this statement.

Just a few weeks after writing his astonishing essay and posting it home(where it was duly published the following September in the Annals and Maga-zine of Natural History), Wallace began a new notebook, the notebook that recordsthis research agenda like no other contemporary writing by Wallace. This is the


Wallace’s Species Notebook as Field GuideFrom the top down: sketches of mouthparts ofbeetles from Sarawak; a feather from the manu-code Manucodia (Phonygama) viridis of the Aru Is-lands, on a page with anatomical drawings of birds;a drawing of a Papilio euchenor caterpillar from Aru;one of several beetle wings pasted on a series ofpages. This one, with wing veins identified, is froma long-horned beetle (Cerambycidae) collected inSarawak. Pages 448, 290, 462, and 424 in Costa,On the Organic Law of Change (HUP, 2013). Cour-tesy of and © the Linnean Society of London.



Pages from Wallace'sSpecies NotebookClockwise from upperleft: the Species Note-book opens with insectcollecting notes made inSarawak, Borneo, writtenover sketches for an in-sect specimen case;notes for Wallace's "or-ganic law of change"(i.e., evolution), theopening salvo of an ex-tended critique of Lyell'santi-evolutionism; tableof contents of Darwin'swork-in-progress, then titled Natural Selection,sent to Wallace in theweeks following the Lin-nean Society readings ofJuly 1, 1858; one of Wal-lace's many severe cri-tiques of supposed"proofs" of divine designfrom natural history.Pages 30, 98, 430, and90 in Costa, On the Organic Law of Change(HUP, 2013). Courtesy of and © the Linnean Society of London.

Species Notebook, now designated manuscript no. 180in the collection of the Linnean Society of London.The rather run-of-the-mill appearance of thisnotepad, clad in handsome standard-issue marbledboards, belies its revolutionary contents. The firstpage, penned just days after completing the SarawakLaw paper, marks the beginning of a journey as muchintellectual as physical: under the heading “SadongRiver, Borneo” Wallace recorded “On March the 12th.1855 I arrived at the landing place in the Si Munjonriver….”

While the Species Notebook is a working fieldnotebook containing all manner of collectingrecords, personal memoranda, observations, ideas,and schemes, its distinction lies in the fact that italso provides an unparalleled record of Wallace’sthinking on transmutation, and his planned bookon the subject—a book idea that, sadly, Wallace qui-etly abandoned after the events of 1858-1859 andthe publication of On the Origin of Species.

How might Wallace have approached thisspecies book that never was? Fortunately we do nothave to rely on pure speculation: Wallace revealedhis plan in the Species Notebook, and his approach isinstructive. He had long been an admirer of the em-inent geologist Charles Lyell, drawing inspiration asso many did from Lyell’s eloquent and compellingcase for slow, steady, mundane natural forces inex-orably shaping the earth over time, an excitingworldview articulated in his watershed work ThePrinciples of Geology (1830–1833). Despite advocat-ing so effectively for gradual changes in and on theearth by natural processes, however, Lyell wouldnot countenance any parallel process going on inthe organic realm. A deeply religious man, Lyellwas convinced that species transmutation was im-possible and he dedicated considerable space in thePrinciples to an extended argument intended to bethe final, damning, word on the subject. Enter thecontrarian Wallace.

Lyell’s vision of earth history was inspiring toWallace, but thanks to his earlier conversion to thenotion of species transmutation à la Vestiges, Lyellalso became his foil on the species question. Wal-lace went through the Principles systematically andwrote out Lyell’s arguments one by one in theSpecies Notebook, launching into a rebuttal follow-ing each. The subjects were expansive: lessons fromthe fossil record, challenges to claims that nature isbalanced and harmonious, the significance of theunique species assemblages found on remote is-lands, domestication and the supposed limits of in-dividual variation, and more. Wallace also

“out-Lyelled” Lyell by crying foul on his inconsis-tency in advocating gradual change for the earthbut not the flora and fauna upon it:

It would be an extraordinary thing if while the mod-ification of the surface [occurs by] natural causesnow in operation & the extinction of species was thenatural result of the same causes, yet the reproduc-tion & introduction of new species required specialacts of creation, or some process which does notpresent itself in the ordinary course of nature…

And here Wallace tipped his hand about the line ofattack of his planned book: “Introduce this and dis-prove all Lyell’s arguments first at the commence-ment of my last chapter,” he parentheticallyinserted above this passage.

Wallace then got into consilient high gear: theSpecies Notebook shows him at his rhetorical best inanswering objection after objection from Lyell’sbook, and then some: how morphology providesclues to transmutation, and embryology informsclassification; how morphological structure can bede-coupled from adaptive “habits;” case studies ofnew varieties arising; how the fossil record is con-sistent with a branching pattern of lineages throughtime; how geography and earth history, not envi-ronment, are the best predictors of spatial patternsof species relationships; pointed critiques of argu-ments for design in nature, and on and on.

What is even more striking is the fact that thedozens of topics tackled by Wallace in the SpeciesNotebook are remarkably congruent with those in-dependently pursued by Darwin, who, in his ownconsilience mode, had been investigating the samelines of evidence for transmutation. The geologicalrecord, instinct and habit, human variation and pri-mate relationships, geographical distribution, com-parative anatomy, origin of varieties or domesticbreeds…observations, notes, and arguments on allthese and more fill Darwin’s notebook pages too. Heand Wallace recognized what sorts of evidence togather, sometimes even consulting the samesources. In writing up his soon-to-be-landmark“Ternate Essay” and mailing it to Darwin, of all peo-ple, the ensuing revelation that Darwin had longsince gotten there and was writing a book on thesubject led the magnanimous Wallace to defer to hissenior colleague. For his part, Darwin, perhaps feel-ing a bit guilty, swiftly sent Wallace the table of con-tents of his book-in-progress, which at that timewas still entitled Natural Selection. Wallace dulycopied this out into the Species Notebook, and wesee no further reference to his own planned book.


A copy of On the Origin of Species, sent by Dar-win with compliments, wended its way to Wallacein southeast Asia in early 1860. Wallace found itnothing short of masterful, lauding the book’s “vastaccumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argu-ment, and its admirable tone and spirit.” He wouldhave recognized the range of topics from the tableof contents Darwin had sent him earlier, and wouldhave understood readily why Darwin declared thatthe Origin was “one long argument” in the conclud-ing chapter. The book was skillfully structured topitch the argument, opening with domestication asanalogous to natural selection, then moving to acase for the core argument for natural selection,and then, in the remaining half of the book, mar-shaling a consilience argument showing the ex-planatory power of the theory applied to widelydisparate areas. To Darwin the consilience argu-ment was the Origin’s strongest attribute. As hewrote to his friend Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist,shortly after the book came out: “I cannot possiblybelieve that a false theory would explain so manyclasses of facts as I think it certainly does explain.”He underscored the point: “on these grounds I dropmy anchor,” he declared, “and believe that the diffi-culties will slowly disappear.”

One Consilient ArgumentWallace emerged as an eloquent defender of his andDarwin’s joint theory after his return to Britain in1862—through papers, letters, books and lecturesexpounding on the subject in subsequent years Wal-lace rose to fame, and was about as tenacious asHuxley, “Darwin’s bulldog.”Indeed, such was the ac-claim that Wallace met forhis lucid explication of thetheory on his North Ameri-can lecture tour of 1886-1887, hailed by sold-outcrowds as “the First Darwin-ian,” that he was promptedto write at long last his ownsynthesis of the evolution-ary process on his returnhome. Published in 1889under the title Darwinism,this is not the book outlinedin the Species Notebook, butrather Wallace’s own “onelong argument,” laying outthe case for evolution bynatural selection in fine

consilience form with chapters on, among othertopics, the struggle for existence, variation, domes-tication, crossing and hybridism, natural and sexualselection, geographical distribution, and the fossilrecord. (However, the book also advanced Wallace’scontroversial stance on the apparent failure of natu-ral selection to account for human cognitive evolu-tion—about which Darwin had written him, “Idiffer grievously from you & I am very sorry for it. Ican see no necessity for calling in an additional &proximate cause in regard to Man.”)

Ironically, despite Darwin and Wallace employ-ing to good effect William Whewell’s philosophicalyardstick of consilience, the Cambridge philosopherstubbornly rejected their theory. That was perhapsto be expected; Whewell was getting up in years bythe time evolution by natural selection burst uponthe scene, and it might be too much to expect a life-long cleric and theologian to alter his conceptionsnear the end of a life committed to natural theologyand divine design. After all, he was well known asauthor of a book aimed at refuting Vestiges, and an-other propounding evidence of design in nature.

Darwin sent him the Origin, to which Whewellpolitely wrote that his one-time pupil would proba-bly “not be surprized to be told that I cannot, yet atleast, become a convert to your doctrines.” Perhapsfeeling the powerful pull of his own doctrine of con-silience, however, Whewell acknowledged that therewas “so much of thought and of fact in what youhave written that it is not to be contradicted withoutcareful selection of the ground and manner of thedissent…” For now he must content himself, he

concluded, “with thankingyou for your kindness” insending him a copy of theOrigin.

It is not known if Wal-lace corresponded withWhewell on the subject,but no matter; just as Wal-lace “out-Lyelled Lyell” inhis Species Notebook chal-lenge to the eminent geolo-gist, so too might he be saidto have “out-WhewelledWhewell” in his intuitivegrasp of the power of theconsilience argument to es-tablish a new, evolutionaryframework for studying andunderstanding the naturalworld.



Alfred Russel Wallace, ca. age 70.

Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of thetheory of evolution, differed with his senior partnerCharles Darwin over whether natural selectioncould plausibly account for the unique abilities ofthe human brain. He thought human consciousnessand cognition warranted erecting a “white picketfence” around them, setting them off as separateand unique from anything else in nature.

Wallace insisted his notion about the “excep-tionalism” of human cognition was not a denial ofthe mechanism of natural selection, but rather alogical deduction from a strict interpretation ofhow it operated. Since natural selection can onlyfavor what works in the here-and-now, Wallace ar-gued, it cannot anticipate future conditions. Andhe could simply not believe that human abilitiesfor language and mathematics, for instance, couldevolve in an ape or protohuman in advance of itsneeds. If such creatures were well adapted to sur-vive and had sufficient intelligence to gather foodand provide for shelter and defense, why wouldthey develop advanced capabilities for art, mathe-matics, or language, none of which were neces-sary in that ancestral environment? Wallacewrote:

Those facilities which but enable us to transcendtime and space, to realize the wonderful concep-tions of mathematics and philosophy, are evidentlyessential to the perfect development of man as aspiritual being, but are utterly inconceivable as hav-

ing been produced through the action of a lawwhich looks only, and can look only, to the immedi-ate material welfare of the individual or the race….This utilitarian hypothesis, which is the theory ofnatural selection applied to humans, seems inade-quate to account for the developments of our ownmoral sense. If we look to primitive societies of thatday, and if we think about evolutionarily ancient lin-eages that led to modern day humans, they possess amental organ which is beyond their needs.1

Here, I’m going to explore a few studies aboutthe cognitive capabilities of non-humans, with aview to asking: Would Wallace have thought differ-ently about the human mind being fundamentallyset apart from those of other animals if he couldhave taken into account certain facts we have re-cently learned about animal behavior? Would heperhaps have taken a different path to understand-ing how the human mind could have evolved bynatural selection?

Let’s examine some long-presumed “uniquelyhuman” attributes in the light of current researchon animals: altruism, morality and fairness, empa-thy, culture, teaching, and deception.

AltruismNaturalists discussed altruism extensively even be-fore Darwin turned his attention to the question,and I have devoted a good deal of my own researchto the topic in animals. Here I shall provide just one

DemolishingWallace’s “WhitePicket Fence”Around HumanCognitionBY LEE DUGATKIN

ARTICLE


An Experimental Design for Examining Reciprocal Mobbing in Pied Flycatchers

example of an interesting study of altruism andrecord keeping (or “payback”) in non-humans byIndrikis Krams and colleagues at Daugavpils Uni-versity in Latvia. This study has to do with the“mobbing behavior” of the European pied fly-catcher, Ficedula hypoleuca.

When these birds spot something that is poten-tially dangerous (a stuffed owl introduced into theirliving space, for instance), a group of them gatherstogether and “mobs” the dangerous bird with thecourage of numbers, screaming and harassing themuch larger predator to drive it away. When inves-tigators recorded which birds helped which, theyfound that the birds remembered who came to helpthem, and then reciprocated the next time by rush-ing to the assistance of those individuals who aidedthem at a time of crisis.

Krams and colleagues constructed an en-closed habitat that included three nesting boxes.A stuffed owl model was placed near nest 1. Al-most immediately, the closest flycatchers per-ceived that they were in great danger, so theycame out and began to mob. The birds at nest 2also could—and in fact usually did—come outand help by mobbing the owl as well, eventhough it is less threatening to them because itwas placed a bit further away. The birds in nestbox 3 were isolated with barriers, so they couldnot join in the mobbing even if they wanted to.The experimenters wondered, “If some birdswere helped by others when they needed it, butnot at all by those penned in, do they rememberwhich individuals were helpful to them, and dothey reciprocate that act of altruistic solidarity inthe future?”

To examine this, the researchers placed owlsnear both nest 2 and nest 3. Now birds from nest 1,who were helped by those in nest 2, immediatelycame to their aid to help them mob the owl, butthey did not help the birds in nest box 3. In short,the flycatchers kept track of who helped whom, andthen when the opportunity arose to reciprocate,they did; but they ignored those that don’t, adopt-ing a “tit-for-tat-like” strategic behavior, which be-havioral game theorists have discovered throughboth computer modeling and human trials is an ex-cellent strategy.2

We can look deeper down than this kind ofclassic proto-sociality to try to get a handle on suchelusive concepts as morality and fairness—certainlyone of the things that Wallace seems to have had inmind when he posited his “white picket fence”around the human mind.



(A) Three nest boxes were placed on a triangulargrid spacedroughly 50mapart. A stuffed owlmodel—aflycatcher predator—wasplaced nearnestbox 1.

(B) Nest 1 flycatchersmobbed the owl. Nest 2 birds usuallymobbed the owl as well. The birds in nest box 3 were isolatedwith barriers, so they could not join in themobbing.

(D) Now birdsfrom nest 1, who were helped by thosethose in nest 2, immediatelycame to their aid to help them mob theowl, but they did not help thebirds in nest box3. In 30 out of32 trials, pair 1mobbed the owlat nest 2 ratherthan at nest 3.

(C) About 1 hour after the first phase of the experiment, owl models were simul- taneously placed near both nest 2 and nest 3.

Adapted from Wheatcroft and Price (2008).

Morality and FairnessWhenever I show a video clip from some recentwork on justice in capuchin monkeys—a clip thathas received more than 2 million hits on YouTube—the audience reaction is always amazement,laughter, and instant identification with the mon-keys’ plight. The footage is from work on the evalu-ation of the monkeys’ sense of morality and fairnessby primatologists Frans De Waal and Sarah Bros-nan.

Two capuchin monkeys are set up in adjoiningPlexiglas cages in a way that they can easily observeeach other’s behavior. Both have been trained tohand the investigator a little stone token, for whichthey receive a food item in return. If the first mon-key gives her little rock to the investigator and re-ceives a piece of cucumber in return, she promptlyeats it. And if the second monkey gives a rock tothe scientist, she also receives cucumber, eats it,and both are content.

But when the investigators change the rewardsystem all hell breaks loose. The key here is thatwhile capuchins will eat both cucumbers andgrapes, given a choice they much prefer the grapes.In this second condition, when the first capuchinhands over her stone, she receives a sweet, succu-lent grape, which she consumes with delight. Thesecond capuchin, having seen the change in re-wards, presents her token, but instead of receivinga grape she is again rewarded with a cucumber; butnow, given what she saw the first monkey just re-ceived, this injustice appears unacceptable. She im-mediately protests the unequal rewards forperforming the same task by throwing the cucum-ber back at the human investigator and launchingan aggressive screaming tantrum, accompanied byrattling the cage walls and slapping the cage floor.3

Monkeys don’t have language so she cannot com-municate her sense of injustice in words, but hernonverbal language sends a clear message.

EmpathyAnother quality that Wallace thought was unique tohumans was empathy—the ability to identify withthe plight or emotions of a fellow creature. He him-self had that quality in abundance, enabling him tocommunicate easily with professors in London aswell as tribal bird hunters in the tropical rain forestshe explored. Work in animal behavior now suggestsempathy may not be a uniquely human talent.

Peggy Mason and her colleagues placed tworats in an enclosure. One rat was allowed to roamaround where there is plenty of space, but its little


(2) When offered a slice of cucumber in exchange for the stonetoken, both monkeysconsume it with relish.

(4) …she tosses the cucumber sliceback at the experimenter, then slapsthe floor and rattles the cage wallsin what appears to be a protestagainst a perceived injustice.

(3) But when the monkey on the rightgets a grape, which they much preferover cucumber, while the monkey on theleft sees that, but only receives theusual cucumber…

Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay in Classic Experimentsby Primatologists Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan

(1) Two capuchin monkeys are situated in side by side cagessuch that they can see one another and the experimenter. Bothhave been trained to exchange a token stone for a piece of food,either a slice of cucumber or a grape.

cage mate was stuck inside a small clear plasticcanister in the middle of the arena. The canisterhad a door that could only be opened from the out-side. The trapped rat clearly did not like being con-fined, as it was emitting an ultrasonic distress call.The question was whether or not the “free” rat,which had lived with the other (now trapped) ratfor a few weeks before the experiment, would at-tempt to release its trapped partner. And indeed,after a few days of figuring out how the experimen-tal setup works, the free rat does free its confinedcomrade. What’s more, the free rat never opens upthe door to that canister if there was no other ratinside, nor if it contained a toy model. If the rat isput in a slightly modified setup, where one of itslittle comrades is stuck inside a transparent box,and there’s another box that also has a door, butthis one has chocolate in it (which the rodentslove!) they choose to free the trapped individualfirst, even before attempting to open the door tothe chocolate. Then they retrieve the treat andshare it with the rat that they freed.4 I don’t knowif that should be called empathy exactly, but surelyit’s something like it.

CultureNow let’s examine an example of culture (the transmis-sion of learned behavior) in non-humans, again withthis idea that maybe positing a “white picket fence”around human cognition is not really necessary.

You’ve probably seen video clips of chim-panzees in an African forest cracking open nuts bysmashing them with sticks. There have been manystudies of culturally transmitted behaviors amongchimps in many various sites across Africa, but oneof my favorites is the handclasp.

After a bout of aggression, apes often clasphands. It’s a kind of reconciliation (reminiscent ofhumans shaking hands after an argument), andagain we know that they learn this in part by watch-

ing adults when they’re young; but the beautifulthing about the chimpanzee studies is that we cansee the variation in cultural behaviors across sixmajor sites that have been studied across Africa.Handclasps occur in three populations, and some-times they are right next to a population where youdon’t see the behavior. This hodgepodge distribu-tion can be seen for some 35 cultural variants—strongly suggesting they are the result of culturaltransmission in chimps.5



A wild bottle-nosed dolphinin Florida pro-tects its tendersnout while for-aging by wear-ing a livingsponge as afront bumper.The cetaceansoriginated thisunique tool useand teach it totheir young.

After eventually learning how thecanister door works, the free ratwill open the door for its com-rade. The free rat never opensthe canister door if the tube isempty, or if it contains a toymodel.

Empathy: Will a “Free” Rat Attempt to Release its Trapped Partner?

Two rats that have previouslybeen cagemates are placed inan enclosure. One is trappedinside a small clear plastic canister that has a door thatcan only be opened from theoutside

Credit: © Ewa Krzyszczyk

TeachingThere are not as many examples of teaching in thebehavior literature as some of the other advancedcognitive behaviors but a particularly instructiveone is by Janet Mann and her colleagues at George-town University, which incorporates both teachingand tool use in bottlenose dolphins. Dolphins for-age for food in gravelly ocean bottoms or off sharprocks. Often they try to scare up burrowing prey bypounding on the sea floor, which can easily injuretheir sensitive snouts. They search around, oftenfor ten minutes or more, to find a perfectly sizedsponge to cushion their snout, so that when theytry to dislodge burrowing fish they don’t hurtthemselves.

Dolphins seek just the right size sponge, andrepeat the search many times. There’s some evi-dence that young individuals, who often spend fouror five years with their mothers, learn how to dothis kind of sponge-seeking and other foragingtechniques by watching and learning from parentalexamples. And Mann and her colleagues even sug-gest “that all spongers are descendents of one re-cent “Sponging Eve.”6

There are many other observations of teachingsurvival techniques to youngsters in variousspecies. All of this is to say, whether or not some“human-like behavior” may seem to be beyondthese animals’ mental capabilities, we are fre-quently surprised at their abilities to pass onlearned traditions that aid survival.

Deception and Theory of MindNicola Clayton and her group at Cambridge havedone some really fine work on food storing inwestern scrub jays from California. Jays in gen-eral, and scrub jays in particular, often cachethousands of food items that they will eatthroughout the year. They scratch and peck holesin the ground, bury their foodstuffs, and monthslater exhibit an astounding memory to find them.Even more interesting is how they respond whenother jays, which might be spying on their hidingplaces in order to steal their food, are hangingaround.

When a jay is burying food, it behaves very dif-ferently if it spots another jay watching. First of all,it tries to place the food in areas that are hidden,rather than in the most obvious places. If a scrubjay has just cached something and soon after inter-acts with another bird that wasn’t around when itburied the food, there is no problem. But if it inter-acts with a jay that was watching while it buried the

item, then things can get very sticky. The individualmay even attack the other bird that has seen himbury his treasure.

Remarkably, when jays spot another birdwatching them, they will return to the hiding placeafter the observer has left, dig up the morsels, andbury them someplace else. The most incredible as-pect of this behavior is that they only do it if theyhave been thieves themselves. If they stole anotherbird’s food, they seem to be aware that the samething could happen to their own stash. That sug-gests a kind of “theory of mind”—that the jay canput itself into the mind of others and predict whatthey’re going to do, based on its own past experi-ence in similar situations.7

Often when we ask the question in the rightway, we find that many things that we thought—and often hoped—were uniquely human, are in factnot so. Our abilities are simply not as unique orspecial as we have assumed they are. Given his bril-liance, if Wallace had known what we know todayabout animal behavior and cognition, he may neverhave felt the need to build the white picket fencearound us in the first place.


1. Wallace, A. R. 1870. Contributions to the Theory ofNatural Selection: The Limits of Natural Selectionas Applied to Man. Macmillan & Co.

2. Krams, I., T. Krams, K. Igaune, and R. Mand.2008. “Experimental Evidence of Reciprocal Altru-ism in the Pied Flycatcher.” Behavioral Ecology andSociobiology 62:599-605.

3. Brosnan, S. F. and F. B. M. de Waal. 2003. “Mon-keys Reject Unequal Pay.” Nature, 425, 297-299.

4. Bartal, I. B. A., J. Decety, and P. Mason. 2011.“Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.” Sci-ence 334:1427-1430.

5. Whiten, A., J. Goodall, W. McGrew, T. Nishida, V.Reynolds, Y. Sugiyama, C. Tutin, R. Wrangham, andC. Boesch. 1999. “Cultures in Chimpanzees.” Na-ture 399:682-685; Whiten, A. 2005. “The SecondInheritance System of Chimpanzees and Humans.”Nature 437:52-55.

6. Krutzen, M., J. Mann, et al. 2005. “Cultural Trans-mission of Tool Use in Bottlenose Dolphins.” Proc.National Acad Sciences, Vol 102, no. 25, 8939-8943, 2005; Mann, J., B. L. Sargeant, J. J. Wat-son-Capps, Q. A. Gibson, M. R. Heithaus, R. C.Connor, and E. Patterson. 2008. “Why Do DolphinsCarry Sponges?” Plos One 3.

7. Dally J. M., N. J. Emery, and N. S. Clayton N.S.2012. “Food-Caching Western Scrub-jays KeepTrack of Who was Watching When. Science. 312,2006 1662–1665; Clayton, N. S, J. M. Dally, andN. J. Emery. 2006. “Social Cognition by Food-Caching Corvids: The Western Scrub-jay as a Natu-ral Psychologist.” Proceedings of the Royal Societyof London. 362, 507-522.

REFERENCES

In 1876, a young zoolo-gist named Edwin RayLankester—a student ofevolutionary biologistThomas Henry Huxley—launched a one-man cru-sade to unmaskprofessional psychics andnecromancers as frauds.Why would a busy scholartake it upon himself to ex-pose and prosecute a cele-brated medium whoclaimed to communicatewith the dead? First, hesaw “spiritualistic im-posters” as a threat to thestill-struggling young enterprise of science. “Medi-ums” represented themselves as earnest investigatorsinto supernatural phenomena under so-called “con-trolled” conditions. Secondly, Lankester hoped to im-press his mentor Huxley, and through him, even hiselderly hero Charles Darwin himself—both of whomwere implacable foes of professional spiritualists,whom they considered despicable frauds.

At the time, “spirit-mediums” (“channelers” intoday’s parlance), were riding high, bilking gullibleLondoners of their coin by bringing the traditionalJudeo-Christian idea of an “afterlife” into the newlyascendant legitimacy of Science. Their séances,they proclaimed, were actually “experiments andinvestigations” that should be embraced by scien-tists. Lankester’s main target was the celebrated“Dr.” Henry Slade, whose performances in dark-ened rooms called on the spirit of his dead wife Ali-

son to write out answersto spoken questions on ahidden slate. By haulingSlade into court as “acommon rogue,”Lankester would becomethe first scientist to pros-ecute a professional psy-chic for criminalfraud—an action Darwinthought long overdue.

Although he wasdelighted to learn ofLankester’s well-publi-cized attack on Slade,Darwin was distressedto learn that Alfred Rus-

sel Wallace, his friendly rival and co-discoverer ofthe theory of natural selection, was also a target ofLankester’s ridicule. In fact, Wallace was convincedof Slade’s sincerity and honesty, and agreed to bethe star character witness for the defense.

The Slade trial was to become one of thestrangest courtroom cases in Victorian England.Some saw it as a public arena where science couldscore a devastating triumph over superstition. Forothers, it was the declaration of war between profes-sional purveyors of the “paranormal” and the frater-nity of honest stage magicians who peddledself-admitted “illusion” as entertainment. ArthurConan Doyle, the zealous spiritualist whose fictionaldetective, Sherlock Holmes, was logic personified,characterized it as “the persecution, rather than pros-ecution, of Slade.” But what made the trial uniquewas that the two greatest naturalists of the nine-

Wallace, Darwin, andthe SpiritualismScandal of 1876When a Young Scientist Prosecuted a "Psychic" Fraudster,the Co-Founders of Evolutionary Biology Took Opposing SidesBY RICHARD MILNER


Darwin and Wallace, co-discoverers of naturalselection, corresponded often on evolution andnatural history, but when it came to the supernat-ural, Darwin was an adamant skeptic while Wal-lace was a passionate believer.

ARTICLE


Below: Slatewriting as a con-duit to the otherside became afavorite amongspirit mediums inthe 19th century.These slates,from one ofSlade’s séances,were discoveredby the author atthe CambridgeUniversity Manu-script Library in1995. Lankesteraccused Slade ofusing a thumbwriter to fake themessages frombeyond. © Richard Milner.

Right:The celebratedspirit-medium“Dr.” HenrySlade claimed he could talk tothe dead through séances.

teenth century ranged themselves on opposite sides. The “arch-materialist” Dar-win gave aid and comfort to the prosecution, while his old friend Wallace, a sin-cere spiritualist and mystic, was to be the defense’s star witness—making it oneof the more bizarre and dramatic episodes in the history of science.

Wallace was respected as an author, zoologist, botanist, the discoverer ofscores of new species, the first European to study apes in the wild and a pio-neer in the study of the distribution of animals. In addition to his classic vol-umes on zoogeography, natural selection, island life and the MalayArchipelago, he had written Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1896), whichlauded spirit-mediums. And, as President of the Anthropology Section at ameeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he had justallowed a controversial paper on “thought transference” to be read at a meet-ing—touching off a backlash and uproar that caused him to avoid scientificmeetings for the rest of his life.

Like Wallace, many Victorians recoiled from the materialism axiomatic inphysical science; they sought a “wireless telegraph” to an intangible spirit-world. Although Darwin and most other “materialist” scientists kept miraclesout of their theories, a few respected scientists shared Wallace’s more mysticalviews. Among them were the physicist Oliver Lodge and the chemist WilliamCrookes, discoverer of the element thallium.

Spiritualism attracted people with a wide spectrum of interests, but itsmajor focus was on the possibility of communication with the dead. This part ofthe movement began in 1848, with the rise of Margaret and Kate Fox, sistersfrom Hydesville, N.Y. When the teenage girls conversed with “spirits,” mysteri-ous rapping sounds spelled out lengthy messages. (Thirty years later, after gain-ing fame and fortune, one of the sisters admitted that she had always producedthe taps by snapping her big toe inside her shoe.) In England, the U.S. and Eu-rope, over the next 80 years, spiritualism enjoyed tremendous popularity.

In contrast to Darwin, zoologist Thomas H. Huxley treated spiritualistclaims with either disinterest or good humor. Once he was present when aclever, attractive American woman mystified a select company with a fraudu-lent display of psychic powers and thought reading. Although he saw throughher game, Huxley later reported he was so charmed by the lady that he gal-lantly refrained from exposing her. “Fraud is often genius out of place,” hemused, “and I confess that I have never been able to get over a certain sneak-ing admiration for Mrs. X.”

When Wallace sent him a copy of his short book, Miracles and ModernSpiritualism, Huxley responded diplomatically: “It may all be true …but reallyI simply cannot get up any interest in the subject…. If anyone would endowme with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates, Ishould rather decline the privilege. … And if the folk in the spiritual world donot talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I putthem in the same category. … Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and bemade to talk twaddle by a ‘medium” for a guinea a séance.”

Huxley had enough interest, however, to master the art of loudly snap-ping his toes inside his boots, so that he, too, could feign summoning the spir-its. “By dint of patience, perseverance [and] practice,” he explained, the toesnaps “may be repeated very rapidly, and rendered forte or piano at pleasure. Toproduce the best effect, it is advisable to have thin socks and a roomy, hard-soled boot; moreover, it is well to pick out a thin place in the carpet, so as toprofit by the resonance of the floor.”

In the early 1870s Darwin’s cousin and brother-in-law Hensleigh Wedg-wood became a convert. Wedgwood yearned to become a respected savant like



Darwin, their cousin Francis Galton, and Darwin’sgrandfather Erasmus. But a pair of swindlers,Charles Williams and Frank Herne, recognized thathe was the most gullible of the clan. At their urging,Wedgwood begged Darwin to come and see theself-playing accordions, levitating tables, automaticwriting and glowing spirit hands at Williams’sséances. Darwin always managed to be too tired,too busy or too ill to attend. “I am a wretched bigoton the subject,” he once admitted.

In January 1874, however, Darwin sent twoclose members of his circle to attend a séance withWilliams. His friend and lieutenant, Professor ThomasH. Huxley, introduced himself as “Mr. Henry” (hismiddle name). And Darwin’s son George, then 29years old, attended as well. Although bottles movedaround the room and a guitar played by itself, the twoconcluded they had observed nothing but crude trick-ery. George, a budding astronomer, wrote that he wasshocked to find that his uncle Hensleigh’s account ofWilliams’s séances was “so worthless.” Later that yearDarwin wrote to a newspaperman, urging him to ex-pose Williams as “a scoundrel who has imposed on thepublic for so many years.”

The following year Huxley’s young laboratoryassistant, Edwin Ray Lankester, decided to catchWilliams and Herne in fraud—an act he knewwould impress his heroes Darwin and Huxley. Butafter Huxley’s and George’s visit, Herne andWilliams became wary, avoiding anyone connectedto Darwin’s circle. Then, in April 1876, a temptingnew target moved into Lankester’s sights: the cele-brated American psychic, Henry Slade, had come toLondon “to prove the truth of communication withthe dead.” Slade claimed that his wife’s spirit wrotehim chalked messages on student writing slates.

Lankester and his fellow medical student, Hor-atio Donkin, went to Slade’s pretending to be be-lievers. They paid the admission fee, askedquestions of the spirits and received mysteriouslywritten answers. Then, in the darkened room,Lankester suddenly snatched a slate out of Slade’shands, found the written answer to a question hehad not yet asked, and proclaimed him “a scoundreland an impostor.”

The next day Slade and his partner, GeoffreySimmonds, were in the hands of the police, chargedwith violating the Vagrancy Act, an old law in-tended to protect the public from traveling palmreaders and sleight-of-hand artists.

Throughout the fall of 1876, all London wasabuzz over the Slade trial. The little courtroom waspacked with Slade’s supporters and detractors and

30 journalists, who spilled out into the street. TheTimes of London carried trial transcripts day afterday. To Slade all publicity was good.

Darwin, whose beloved 10-year-old daughterAnnie had died in 1851, had nothing but contempt forthe “clever rogues” who preyed on grieving relatives.Yet he avoided saying so publicly—On the Origin ofSpecies had stirred up enough controversies for a life-time. Privately, he wrote Lankester an effusive letterof congratulations. Jailing Slade was a public benefit,he said, and insisted on contributing £10 to the costsof prosecution. (Under English law, the complainantpaid court costs; £10 was a substantial sum, compara-ble to a month’s wages for a workingman.)

As the trial got under way, the prosecutor an-nounced that famous stage magician John NevilMaskelyne was prepared to reproduce all the “al-leged phenomena” that were observed at theséance. The judge, in turn, warned that performingillusions of “magic slate tricks” in court wouldprove nothing; the question was whether Lankesterand Donkin had actually caught the defendants fak-ing the alleged spirit writing.

Both scientists turned out to be terrible wit-nesses; their observational skills, developed inanatomy and physiology labs, were useless in de-tecting fraud by professional cheats. As Huxley laternoted, “In these investigations, the qualities of thedetective are far more useful than those of thephilosopher…. A man may be an excellent natural-ist or chemist; and yet make a very poor detective.”

Indeed, Lankester and Donkin apparentlycould not agree on anything much beyond theircharge that Slade was an impostor. Did the mediumuse a thimble device for writing, or did he hold apencil stub in his fingers even while his thumb wasvisible on the tabletop? Did he switch the blankslate for one that was previously written on? Wasthe table of ordinary construction, or did it havesliding bars and trick panels? The two could not es-tablish when or how the writing had been done.

Maskelyne’s courtroom conjuring, in contrast,was perfect. In answer to a question about instantwriting—and before the judge could stop him—hebegan scrubbing a blank slate with a wet spongeuntil writing appeared: “THE SPIRITS AREHERE!” Then he wiped the slate clean and ran thesponge over it again. The message reappeared, andSlade’s partner, Simmonds, was fascinated. “Mar-velous!” he exclaimed. “May I examine the slate?”Maskelyne shot back, “Oh, you know all about it.”

Whenever the prosecutor could, he had Maske-lyne slip in another slate trick until the judge finally

Zoologist Edwin RayLancaster who under-took a crusade to ex-pose the psychics andspirit-mediums of hisday, found support fromboth Charles Darwinand his old professorThomas Henry Huxley.

Hensleigh Wedgwood,Darwin’s cousin, wasconned into believingthat psychic powerwas real and urgedDarwin to view slatewriting and levitatingtables for himself.


barred them. The prosecutor then offered Slade twosmall slates joined by hinges and a hasp lock. Whynot make writing appear inside the locked slates andconvince the world? Slade replied he had been sopestered by such tests that Allie, his wife’s spirit, hadvowed never to write on a locked slate.

A chemist named Alexander Duffield was oneof many witnesses for the prosecution. He saidSlade had convinced him “that there could be es-tablished a sort of post office in connection withthe ‘other place.’” But now he had his doubts. An-other witness testified that a few years earlier, inthe U.S., someone had similarly snatched a slatefrom Slade in mid-séance and exposed him infraud. But that did not deter the steady stream ofsuckers who flocked to Slade’s parlor.

The high point of the trial was Wallace’s ap-pearance for the defense. His integrity and candorwere well known to all. When called, he said thathe had witnessed the alleged phenomena but re-fused to speculate on whether the writings werecaused by spirits. He considered Slade to be anhonest gentleman, “as incapable of an imposture…as any earnest inquirer after truth in the depart-ment of Natural Science.”

In his summation, Slade’s lawyer argued thatthere was no real evidence against his client. No onehad proved the table was rigged, and Maskelyne’sdemonstrations of how the trick could have beendone were irrelevant. The writing’s appearance be-fore the corresponding question was asked provednothing about its origin, and Lankester and Donkincould not agree on exactly what they had seen dur-ing the séance. Moreover, such an eminent scientistas Wallace should be considered at least as credibleas young Lankester. The barrister concluded by in-voking Galileo, remarking that innovative scientistswho challenge the beliefs of their time are alwaysvilified. His irony was not lost on the evolutionists.

But nothing could save Slade. The judge saidthat he understood that spiritualism was “a kind ofnew religion” and did not wish to offend sincerebelievers. Still, the question before the court waswhether Slade and Simmonds had fraudulentlyrepresented their own actions as paranormal phe-nomena. Concluding that he must decide “accord-ing to the well-known course of nature,” the judgesentenced the defendant to three months’ hardlabor in the House of Corrections.

Slade never served his sentence. On appeal,another judge ruled that the Vagrancy Act, whichprohibited palmistry, was not applicable to claimsof spirit writing. Slade and his partner fled England

The Slade trialgarnered somuch publicitythat it was portrayed inthis spoof cartoon char-acterizingSlade as afarce.

Edwin Ray Lankester testifies on behalf of the prosecution in the celebrated1876 trial of Henry Slade, the self-proclaimed spirit-medium who claimed tocontact the dead through “automatic writing” on slates. Lankester holds upone of Slade’s slates, while onlookers strain to glimpse the mysterious writ-ing on them. The “spirit-medium” Slade and his bearded accomplice areseated at extreme left.



for Germany. Within a short time, Slade had con-vinced his landlord, a local conjurer, the chief ofpolice and several prominent German scientists(including the physicist Johann Zollner of the Uni-versity of Leipzig) that he was in contact with spir-its and various paranormal forces. When his actwore thin, he took to the road again. Eventually hewound up an alcoholic in a run-down New Yorkboardinghouse, easy prey for tabloid editors whosent cub reporters to expose him one more time.

The controversy took a toll on participants otherthan Slade. In 1879 Darwin tried to drum up supportfor a government pension in recognition of Wallace’sbrilliant contributions to natural history. Wallace, heknew, had to earn his meager living in old age bygrading examination papers. But when Darwin wroteto his friend Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens,the botanist refused to help. “Wallace has lost casteterribly,” he replied nastily, “not only for his adhesionto Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliber-ately and against the whole voice of the committee”allowed the paper on mental telepathy at the scien-tific meetings. In addition, he thought the govern-ment “should in fairness be informed that thecandidate is a public and leading Spiritualist!”

Undaunted, Darwin replied that Wallace’s be-

liefs were “not worse than the prevailing supersti-tions of the country,” meaning organized religion.Darwin and Huxley twisted a few more arms, thenDarwin personally wrote to Prime MinisterWilliam Gladstone, who passed the petition on toQueen Victoria. In the end, Wallace got his modestpension and was able to continue writing his arti-cles and books all the way up to the day he died in1913, at the age of 90.

In the years after the trial, Darwin and hisbrother-in-law Hensleigh Wedgwood did not seemuch of each other. In 1878 a reporter for the journalLight had finally managed to unmask CharlesWilliams, the medium who had attempted to useWedgwood to win over Darwin’s family. When thejournalist suddenly turned on the lights at a séance,Williams was found to be wearing a false black beard,phosphorescent rags and, as Darwin later put it in aletter, “dirty ghost-clothes.”

“A splendid exposure,” crowed Darwin when heread of it. But even then, Hensleigh’s faith remainedunshaken; in his opinion, a few faked performancesindicated only that the medium was having difficultygetting through to the other side and was under pres-sure not to disappoint his sitters. For Darwin, thiswas the last straw: “Hensleigh Wedgwood admits

Darwin’s bulldog ThomasHenry Huxley attended aséance, noting: “In theseinvestigations the quali-ties of the detective arefar more useful than thoseof the philosopher.” Heconcluded: “Better live acrossing-sweeper than dieand be made to talk twad-dle by a ‘medium’ hired ata guinea a seance.”

Left: Spiritualist Secretsare for sale in this cata-log. “Psychics” destroyedthem after ordering tricks,which is why survivingcopies are so rare.


Combining science and religion, a Spiritualist anthropology professor from Columbia University claimed in 1913 that early human fos-sils “proved” that spiritual evolution had taken place. Most scientists disagreed, but the New York Times gave his views respectful cover-age. One example, Piltdown Man, was later found to be a hoax. (Courtesy Research Library, the American Museum of Natural History)

Victorian cartoonists characterized sitters’ enthusiastic testimony about séance marvels as “what Foxes will say, Geese andAsses will believe”—a reference to the celebrated Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York. The young Fox girls tricked hundreds withtheir phony “spirit raps,” which began on March 31st, 1848—April Fools’ Eve. (Courtesy, New York Public Library)



Williams is proved a rogue,” he fumed, “but insists he has seen realghosts at Williams’s séances! Is this not a psychological curiosity?”

In 1880 Wedgwood sent Darwin a long handwritten manuscript: aspiritualist synthesis of science and religion. Would Darwin read it andperhaps suggest where it might be published? In a melancholy mood,Darwin sat down to reply to his cousin. He may have remembered thetimes Wedgwood had gone to bat for him many years before: he hadhelped persuade Darwin’s uncle and father to let him go on the HMSBeagle expedition, and it was to his cousin that Darwin had once en-trusted publication of his theory of natural selection in the event of hisearly death.

“My dear Cousin,” Darwin wrote, “It is indeed a long time sincewe met, and I suppose if we now did so we should not know one an-other; but your former image is perfectly clear to me.” He refusedeven to read Hensleigh’s paper, writing that “there have been toomany such attempts to reconcile Genesis and science.” The twocousins, who had once been so close, were now hopelessly estrangedover the question of science and the supernatural.

That same year Lankester, now a professor of zoology, declinedrequests to continue ghostbusting. “The Spirit Medium,” he wrote inan 1880 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, “is a curious and unsavouryspecimen of natural history, and if you wish to study him, you musttake him unawares …. I have done my share of the skunk-hunting;let others follow.” He was later appointed director of the British Mu-seum of Natural History. Ironically, in 1912 this nemesis of fakerswas completely fooled by the Piltdown man hoax, one of the mostnotorious frauds in the history of evolutionary biology.

As for the “evidence” of spiritualism in the Slade trial, there area few slates with the chalk “spirit writing” on them, still perfectlypristine and undamaged after 150 years. I saw the first one in 1994 atthe American Society for Psychical Research in New York. When Iasked if their collection included one of Slade’s slates, the curator’seyes lit up. He went straight to the artifact in its archival box andshowed it to me with evident pride and pleasure. I told him I wantedto return and photograph it sometime, and he invited me to do so.

More than a year later, I returned, but that curator was no longerthere, and a new man was in charge of the library and collections. Iasked about Slade’s slate, and he said he had heard of it, but couldn’tlocate it and asked me to come back again. When I returned, he saidhe had spent several hours trying to track it down, but no one knewwhat had become of it. There went my opportunity to get a photo to il-lustrate my article. I heard myself saying, “What do you mean you can’tfind it? Aren’t you supposed to be the Psychic Society?” He was notamused.

About two years later another slate with Slade’s “spirit writing”turned up. This was in England, at Cambridge University ManuscriptLibrary. I was not looking for it there, and was doing some researchon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but the archivist, knowing my interests,steered me to a collection of material that was not yet catalogued,and had recently been donated by the British Psychic Society. Thepair of hinged slates had been stored together with a long handwrit-ten letter by Hensleigh Wedgwood, insisting that he had observed“no trickery” during the séance. Alas.

Slade’s 1905 Newspaper obituary seems to gloatthat the once-celebrated “master of the occult”couldn’t overcome disease and death in a Michigansanatorium. “His once active mind dimmed, hiswealth gone, and deserted by friends, he passedaway,” wrote the cruel obituarist, noting that “‘Dr.’Slade made and lost several fortunes.”

Wallace sat for studio photographs by “spirit photographers” who claimed that their plates couldreveal invisible “spirits” hovering about him. Such“spirits”—usually Native America chiefs or ancientmiddle-Eastern warriors—were later added to thenegatives by “mysterious” double exposures, whichanyone could spot today. Used by permission of theCollege of Psychic Studies.

Antievolutionist John Hampden, the self-proclaimed champion of biblical “Flat Earthism,”drew the great evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallaceinto one of the most bizarre episodes in the historyof science. Son of a rector and nephew of a bishop,Hampden had sworn to destroy the “infidel pagansuperstitions” of modern science.

A zealous disciple of Samuel Birley (“Parallax”)Rowbotham, author of the 1869 book Earth Not aGlobe, Hampden warned that if schools continuedto teach the “Satanic globular theory” to the young,it would mean the destruction of all morality andreligion. Evolution, he believed, was only the latestwrinkle in the more basic blasphemies of Coperni-cus and Sir Isaac Newton.

In 1870, Hampden publicly challenged any sci-entist to prove the Earth a spheroid and offered tobet £500 (about a year’s salary for the averageworker) that no one could prove the “globular the-ory” to the satisfaction of independent referees. Tocollect, the challenger had to demonstrate the exis-tence of a convexrailway track orcurving surface ona large body ofwater.

His preferredtargets—wealthy,influential gentle-men-scientists likeCharles Darwin orSir Charles Lyell—ignored Hampden’sbait. But AlfredRussel Wallace,with his openness,

trusting nature, and perpetual near-poverty, thoughthe might make a few points for science and win aneasy five hundred quid. After all, he had started hiscareer as a surveyor. Hesitant, he asked the great ge-ologist Lyell whether he thought it wise to acceptsuch a challenge. “Certainly,” Sir Charles replied, “itmay stop these foolish people to have it plainlyshown to them.”

Wallace had chosen the worst possible advisorto protect his interests. Lyell had pushed CharlesDarwin to publish quickly, warning that Wallacewas also developing a theory of natural selectionand might beat him into print. The same Lyell, Dar-win wrote in his 1876 autobiography, “strongly ad-vised me never to get entangled in a controversy, asit rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss oftime and temper.” While counseling Darwin toavoid public debates, however, Lyell encouragedWallace to lock horns with one of the most mali-cious, abusive crackpots in all of England.

Confident of his scientific prowess, Wallace en-tered the contestunconcernedly,like a lamb to theslaughter. Hamp-den asked him topick an umpire,and Wallacechose a mannamed J. H.Walsh, who was astranger to him.As the well-known editor ofThe Field, a news-paper for country

Wallace and the Flat EarthersCharles Lyell Counseled Charles Darwin to Avoid Public Controversies, while Encouraging Alfred Wallace to Lock Horns with a Malicious CrackpotBY RICHARD MILNER AND MICHAEL SHERMER

ARTICLE


The Old Bedford Canal

C. Illustration of two views through the telescope demonstrating the cur-vature of the Earth. These views, as seen by means of the inverting tel-escope, are exact representations of the sketches made by the mutuallyagreed upon referee John Henry Walsh, editor of Field magazine, and at-tested to by Wallace’s witness Dr. Coulcher, who confirmed them asbeing correct in both cases: first, from Welney Bridge; and second, fromthe Old Bedford Bridge.


gentlemen, Walsh had a reputation for fairness andobjectivity. Graciously, Wallace offered to let Hamp-den appoint another impartial judge of his ownchoosing. He named a printer, who was a closefriend and dedicated flat-earther, which Hampdendid not think it necessary to mention.

On Saturday morning, March 5, 1870, the par-ties met near the north end of Old Bedford Canal,about 80 miles from London. The waterway ranstraight and unobstructed for six miles between twobridges. Wallace affixed large cloth rectangles to thefacing sides of each bridge, both bearing a bold blackstripe running parallel to the ground and both placedexactly the same height above the water. Halfway be-tween the two bridges, Wallace stuck a tall pole inthe bank, bearing two large discs as height markers.He measured the height of the lower disc, placing itexactly the same distance above the water level asthe black stripes mounted on the bridges.

After carefully lining up a surveyor’s level-mounted telescope at the same height as the mark-ers, Wallace asked the referees to sight through itfrom either bridge. From whichever vantage point,the pole’s discs appeared much higher than the barsmounted on the bridges, which seemed to be on adownslope.

Walsh and another man looked through the tele-scope and both confirmed immediately that Wallacehad proved his point. But Hampden’s referee dis-agreed and actually jumped for joy, proclaiming thedemonstration proved the flatness of the Earth. Ham-pden said it wasn’t even necessary for him to lookthrough the telescope, as he trusted his colleague.

Wallace was stunned. He had not reckonedwith the strange logic of “Zetetic” astronomy, as setforth in Rowbotham’s book, which explains awaysuch a result as a mere optical illusion, to be ex-pected if the Earth is flat. Hampden immediatelyclaimed victory and demanded his money.

Walsh took the drawings and interpretations ofwhat was seen through the telescope, studied themfor a week, then published them in his paper withan announcement that Wallace was clearly the win-ner. Furious, Hampden demanded his money back,but Walsh sent it to Wallace with congratulations.At this “perfidy,” Hampden directed a barrage of let-ters and pamphlets at Walsh, Wallace, and all theirfriends and colleagues, calling them liars, thieves,cheats and swindlers. He kept it up for the next 16years, even haranguing the officers of all the scien-tific societies to which Wallace belonged, such asthe President of the Royal Geographical Society onOctober 23, 1871 (see handwritten letter):

A. A telescope, a disk, and a black band were all placed at exactly thesame height above the water along a straight six-mile stretch of thiscanal. If the six-mile surface of the water is convexly curved, then thetop disk will appear higher than the black band (Fig. 1). If the surface ofthe water is a perfectly straight line for the six miles, the three objectswill be at exactly the same level and the disk will be seen through thetelescope as superimposed upon the black band (Fig. 2).

B. The view throughthe telescope ofthe canal bridge,showing the disksand black band.

Wallace challenges the flat-earthers, March 5, 1870, at the OldBedford Canal. (Courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society)


If you persist in retaining on your list of members aconvicted thief and swindler, one A. R. Wallace, ofBarking, I am obliged to infer that yr Society ischiefly made up of these unprincipled blackguards,who pay you a stipulated commission on their frauds,& secure the confidence of their dupes by their con-nexion with professedly respectable associations.

When Wallace brought his own criminal ac-tion for libel, the court ordered Hampden to stophis flow of venom and “keep the peace” for a year.He managed it for a few months, then sent Mrs.Wallace a note:

MADAM— If your infernal thief of a husband isbrought home some day on a hurdle, with everybone in his head smashed to a pulp, you will knowthe reason. Do you tell him from me he is a lyinginfernal thief, and as sure as his name is Wallace henever dies in his bed. You must be a miserablewretch to be obliged to live with a convicted felon.Do not think or let him think I have done with him.

Wallace brought Hampden back to court,where he was fined and spent a week in jail, butover the next four years he kept repeating the of-fense and was convicted three times. He got severalmonths in jail the next time, six more when he ha-rassed Wallace again and was directed to pay dam-ages and court costs, which he never did. Instead,he brazenly hid all his assets under a relative’sname and declared bankruptcy.

Then Hampden began turning the tables in thelaw courts. He sued Walsh, the stakeholder, for his£500 when his barrister reminded him that Englishlaw did not recognize wagers. Losers of bets had nolegal obligation to pay, and Hampden had asked for

his money back before Walsh had paid it to Wallace.Hampden won, and Wallace bore Walsh’s expensesin the suit. Although he had been declared winner ofthe challenge and wager, and several times winnerin the courtroom, Wallace ended up deep in the red,disgusted with British justice. As he grumbled in aletter: “The two law suits, the four prosecutions forlibel, the payments and costs of the settlement,amounted to considerably more than the 500pounds…besides which I bore all the costs of theweek’s experiments, and between fifteen and twentyyears of continued persecution—a tolerably severepunishment for what I did not at the time recognizeas an ethical lapse.”

The difference, of course, between Wallaceand Hampden was the extent to which they wouldallow the evidence to answer a question of nature.Despite his best efforts to use science to debunk apseudoscientific claim, however, Wallace’s re-sponse to Hampden was one that would neverhave been made by his more conservative col-leagues Darwin and Lyell. Nevertheless, Wallace’spersonality dictated his need to take on such a rad-ical claim. His were the actions of a heretic-per-sonality. (See accompanying article.) Fascinatedwith all ideas on the radical edge, Wallace simplyhad to take up the cause regardless of the cost,which was substantial.

In his 1905 autobiography Wallace expressedcontinuing amazement at Hampden’s virulence, asif he were some strange specimen of natural his-tory. “Seldom has so much boldness of assertionand force of invective been combined with suchgross ignorance…. And this man was educated atOxford University!”


Wallace had no ideawhat he was getting him-self into by taking up thechallenge of proving thatthe Earth is round. Heproved it unquestionably,but collecting the prizemoney for doing soturned out to be theleast of his problems.Flat-Earther John Hamp-den harangued him foryears with abusive let-ters and notes, includingthis one to the Presidentof the Royal Geographi-cal Society.

One key to understanding Alfred Russel Wallace’s lifelong attitude toward heretical ideas maybe found in his personality, because personality traitsand temperament tend to hold steady throughout thelife of an individual, influenced of course by lifeevents. Wallace’s humble origins and self-made ca-reer, for example, may help to explain his generosityand kindness to others. His varied and diverse educa-tion and experiences also shaped a separatist person-ality and created an independent thinker—good forcreativity in breaking out of a paradigmatic mold (forexample, his discovery of natural selection), but mak-ing him more gullible to unusual claims (for example,spiritualism), especially when mainstream sciencefailed to account for such human skills as mathemati-cal reasoning, art, and language, leading Wallace toconclude that there must be a higher intelligence thatguided and enhanced nature’s selective hand.

Taking Wallace as a case study in finding the es-sential tension between conservatism and opennessin science, he usually erred on the side of the latter,preferring to risk being right rather than playing itsafe and possibly missing out on an intellectual revo-lution. Thus, the life and personality of Wallace is it-self a test case for resolving the boundary problem inscience—where do we draw the line between scienceand pseudoscience, or science and non-science?More importantly, why are some people drawn to thefringe side of the boundary, willing to risk careersgambling on revolutionary ideas, while others greatlyprefer the more conservative approach of playing itsafe until a consensus is reached?

The Personality of a Heretic ScientistWhat was Alfred Russel Wallace like as a person? Anumber of magazine profiles and interviews withWallace that appeared in the final decades of his lifehelp flesh out his personality and temperament. Dur-ing his lecture tour of America in 1886 he was inter-viewed by The Sunday Herald of Boston, when he wasin that city to present his “Lowell Lectures on theDarwinian Theory.” The interviewer’s portrayal of hispersonality is very American: “His face lights up in

conversation, and there is nothing in his manner orfeatures to distinguish him from an American. Hehas the bearing of an ordinary citizen rather thanthat of a scientist, but there is a strong individualitybeneath the quiet exterior, and, after the first steps ofacquaintance are entered upon, he reveals himself asa very agreeable gentleman. His presence is so good,and his enunciation is so clear for an Englishman,that he ought to be easily heard by his audience,which, at least on Monday night, will be as distin-guished as any that has greeted an English lecturerbefore the Lowell Institute for some time.”

In 1898 a journalist for The Bookman noted that“Dr. Wallace’s travels and adventures in early lifeseem to have hardened his physique. No symptomof feebleness, physical or mental, is perceptible.With his tall substantial figure, still erect but forslight ‘scholar’s stoop,’ his head thickly covered withsmooth white hair, Dr. Wallace’s appearance is atonce robust and dignified.” Like most descriptions ofWallace, this author “is charmed by the native sim-plicity and modesty of his speech and demeanour; heseems never to regard himself as one of the notablemen of the century.” Tellingly, when asked to com-pare his personal habits to those of Darwin, Wallaceresponded: “Darwin was a continuous worker at hisone great subject; I am not. I should not be happywithout some work, but I vary it with gardening,walking, or novel reading. Even when in the midst ofwriting a book I never cease to read light literature.”

In the final two years of his life Wallace grantedseveral interviews, one of which labeled him as “TheLast of the Great Victorians.” Frederick Rockell ofThe Millgate Monthly “pushed open the gate, whichbore the inscription, ‘Old Orchard-A. R. Wallace’—and found myself in a luxurious garden where flow-ers of many varieties contested in a friendly rivalryof shape, colour, and perfume. As I entered theporch, two merry children ran out of the house intothe garden, and I realised that in the winter of hislife the great scientist was still closely in touch withthe innocence and fragrance of childhood.”

He remained so to the end, along with his

Heretic ScientistWhy Alfred Russel Wallace Got Involved In So Many

Heretical IdeasBY MICHAEL SHERMER


ARTICLE

sanguine personality described by W. B. Northropin the New York-based magazine The Outlook justdays after his death in 1913, as “a man of great mod-esty. It is seldom that greatness in this world is al-lied to humility; but Dr. Wallace possessedself-abnegation to a rare degree.”

Most contemporary observers thought Wallacea highly agreeable personality. In fact, Wallace de-scribed his own “natural disposition” as “reflectiveand imaginative,” which he attributed to “the quietand order of my home, where I never heard a rudeword or an offensive expression.” This, he said,“was intensified by my extreme shyness.”

Personality and temperament, of course, donot a great scientist make. To explore this questionfurther I asked experts who had assessed Wallace’spersonality for my book In Darwin’s Shadow: TheLife and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace, “how wouldyou describe Alfred Russel Wallace’s unique intel-lectual style? In other words, what are his strengthsand weaknesses as a scientist? In particular,” I alsoasked them, “I am interested in answering thequestion of how and why a world-class scientist likeWallace was so interested in fringe and hereticalsciences and social causes.”

The answers were revealing. Linnean Societyarchivist and librarian Gina Douglas noted: “I thinkhe had a very open mind…a person with a verybroad outlook.” Historian of science Michael Ghis-elin made this modern comparison: “There is noth-ing unusual about Wallace’s interest in such

matters. Had he been at Berkeley in the 1960s hewould have been opposed to fluoridation and ‘into’acupuncture and communal life styles. Such inter-ests made him open to novelty but there is a serioustradeoff if one is a bit gullible as was he.” LinneanSociety Executive Secretary, the late John Marsdenwondered: “Is there an answer to this? Most Nobellaureates I have been acquainted with (aroundseven or eight) have had severely flawed personali-ties. I don’t think Wallace was that bad. In fact, heseems to have been a pretty decent sort. A numberof people of this kind were attracted to socialism,not least Marx and a variety of intellectuals. Look atthe alternatives! Hardly wonderful. As you note hehad this weakness for psychics. Perhaps those wholive in glass houses should not throw stones!”

Wallace archivist and biographer CharlesSmith’s comments were especially insightful in in-tegrating Wallace’s personality with his intellectualstyle, philosophy of science, and the boundaryproblem and Wallace’s role in determining whatconstitutes legitimate science:

As far as his “fringe” interests go, I would suggestthat they were then (and in many cases still are) con-sidered “fringe” only because others had not yetcaught up with the thinking involved (or in addition,in the case of spiritualism, still cannot devise ade-quate tests of related matters, or refuse to entertainthe notion that the basic idea may be correct, thoughanthropomorphized). I would describe Wallace as anabsolutely “fearless” thinker, but not a foolhardy one.To me, his strongest weakness as a thinker was histendency to too absolutely trust some kinds of physi-cal data as being finally diagnostic: thus, his errantconclusions in some aspects of biogeography, astron-omy and glaciology. I realize he is also criticized forbeing gullible in his dealings with mediums; how-ever, it seems to me that some of his experiences (es-pecially those which took place in his own quarters)are difficult to easily discount. I am a reasonablyskeptical person; still, it seems to me (as someonewho has spent a good deal of time over the yearsconsidering the evolutionary process and related sys-tems concepts) that Wallace’s model of evolution, in-corporating social and spiritualist components, ismore on target than anyone else’s.

Historian of science Richard Milner consid-ered Wallace’s personality to be the source of bothhis strengths and weaknesses with this rather dif-ferent assessment of Wallace’s forays into the un-known: “I don’t see how anyone who has seriouslystudied the man’s character can fail to be deeply


WALLACE’S PERSONALITYRatings on the “Big 5” Personality Traits

Low High

Low High

Low High

Low High84th percentile Conscientiousness

86th percentile Openness to Experience

58th percentile Extroversion

22nd percentile Neuroticism HighLow

To assess Wallace’s personality the author asked a number ofWallace biographers and experts to rate him on today’s mostreliable personality test—the “Big 5.” Wallace’s exceptionallyhigh score in “Openness to Experience” led him to accept anumber of radical theories in his life—some right, somewrong—and his high level of “Agreeableness” made it difficultfor him to brush aside people who tried to convince him of thereality of psychical phenomena, which his more skeptical col-leagues like Darwin rejected.



impressed by the contradictions and paradoxes of his per-sonality. I think he was an extraordinarily good man withan uncommonly trusting attitude. Because he was so hon-est and straightforward, he thought that everyone was likethat. He could not conceive that men who spoke like gen-tlemen interested in exploring the frontiers of knowledgecould be calculating deceivers, who lied to his face for mon-etary gain. (I’m talking here about the various Spiritualistimposters and conmen, of course.)”

As for the contrast of Wallace’s personality with Dar-win, Milner made this insightful observation that supportsmodern theories of happiness as a temperament independ-ent of social status or wealth: “I think the contrast betweenWallace and Darwin at the end of their lives is most inter-esting. Darwin became depressed and melancholy, could nolonger find any joy in scenery, art, or music, and peeredgloomily into the coming darkness, where thoughts andpersonality would cease forever. Wallace lived much longerand happily, despite his penury, and cheerfully looked for-ward to his adventures in the Spirit World. Another glori-ous expedition into the Unknown.”

We can do no better than follow the precepts of such emi-nent naturalists in our exploration of the natural history of per-sonality, starting with a heretic personality, or the unique patternof relatively permanent traits that makes an individual open to sub-jects at variance with those considered authoritative. This descrip-tion well fits Wallace, who routinely maintained opinions on avariety of subjects typically at odds with the received authori-ties. A heretic personality is an individual, like Wallace, whodiffers from the majority in his openness to and support ofideas considered heretical, while also maintaining anti-author-itarian, pro-radical sympathies. These traits, being “relativelypermanent,” are not temporary conditions, or “states” of theenvironment, the altering of which changes the personality.

Left: Wallace’s openness (some would say gulli-bility) to all matters spiritual was evident in hispersonal participation in séances, which he con-sidered to be a form of experimentation. Here isa diagram in Wallace’s hand from his Americanjournal depicting a séance he participated inwhen he was in Boston in 1886. Wallace has in-dicated where he (“AW”) sat, the cabinet wherethe medium was encased, and the sliding doors“privately marked with pencil & found untouchedafter.” Courtesy of the Linnean Society of Lon-don.

Below: Wallace’s heretic personality led him tobe open-minded to radical new ideas, such asevolution by natural selection, but to also ac-cept scientific theories that turned out to bepseudoscience, such as phrenology. While it istrue that certain brain areas have specific func-tions, phrenology’s categories based on bumpson the skull were entirely imaginative.


The heretic personality, like any other personalitytrait, tends to act consistently over most environmen-tal settings, throughout much of a lifetime.

Wallace became interested in heretical theo-ries as a very young man, investigating, for exam-ple, phrenology, and considered controversialbiological problems such as the mutability ofspecies. This was not, however, a temporary flirta-tion with anti-authoritative ideas by a young, undis-ciplined mind. In mid life, after co-discoveringwith Darwin their innovative (and at the time mod-erately heretical) theory on the origin of species bymeans of natural selection, Wallace began experi-menting with spiritualism and many other contro-versial beliefs. What establishes Wallace as agenuine heretic personality was that he demon-strated a unique pattern of relatively permanenttraits that caused him to maintain opinions upon avariety of subjects throughout his life at variancewith those considered authoritative. In addition tophrenology, spiritualism, and his collision with onelitigious flat-Earther, the following incident in Wal-lace’s life is emblematic of a heretic personality.

“Leonainie”—In Search of the Lost Poem of PoeIn digging through the stacks at the Honnold Li-brary of the Claremont Colleges in search of anyminutia on Wallace, I was surprised to find—underthe section on Edgar Allan Poe—a posthumous

publication first published circa 1930 entitledEdgar Allan Poe: A Series of Seventeen Letters Con-cerning Poe’s Scientific Erudition in Eureka and HisAuthorship of “Leonainie”. The author of this tinymonograph (18 pages) was none other than AlfredRussel Wallace, who penned 15 letters (and two ex-tracts never mailed) to one Ernest Marriott, Esq.,between October 29, 1903 and March 23, 1904.The incident in question—a rediscovered poem ofEdgar Allan Poe supposedly written “at the Way-side Inn in lieu of cash for one night’s board andlodging”—is typical of Wallace’s vivid imaginationand willingness to jump to conclusions on thescantiest of evidence.

The story, as I have been able to reconstruct it,is as follows. Sometime around 1893, just sevenyears after a lecture tour of America, Wallace re-ceived a letter from his brother living in California,which included a poem entitled “Leonainie,” al-legedly written by Poe. Wallace, however, was “oc-cupied with other matters” and thus “made noenquiry how he got it, but took it for granted thathe had copied it from some newspaper.” Ten yearslater, on November 3, 1903, Wallace wrote toErnest Marriott (with no explanation offered ofMarriott’s role, other than that he was an attorney)to inquire about confirmation of the claim: “I thinkyou will agree with me that it is a gem with all thecharacteristics of Poe’s genius.” Wallace also made abizarre reference in this letter about the last poemsof Poe, “The Streets of Baltimore” and “Farewell toEarth,” which Wallace believed were written afterPoe’s death “through another brain,” and while theyare “in my opinion fine and deeper & granderpoems than any written by him in the earth-life…they are deficient in the exquisite music & rhythmof his best known work.”

With typical enthusiasm for all matters heretical,Wallace threw himself into an intense study of Poe’swritings, obsessed with finding out if “Leonainie” wasindeed his long lost, and perhaps last, poem (in thisworld anyway). One week later he told Marriott:“Since I wrote to you about ‘Leonainie’ I have read itmany times & have it by heart, & on comparing itwith the other poems by Poe which I have it seems tome to be in many respects the most perfect of all. Therhythm is most exquisite, and the form of verse differ-ent from any other I can call to mind in the doubletriplets of rhymes in each verse, carried on through-out by simple, natural and forcible expressions whilethe last verse seems to me the very finest in any of hispoems.” Wallace reprinted the poem for Marriott atthe end of the November 2 letter:

Left: Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer whose “last poem" Wallacemistakenly believed he had discovered. “Leonainie" was, in fact, a fake Poepoem penned by James Whitcomb Riley (Right), who was known as the“Hoosier” or Children’s Poet for his homespun dialect-sprinkled works. Heis credited with the oft quoted skeptic phrase, “When I see a bird that walkslike a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird aduck.” Riley photo courtesy of The James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home.



LeonainieLeonainie, angels named her, and they took the light

Of the laughing stars and framed her, in a smile of white,And they made her hair of gloomy midnight, and her eyes of bloomyMoonshine, and they brought her to me in a solemn night.

In a solemn night of summer, when my heart of gloomBlossomed up to greet the comer, like a rose in bloom.

All foreboding that distressed me, I forgot as joy caressed me,Lying joy that caught and pressed me, in the arms of doom.

Only spake the little lisper in the angel tongue,Yet I, listening, heard the whisper; “songs are only sung

Here below that theymay grieve you,tales are told you todeceive you,

So must Leonainie leave you, while her love is young.”

Then God smiled, and it was morning, matchless and supreme,Heaven’s glory seemed adorning earth with its esteem,

Every heart but mine seemed gifted with a voice of prayer and lifted,

When my Leonainie drifted from me like a dream.

With little evidence to go on, however, on thefirst day of 1904 Wallace noted that he still needed ascene and a motive for the poem: “I presume Poe wasnever in California, but I shall be glad to know if, atanytime, shortly before his death, he is known to havetravelled anywhere in an almost penniless condition,where such an incident as his paying for a night’sboard & lodging with a poem might have occurred.”

Undaunted by a lack of evidentiary support, how-ever, and in his usual eagerness to get into print withan exciting new find, on January 6 Wallace told Mar-riott: “I think I can see when ‘Leonainie’ was probablywritten & I shall now send it with a few preliminaryremarks to the Editor of the Fortnightly,& its publica-tion may possibly lead to its origin being traced inAmerica.” Growing bolder by the day, on January 10Wallace announced that the poem would be publishedand that “taking all the circumstances into considera-tion…I have come to the conclusion that this was thevery last thing Poe wrote, & it was probably writtenonly a few days before his death.”

Five days later Wallace was in print with the poemand, as usual, he found himself embroiled in contro-versy. Apparently someone identified the poem as afake, written by one James Whitcomb Riley, but Wal-lace spin-doctored this attribution, setting a standardof proof he had not held for himself: “Till we have thealleged proof that Riley wrote ‘Leonainie’, it seems tome quite as probable that he found it, and on the sug-gestion of a friend made use of it to gain a reputation”(February 8). But then Wallace received a letter from aMr. Law (reprinted in the February 8th letter to Mar-riott), implicating Riley as the perpetrator of the hoax,

cajoled by friends who told him that if he could writelike Poe he could achieve enough fame to establishhimself as a poet of high caliber. Riley, speculates Wal-lace, then wrote “Leonainie,” submitted it, and “after ithad run the gauntlet of Poe critics and been pro-nounced genuine if not canonical Riley proved the au-thorship. This drew attention to his own works, and hehas never since lacked for praise and pudding.”

On February 15, Wallace received more badnews, this from the “Librarian of the London Library,”who “obtained a copy of Riley’s ‘Armazindy’—whichcontains ‘Leonainie’ & has sent it to me. The publish-ers say that this vol. ‘contains some of Mr. Riley’s latestand best work including ‘Armazindy’ & the famousPoe Poem.’” Despite the overwhelming evidence that“Leonainie” was a hoax, Wallace was unable to recant.The remainder of the February 15th letter is a critiqueof Riley’s other poetry, with Wallace’s analysis thatRiley did not have the skill to write “Leonainie,” andhis conclusion that the real hoax is that Riley foundthe Poe poem and pretended to have written it!

The entire incident encapsulates Wallace’sheretic-personality: his eagerness to investigate un-usual claims, his thorough, almost obsessive analysisof a subject, his willingness to make a serious com-mitment to a position early in the absence of substan-tial evidence, and his resolution, regardless ofcontrary evidence, to maintain his original position(even using contradictory evidence in his favor).When he was right, as in his discovery of natural se-lection, these traits worked in his favor. But when hewas wrong, as appears to be the case here as in his in-vestigations of spiritualism, Wallace’s heretic-person-ality brought down upon him the scorn and ridiculeof scientists and more cautious personalities.

* * *

Those with heretic personalities—scientists and non-scientists alike—must be more cautious than most,for while their boldness may lead them to extraordi-nary success in one field, it may occasionally turn totemerity and lead them down the road to deceptionand self-deception in others. The rub in science is tofind the right balance between being so open toheretical ideas that it becomes difficult to separatesense from nonsense; and so closed to heretical ideasthat it becomes difficult to abandon the status quo.Heretic personalities, so numerous among the vari-ous pseudosciences, need to temper their beliefs witha little caution. Skeptics, so numerous among the var-ious sciences, need to moderate their skepticism witha little boldness. Where the heretic meets the skeptica creative scientist will emerge.

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