The list has been arranged, as possible, in reverse chronological order. I should note that the contents have been lightly edited to reduce entry length; almost all of these edits have removed references to recent sources in the outside literature which are not further identified. My apologies for this to the authors, but readers should of course consult the original sources to get the full picture, often extending well beyond Wallace studies per se.
. . . How is it that the memes of poetry remained a strong presence in the life of Wallace but disappeared from the life of Darwin even though both men were very much involved in scientific research that led both to the same revolutionary paradigm of natural selection? Perhaps the answer to this question may be found in a famous clash between the two scientific titans. For as Himmelfarb (1986) has remarked, 'Wallace not only had the distinction of being the first Darwinist; he was also the first renegade Darwinist'. And the issue on which Wallace became a 'renegade' was hardly trivial. Whereas Darwin believed that the science of evolution could completely account for the human species, Wallace had his doubts. His 'little heresy' as he called it was actually not so little, for he questioned whether the science of natural selection could account for 'the moral and higher intellectual nature of man' . . . --Bryce Christensen, October 2012. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 18(4): 400.
. . . The first author who expected mimicry by light was Wallace (1878) himself, who erroneously supposed click beetles for firefly mimics. Nevertheless, their light is different and they also appeared inedible too (Harvey 1956). Cockroaches are fat and tasty, so the mimic is at the place. One mimicry by light (aggressive, Batesian-Wallacian or Peckhammian) is actually known (Lloyd 1965, 1984): Predaceous fireflies Photuris (and also Bicellychonia) mimic the flash responses of females of other, up to five different (Lloyd 1983) species, attract males, and catch them, often during flight . . . --Peter Vršanský et al., September 2012. Naturwissenschaften 99(9): 748.
. . . Background matching prey coloration and its adaptive features have been recognized by biologists for a long time. The related idea that prey animals can decrease their probability of being detected through behavioural features was already discussed by Alfred Russel Wallace. . . . It has been shown experimentally that background matching effectively reduces predation risk imposed by predators, for example, in fishes and birds. Preference for backgrounds that reduce the risk of detection has thus been suggested to be an important and wide spread strategy among prey animals to decrease their predation risk. It is also a common assumption that prey animals have been selected to actively prefer visually matching backgrounds. However, considering the popularity of this idea, surprisingly few experimental studies testing it exist . . . --Karin Kjernsmo & Sami Merilaita, August 2012. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 279(1745): 4192.
. . . After planting doubts about sexual selection as the unique explanation, Wallace (1868) associated sexual dichromatism with the nesting habits of birds in relation to the risk of nest predation. He considered that, assuming that (i) incubation attendance by either sex promotes cryptic plumage in open nesters, but (ii) not in cavity or domed nesters, (iii) conspicuous sexual monochromatism should be associated with cavity or domed nesting, and (iv) sexual dichromatism with conspicuous males and cryptic females should be related to open nesting (Table 1). Wallace (1868) offered support for the two last predictions by listing 23 phylogenetically related groups of birds (i.e. families or genera) with conspicuous monochromatism nesting in cavities or domed nests and seven families with bright males and dull females with open nesting habits. Wallace (1868, 1889) also predicted that because of the higher phylogenetic lability of plumage colour, changes in nesting habits would come first and be followed by changes in coloration. Darwin (1871) disagreed with this view and forcefully argued that plumage coloration could select for changes in nesting habits while the opposite was less plausible. In nearly a century and a half elapsed since Wallace first presented his theory on avian sexual dichromatism in relation to nesting habits, few attempts have been made to empirically check its validity despite the attention that sexual dichromatism as variable reflecting the strength of sexual selection in different bird species has received during the last decades (see for instance, Amundsen & Pärn, 2006) and the huge increase in information on avian natural history and phylogeny . . . --J. J. Soler & J. Moreno, May 2012. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 25(8): 1615.
. . . In this article, we tested some assumptions and predictions of Wallace’s theory by analysing plumage conspicuousness and dichromatism, nesting habits and incubation attendance of European passerines as described in Handbook of Birds of The Western Palearctic (HBWP; Cramp & Perrins, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994a,b). We have also corrected for phylogenetic relationships in all analyses as nesting habits, and to a lesser degree sexual dichromatism, may show a marked phylogenetic component as already argued by Wallace (1889). According to the fundamental assumption of Wallace that incubation attendance by either sex promotes cryptic plumage in open nesters, but not in cavity nesters, conspicuousness in either sex should be related to incubation attendance, nest type and their interaction (Prediction 1). Moreover, the predictions by Wallace that conspicuous sexual monochromatism should be associated with cavity or domed nesting, and sexual dichromatism with conspicuous males and cryptic females should be related to open nesting, were tested by relating degree of male and female conspicuousness to nest type and sexual dichromatism. . . . --J. J. Soler & J. Moreno, May 2012. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 25(8): 1615-1616.
. . . The world 's terrestrial zoogeographical regions were originally outlined by Sclater (1858) and Wallace (1876), primarily on the basis of vertebrates, because their distribution records were the most complete at the time. Since then, the completeness of records has improved dramatically for both vertebrates and invertebrates, and although invertebrates represent a far greater proportion of total animal diversity, tetrapod vertebrates remain the best group for comparatively testing biogeographical hypotheses, with a comprehensive data set having become openly available online (WWF 2010). Specifically, where the world's biogeographical regions are concerned, it makes sense to test their accuracy using the same groups of organisms used to delimit them in the first place . . . --Şerban Procheş & Syd Ramdhani, March 2012. Bioscience 62(3): 260.
. . . During his student days, however, Meyer had also encountered the works of the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. In 1869, when Wallace published The Malay Archipelago, describing his travels and observations in the region from 1854 to 1862, Meyer produced an authorised translation, Der Malayische Archipel, within the same year. In 1870, he added two collections on the origin of species and the theory of natural selection, translated from original essays by Wallace and Darwin. On 6 July of the same year, Meyer embarked for Batavia (Jakarta) and by the end of September was stationed in Menado (Manado, North Sulawesi). Clearly, his admiration for Wallace's work influenced his decision to go abroad; indeed, Chris Ballard counts him as one among a 'wave of naturalist explorers' who travelled to the Malay Archipelago during the 1870s in Wallace’s wake, 'each bearing copies of his book and consciously emulating his earlier feats' . . . --Hilary Howes, March 2012. The Journal of Pacific History 47(1): 25.
. . . Most species remain undescribed and unknown. Recognizing and describing them is, however, just the beginning of a process. For most of the species already described, we probably know little more than some morphological characteristics and a few, if not a single, locality (as a spot distribution within an unknown range). This shortfall was named by Lomolino (2004) as the "Wallacean shortfall". Compiling good distributional data is the first stage of any systematic conservation planning exercise (Margules and Pressey, 2000). Without reasonable information of where species live, it is impossible to know which are endangered and where to concentrate efforts to preserve them . . . --Pedro Cardoso et al., November 2011. Biological Conservation 144(11): 2651.
. . .Wallace's Line demarcates the most abrupt faunal transition in the world. To a seasoned naturalist like Wallace, this unique juxtaposition of dramatically different faunas, first noted by Müller (1846), was obvious, was anomalous, and begged explanation; so it is perhaps no accident that biogeographic study effectively began in the IAA. The range limits of many terrestrial taxa are coincident with the eastern edge of the Sunda Shelf, and the taxonomic compositions of communities on either side are distinctly different. Wallace advocated geological explanations for these biological differences. He suggested, for example, that Bali and Lombok were formerly widely separated and had only recently moved to their present positions <40 km apart; he also noted that faunal discontinuities were associated with deep straits (Wallace 1860). Wallace first described the Line in an 1858 letter to H.W. Bates (Marchant 1916, p. 66) before he mapped the Line (Wallace 1863) that was later given his name by Huxley (1868) and expounded upon these observations in books on the IAA and biogeography in general (e.g., Wallace 1869). The veracity of Wallace's observations was debated because the existence of such a stark faunal divide seemed improbable, and this spurred intense study of distribution patterns in the region (e.g., Weber 1902). . .–David J. Lohman et al., August 2011. Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 42: 208.
. . . The processes governing the evolution of sexual dimorphism provided a foundation for sexual selection theory. Two alternative processes, originally proposed by Darwin and Wallace, differ primarily in the timing of events creating the dimorphism. In the process advocated by Darwin, a novel ornament arises in a single sex, with no temporal separation in the origin and sex-limitation of the novel trait. By contrast, Wallace proposed a process where novel ornaments appear simultaneously in both sexes, but are then converted into sex-limited expression by natural selection acting against showy coloration in one sex. Here, we investigate these alternative modes of sexual dimorphism evolution in a phylogenetic framework and demonstrate that both processes contribute to dimorphic wing patterns in the butterfly genera Bicyclus and Funonia . . . Our analyses support both hypotheses advocated by Darwin and Wallace for the origin of sexual dimorphism: some sexually dimorphic ornaments arise concomitantly with sex-limited expression, while others arise in both sexes but are subsequently lost in one sex. Thus both modes of evolution are applicable to the evolution of sexual dimorphism in butterflies . . . --Jeffrey C. Oliver & Antónia Monteiro, 7 July 2011. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 278(1714): 1981, 1985.
. . .Wallace (1889) was the first to propose that cuckoo-hawk resemblance was a form of mimicry, which Wyllie (1981) suggested might aid parasitic laying by frightening aggressive hosts away from the nest. In support of this idea, hawk-like plumage, with cryptic upperparts and pale, barred underparts, is more prevalent in parasitic than in nonparasitic cuckoos (Payne 1967) and most likely evolved after the evolution of brood parasitism (Krüger et al. 2007) . . . –Justin A. Welbergen & Nicholas B. Davies, May-June 2011. Behavioral Ecology 22(3): 574.
. . . While there were numerous previous philosophical treatises on the topic, stretching back to speculations about the origin of the universe in ancient times, scientific proposals are more recent. A well known one was biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, who wrote in 1904: "Such a vast and complex universe as that which we know exists around us, may have been absolutely required . . . in order to produce a world that should be precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development of life culminating in man". But that was before modern cosmology was established; the idea of the expanding and evolving universe was yet to come . . . --George Ellis, 13 May 2011. General Relativity and Gravitation 43(11): 3213.
This brings us back to the Popp. et al. analysis of Empetrum. Their dating analysis shows quite convincingly that the relevant phylogenetic splits do not date to the Jurassic--not even close. Instead, they probably happened in the Pleistocene less than 1 Mya. We can, therefore, immediately rule out ancient vicariance, but it is not quite as easy to choose between a Darwin or a Wallace migration scenario and the long-distance dispersal favored by Popp et al. As Popp et al. point out, Empetrum is not currently known along the Andes, and its distinctive pollen grains have never been found there. However, as Wallace (1880) argued, this does not entirely rule out that they passed through the Andes and then disappeared as suitable habits shrank . . . --Michael J. Donoghue, 19 April 2011. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108: 6341-6342.
. . . Although theories of animal colouration were developed principally in regard to terrestrial species (Wallace 1879; Poulton 1890; Cott 1940; Edmunds 1974), from early on they were applied to aquatic species too (e.g., Wallace 1889; Beddard 1895; Longley 1916, 1917). Nonetheless, colouration of aquatic organisms is subject to different selection pressures than those operating on land because scattering of light in water leads to an unchanging angular distribution of light direction; light only penetrates surface waters, the extent to which additionally depends on turbidity; light may be refracted at the surface; and species that use the water column may be viewed by prey, predators or conspecifics from almost any angle (Lythgoe 1987; Marshall 2000; Hanlon et al. 2009; Zylinski et al. 2009). These properties favour certain mechanisms of crypsis including transparency, counter illumination and countershading (Johnsen 2011; Johnsen et al. 2004; Ruxton et al. 2004) . . . –Tim Caro et al., April 2011. Evolutionary Ecology 25(6): 1232.
. . . More than 130 years on, the biogeographic scheme of Sclater and Wallace continues to form a basis for continental-scale geographic comparison of mammalian communities. Any observer of modern Africa can quickly recognize the stark ecological boundary delimited by the Sahara Desert, with the vast diversity of African-endemic taxa restricted to regions to its south. With almost no African fossil record to consult, scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries could only speculate on the age or historical development of this continent's biogeography. In contrast, the last 100 years of paleontological exploration have provided a wealth of information that allows for an investigation into the developmental history of African endemism as a whole, and the Ethiopian biogeography realm in particular. Wallace's proposal of "long epochs" of isolating barriers can now be more precisely formulated and addressed . . . --Faysal Bibi, February 2011. PloS One 6(2): 1-10.
. . . Wallace noted the problem of incipient evolutionary stages. He argued that incipient and intermediate stages might have little selective survival advantage, as with a partially developed wing; yet evolution progressed to new forms and greater complexity as if teleologically guided. Wallace thus predicted the problem of "irreducible complexity" (Behe, 2004). A group composed of Paleo-anthropologists and Linguists similarly argued that the physical and cognitive articulations required for human speech are so sophisticated that it is difficult to imagine intermediary systems (Picq et al., 2008). They described as a Neo-Darwinian tautology the argument that if a human feature existed, then it must be adaptive, otherwise it would not have survived. This is a form of Panglossian, overly-optimistic), post-hoc reasoning . . . --Michael M. DelMonte, January 2011. The International Journal of Healing and Caring 11(1).
. . . the evolution of longer floral tubes forced the evolution of longer insect proboscides, which in turn forced the selection for even longer floral tubes. Wallace (1867) noted that this positive feedback system would continue generating longer and longer traits until it is balanced by an opposing selective pressure. Although he did not elaborate much on opposing selective pressures, Wallace (1867) implied that proboscis and tube lengthening would only be advantageous to a point, after which increased length may become a liability (e.g. Harder 1983; Kunte 2007). Insects with excessively long proboscides may have difficulty maneuvering them and inserting them accurately into the narrow gullets of flowers (e.g. Harder 1983) . . . --Allan G. Ellis & Bruce Anderson, 2011. In Sébastien Patiny, ed., Evolution of Plant-Pollinator Relationships (Cambridge University Press): 237-262.
. . . Inspired by evolutionary computation, artificial life, multi-agent systems and social cognition, we develop a more realistic distribution of environments. The basic idea is straightforward: intelligence is the result of evolution through millions of generations interacting with other live beings. Thus we define intelligence in this context, interacting with other agents of similar intelligence. We formalise the so-called Darwin-Wallace distribution for agents and environments. Despite the many options and the many sources of uncomputability, we claim that, conceptually, the notion of Darwin-Wallace distribution is useful to re-visit previous definitions of intelligence. The next step is how this notion can be used for AGI development and evaluation. We present a procedure which approximates a Darwin-Wallace distribution by using intelligence tests over environments such that 'certified' systems are incorporated into the environments, so making them socially more complex . . . --José Hernández-Orallo et al., 2011. 'On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence' (http://users.dsic.upv.es): 3.
Wallace's approach to cosmology shows how the consideration of the conditions necessary for the evolution of life is not wedded to any particular theory of star formation and development but must be used appropriately in any cosmology we pursue . . . --John D. Barrow, 2011. The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (W. W. Norton).
. . . The term used to describe this type of speciation is allopatry, as opposed to sympatry, where ancestral and descendant species coexist in the same environment (or parapatry if they exist side by side, with a hybridisation zone in between). If two populations having evolved separately come back in contact later on, the intermediate phenotype of their offspring could make them unfit for either environment, and this would then provide the selective pressure for the selection of additional reproductive barriers, in a process called reinforcement, and often referred to as 'the Wallace effect'. Indeed, the earliest promoter of the view that reinforcement could occur under the pressure of natural selection was undoubtedly Alfred Wallace, who disagreed with Darwin's views that reproductive isolation could not possibly result from natural selection: "The sterility of first crosses and of their hybrid progeny has not been acquired through natural selection" (The Origin, Summary of Hybridism chapter). This point was a subject of written exchanges and arguments in private correspondence between the two around 1858 [[sic]], 10 years after their joint communication to the Linnean Society in July 1858, but Wallace formally published his views only in 1889, some twenty year later, in chapter VII of his book called Darwinism. On the subject of allopatry versus sympatry, I do take a very divergent view to that adopted by a majority of evolutionary biologists to this day. Rather, I choose to follow Wallace's path against Darwin's in thinking that natural selection plays a major role in the reproductive isolation that defines species, and I shall actually venture some steps further than Wallace, and will advocate in the following pages that natural selection can act on the very first stages of reproductive isolation, and not just on reinforcement after divergence has taken place . . . --Etienne Joly, 25 November 2010. Nature Precedings: 3.
. . . By the time he wrote Island life, Wallace (1881) knew of 21 species of Philippine mammals, most of which are either widespread species or Palawan endemics. Thus, he had virtually no knowledge of the highly endemic mammal communities in the oceanic Philippines. At the time, even less was known of amphibian and reptile diversity (Boulenger, 1894). Thus, Wallace's impression of the Philippine fauna, and his biogeographic delineations of it, were taken from a very small, biased sample of the diversity . . . --Jacob A. Esselstyn et al., November 2010. Journal of Biogeography 37(11): 2055.
. . . With growing knowledge about species distributions, updated summary information on species richness, endemism and faunistic resemblance has been assembled and analysed within the classic Wallace scheme (Chapin, 1923; Smith, 1983; Cole et al., 1994; Newton & Dale, 2001). Furthermore, various refinements have been proposed, many of them addressing delineations of subregions, districts etc. within classic Wallace regions (e.g. Chapin, 1923; Hagmeier & Stults, 1964; Hagmeier, 1966; Hershkovitz, 1969; Crowe & Crowe, 1982) or boundaries and transition zones between regions, e.g. between the Oriental and Australian realm (e.g. Mayr, 1944; Simpson, 1977; Vane-Wright, 1991; Beck et al., 2006b) . . . --Holger Kreft & Walter Jetz, November 2010. Journal of Biogeography 37(11): 2030.
. . . Few recognize, as Cronin (1991) documents, that the contemporary dominance of adaptive intersexual selection models, which assuming a controlling power of natural selection on mating preferences, represents a triumph of Wallace's view over the arguments of Darwin himself. Most contemporary researchers are the intellectual descendents of Wallace. Like Wallace, they are using the logic of Darwin's Origin to argue against Darwin's Selection in Relation to Sex. For one, Dawkins proudly embraces Cronin's label as a modern Wallacean, describing the theories of Zahavi, Hamilton, and Grafen as a "neo-Wallacean" triumph over the incomplete and muddled mate choice mechanism of Darwin and Fisher . . . --Richard O. Prum, November 2010. Evolution 64(11): 3097.
The key feedbacks that amplify change in the region are the reflectivity of the ground and the moisture in the air, factors that were discussed more than a 100 years ago by the geologist James Croll and the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace, for example, wrote as follows (1895, p. 157): ... the increased heat of summer could not be in any way stored up, but would be largely prevented from producing any effect, by reflection from the surface of the snow and by the intervention of clouds and fog ... Reflectivity (albedo) is now generally recognized as the dominant feedback factor. The net contributions of clouds and fog, although clearly important, are less obvious and are difficult to quantify . . . --Wolfgang H. Berger, Michael Schulz & Gerold Wefer, October 2010. International Journal of Earth Sciences 99, Supplement 1: 171-189.
For Wallace, the two processes of isolation in space and biological differentiation through time were inseparable, because one (isolation) led to the other (speciation). Wallace's view of what constituted natural--the dual criteria of biological and geological uniqueness--has some important implications for how natural biogeographical units are identified. Because Wallace was the first to suggest a geological/historical component to the identification of natural biogeographical areas. I propose to name such entities Wallacean biogeographical units . . . --Bernard Michaux, September 2010. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 101: 193-212.
. . . In my view there is a further step to take, and that is to confirm that areas of endemism are also Wallacean biogeographical units. These are the fundamental units for further biogeographical analysis because they are natural entities, not human constructs. For example, 'Sulawesi' is an area of endemism, but not a Wallacean biogeographical unit: it is a human geopolitical construct that has no biogeographical reality. Any attempt to use the area 'Sulawesi' in biogeographical analysis is doomed to failure . . . --Bernard Michaux, September 2010. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 101: 193-212.
. . . Roy Davies has assembled a convincing case that Darwin was much more cavalier with attribution, particularly with regard to Wallace, than commonly thought and in several instances failed to cite or give adequate credit to his antecedents. He concludes that Wallace has a stronger claim to the theory of evolution than commonly realized . . . --David Lloyd, Julian Wimpenny & Alfred Venables, September 2010. Journal of Biosciences 35: 339- 349.
That Wallace almost certainly solved the problem of divergence before Darwin did is, perhaps, not surprising. Wallace had much the greater experience in the field of biogeography, which was so fundamental to unravelling the relationships between species. But, even more importantly, he had the advantage that, unlike Darwin, he was looking actively for evidence of evolution while in the field, and could therefore tailor his data collection appropriately. By contrast, Sulloway has recently argued most persuasively that during the voyage on The Beagle Darwin was still a creationist in attitude; this blunted his appreciation of the evolutionary significance of the Galapagos fauna to the extent that he failed to collect a single tortoise specimen and neglected to label his finch specimens with their exact islands of origin . . . --David Lloyd, Julian Wimpenny & Alfred Venables, September 2010. Journal of Biosciences 35: 339-349.
. . . 'Muir went over to Darwinism with all the rest' (Worster, 2008, p. 204), stating 'Not that I would in any way oppose the discovered truths of evolution for I embrace them cordially' (Worster, 2008, p. 206). And so Worster (p. 207) suggests a 'glowing endorsement' of Darwinism, taking Muir 'far . . . from, the evangelical orthodoxy and towards a more liberal, science-based view of the world'. There is, then, a likely influence of Darwin in Muir's later life and reading. Moreover, books in the Muir collection at Pacific University show that he was also reading the works of Alfred Russel Wallace, whom he met, the two naturalists together visiting the Muir Woods of northern California (Wallace, 1905, p. 158) . . . --R. M. McDowall, September 2010. Journal of Biogeography 37(9): 1634.
. . .Biological barriers act throughout the lifecycle and are often classified according to the point in the life cycle that they are encountered (e.g. premating vs. postmating). Barriers at each stage can arise as byproducts of within lineage evolution as a result of natural or sexual selection or genetic drift, but natural selection against maladaptive hybridization itself can also drive evolution of reproductive isolation barriers (Wallace, 1889; Fisher, 1930; Dobzhansky, 1937). This process is usually termed reinforcement, and as the name implies, it requires the pre-existence of some degree of reproductive isolation, which is then 'reinforced' by the evolution of additional barriers. Studies of reinforcement have focused overwhelmingly on premating barriers. . . . Nevertheless, selection on postmating barriers is at least theoretically possible (Wallace, 1889; Coyne, 1974). Wallace argued that selection among demes could drive hybrid inviability by reducing the negative impact of low-quality hybrids (Wallace, 1889) . . . --E. Turner, D. J. Jacobson & J. W. Taylor, August 2010. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 23(8): 1642.
. . . He spent years living on his own in Amazonia and then in the Malay archipelago, making detailed and sympathetic observations about local peoples, practices and cultures. In the latter context his travelling companion and research assistant for many years was a young Malay man, Ali. At their parting, in 1862, Wallace commissioned a photograph of Ali to carry home to England and included it in his 1905 autobiography. Compare this to the erasure of non-white participation and assistance in other European explorers' accounts of the time . . . --Kathleen Bolling Lowrey, August 2010. Anthropology Today 26(4): 18-21.
. . . one must simply concede that during the 20th-century history of the discipline anthropologists have accumulated a huge wealth of data relating to question 3 for which no plausible explanation, general theory, or provisional hypothesis exists . . . And this is why, under present circumstances, I want to advocate for Wallace--a brilliant and unashamed crank--as an ancestor-figure for contemporary anthropology. In Wallace's articulation of the theory of evolution, he arrived at the same answers to questions 2 and 3, responding as follows: (1) common origin, endless divergence; (2) co-operation; (3) no . . . --Kathleen Bolling Lowrey, August 2010. Anthropology Today 26(4): 18-21.
Wallace quite rightly considered the lush complexity of human thought a serious mystery, one inexplicable within the necessity-driven framework of natural selection. As he put it, the human brain 'furnishes a surplusage of power--of an instrument beyond the needs of its possessor'. This sounds very much like Levi-Strauss's enchanting assertion that 'the universe is never charged with sufficient meaning [...] the mind always has more meanings available than there are objects to which to relate them' . . . --Kathleen Bolling Lowrey, August 2010. Anthropology Today 26(4): 18-21.
Wallace (1890) suggested that the primary function of egg coloration was to provide crypsis to avoid predation, although the experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis has been equivocal. One possible reason for this is that the experimental protocols typically involve painting eggs and comparing predation rates on painted versus natural eggs. With but one exception, all the egg-predation experiments cited in their review use painted eggs . . . --Michael I. Cherry & Andrew G. Gosler, August 2010. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 100: 753-762.
. . . Beatty et al. (2004) conducted another study, this time assessing the selection for mimicry using human predators and computer-generated prey. They found that when there are only 2 unprofitable prey types, selection for mimicry was weak. One reason for the results, they suggested, was that predators may not be sufficiently confused to generate selection for mimicry when just 2 different forms are involved. In an explanation for the evolution of conspicuous signals, Wallace (1889, p. 255) suggested that "not only do fewer individuals of each species need to be sacrificed in order that their enemies learn the lesson of their inedibility (in cases of mimicry), but they are more easily recognized at a distance and thus escape even pursuit. There is thus a kind of mimicry between closely allied species as well as between species of distinct genera, all tending to the same beneficial end." One explanation for Beatty et al's findings is that mimicry reduces confusion in visually complex environments. It has also been argued, in a theoretical treatment, that the mere coexistence of visually distinctive aposematic species can be mutually beneficial (Turner and Speed 1999). If predators that ingest members of one chemically defended species become risk averse with respect to further toxin ingestion, while their physiology copes with the toxins, it has been suggested that predators may heighten avoidance of species that could contain toxins, even in the absence of signal mimicry . . . –Hannah M. Rowland et al., July-August 2010. Behavioral Ecology 21(4): 851-852.
. . . Selection fundamentally acts on genes or individuals of distinct species. At the individual level, the success of a collection of interesting genes is mediated through the fitness of an individual phenotype. But what is the phenotype? What is a species? It may be worth remembering what Alfred Russel Wallace, natural selection's co- discoverer, published as species definition: 'A species . . . is a group of living organisms, separated from all other such groups by a set of distinctive character(istic)s, having relations to the environment not identical with those of any other group of organisms, and having the power of continuously reproducing its like'. Thus, it is the relation to the environment which is one of the features defining a species. The crucial role of many microbes in development demonstrates that environmental and genetic information interact . . . --Sebastian Fraune & Thoms C. G. Bosch, July 2010. BioEssays 32(7): 578.
. . . Darwin (at least, in the first edition of The origin of species) relied on selection as the main cause of evolutionary change, but saw that hybrid sterility could not be directly selected; instead, he argued that it arises as a side-effect of divergence. In contrast, Wallace's (1889) enthusiasm for selection led him to argue that not only could it strengthen prezygotic isolation, by what we now call reinforcement, but that group selection could even cause hybrid sterility. Then, as now, ecological divergence that allows distinct species to live together in sympatry received less attention than reproductive isolation . . . --N. H. Barton, 12 June 2010. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, Biological Sciences 365: 1825-1840.
. . . In the present study, we use all known non-African Charaxes species to explore the history of diversification in the Oriental and Australian region, especially the 'transitional' Wallacea. Several of these Charaxes species are poorly known and/or represent recently described taxa. Indeed, the highly distinctive C. marki Lane & Müller is known only from the holotype. This work forms part of a larger study that demonstrates Wallacea is not only a transitional zone, but also comprises a very unique area, with distinct geological and biogeographic histories . . . –Chris J. Müller, Niklas Wahlberg & Luciano B. Beheregaray, 1 June 2010. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 100(2): 458.
Despite Southeast Asia's abundance of organisms and islands, however, finding a repeated signal of geological events beyond the encroachment of the Indo-Australian plate has been difficult. A hierarchy of Southeast Asian landmass associations, expressed as a single area cladogram, would be a more intriguing pattern to extrapolate and explore. Just such a hypothesis was suggested by Wallace (1863) and used as a theoretical model by Nelson & Platnick (1981). Unfortunately, a convincing area cladogram for the region has been elusive, notwithstanding proposals for certain taxa . . . --Ronald M. Clouse & Gonzalo Giribet, June 2010. Journal of Biogeography 37: 1114-1130.
. . . While the distribution of many flora and fauna conforms to Wallace's line, the seafaring capabilities of human settlers to this region undoubtedly overcame this barrier to dispersal. Indeed, Asian ancestry exceeds 50 per cent as far as east as the island of Alor, which is well within Wallacea and approximately 1000 km east of Bali, as well as on the island of Sulawesi, which is located east of Wallace's line in the north. Curiously, Wallace himself noted this difference, positing a second line in eastern Indonesia corresponding to changes in human phenotype (Wallace 1869 . . . ). Wallace's second 'phenotypic' line broadly parallels the rapid decline in Asian admixture identified here . . . --Murray P. Cox et al., 22 May 2010. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, Biological Sciences 277: 1589-1596.
. . . Wallace was scandalized by Darwin's sexual selection theory, considering it Darwin's greatest error, because it appeared to admit a subjective factor into evolutionary theory, because it appeared to admit a subjective factor into elocutionary theory. Indeed, it appeared to elevate aesthetic appreciation to the status of a significant factor in evolution. Wallace's alternative theory to account for exaggerated display traits relied instead on explanations that invoked incidental physiological mechanisms in males and the need to suppress their effects in females, to avoid predation . . . Wallace was of course wrong in his denial of the plausibility of sexual selection, although not completely wrong to doubt that aesthetic appreciation of combative prowess were the primary factors. It took a century to recognize that the theory needed to be based instead on asymmetries of parental investment in offspring care between the sexes. Today, sexual selection theory is again considered an important adjunct to the theory of natural selection; however, its reinstatement has not resuscitated the power of Darwin's account of language origins . . . --Terrence W. Deacon, 11 May 2010. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, Supplement 2: 9000-9006.
. . . Few scientists today accept Wallace's creationism, teleology, or spiritualism. Nonetheless it is appropriate to engage the profound puzzle he raised; namely, why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did? I suggest that the puzzle can be resolved with two hypotheses. The first is that humans evolved to fill the "cognitive niche," a mode of survival characterized by manipulating the environment through casual reasoning and social cooperation. The second is that the psychological faculties that evolved to prosper in the cognitive niche can be coopted to abstract domains by processes of metaphorical abstraction and productive combination, both vividly manifested in human language . . . --Steven Pinker, 11 May 2010. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, Supplement 2: 8993.
. . . Toward the end of their lives, Darwin and Wallace became estranged. Darwin argued that natural selection was sufficient to explain the origin of the existing biological world. Wallace believed that natural selection alone was insufficient to explain the existence of complex structures such as the human brain. From the bioenergetic perspective, Wallace's reservations were justified, as complexity can be generated only through the information- generating power of energy flow and the cumulative information storage capacity of nucleic acids. It took more than 3.5 billion years for these systems to amass sufficient information to generate the human brain. Thus the missing concept that Wallace sought to explain the ascent of man is the interaction between energetics and information . . . --Douglas C. Wallace, 11 May 2010. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, Supplement 2: 8952.
Wallace proposed to redefine Darwinism in a way that excluded Darwin's principle of sexual selection. The main result of the Darwin-Wallace controversy was that most Darwinian biologists avoided the subject of sexual selection until at least the 1950's, Ronald Fisher being a major exception. This controversy still deserves attention from modern evolutionary biologists, because the modern approach inherits from both Darwin and Wallace. The modern approach tends to present sexual selection as a special aspect of the theory of natural selection, although it also recognizes the big difficulties resulting from the inevitable interaction between these two natural processes of selection . . . --Jean Gayon, February 2010. Comptes Rendus Biologies 333: 134-144.
. . . Early evolutionary theories of senescence (Wallace, ca. 1865; Weismann, 1889) were group-selectionist in nature, proposing that individuals senesce and eventually die in order to make space and resources available for future generations composed of younger, more vigorous individuals. However, such arguments are circular because, if ageing is one of the reasons why individuals must be replaced, they presuppose that individuals must deteriorate over time. Moreover, they fail to explain how a population of altruistically senescing individuals would not be subject to invasion by more slowly senescing or even non-senescing invaders. Recent studies have placed group- selectionist arguments on a stronger theoretical foundation by emphasizing instances where senescence appears to be "selected for its own sake" as a result of kin- or group-level benefits including payoffs to close relatives, and reduced local extinction risk due to communicable diseases or chaotic population dynamics . . . --Robert A. Laird & Thomas N. Sherratt, February 2010. Biosystems 99(2): 130.
. . . Other questions, such as whether maternal emotions influence the fetus, have made a remarkable tour. Alfred Russel Wallace was co-originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection written in 1859 by Darwin. When Wallace (1893c) wrote the above quoted sentence in a letter entitled 'Prenatal influences on character' into Nature, the belief that a mother's emotions could affect the child she carries was seen as resting on old wives' tales. Wallace (1893a,b) was also publishing articles about the possibility of being able to study whether 'individually acquired characters are inherited'. Lamarck had incorporated this idea in his theory of directed evolution; it was seriously challenged in 1880 by Weismann's theory, on which the modern understanding of genetic inheritance became based, and since the turn of the 20th century it became widely rejected by the scientific community. However, this old question that had originated in ancient time, with Greek philosophers, recently got renewed interest with the discovery of epi-genetic variation between individuals and the finding that in some cases epigenetic variants can be inherited by the offspring, a biological inheritance that cannot be explained by changes in the DNA- sequence itself . . . --Bea R. H. Van den Bergh, January/February 2010. Infant and Child Development 19(1): 42.
The Wallace (1881) and Briggs (1966) lineage age hypothesis suggests that there are low levels of endemism in the Azores biota because the biota is of recent (post-Pleistocene) origin. Avila et al. (2008) challenged this hypothesis to explain at least mollusc diversity patterns by demonstrating that the endemic mollusc fauna of the Azores was largely unaffected by Pleistocene climatic oscillations and that the current endemic fauna is therefore not of post-Pleistocene origin. Evidence from phylogenetic relationships of Azorean plant lineages suggests that the lineage age hypothesis similarly fails to explain the distinctive patterns of Azorean endemic plant diversity . . . --Mark A. Carine & Hanno Schaefer, January 2010. Journal of Biogeography 37: 77-89.
. . . although it is sometimes argued that aposematic signalling is fundamentally about raised distinctiveness rather than heightened conspicuousness, the two often amount to the same thing (Wallace 1889). If this is generally true, the association between conspicuousness and aposematism in the primary evolution of warning signals, in our view, is not problematic . . . --Thomas J. Lee, Nicola M. Marples & Michael P. Speed, January 2010. Animal Behaviour 79(1): 70.
. . . Wallace's essay was remarkable for two reasons: First, it conveys a sophisticated understanding of the nature of selection among individuals belonging to a normal distribution of trait values. "The flowers most completely fertilized by these moths being those which had the longest nectaries, there would in each generation be on the average an increase in the length of the nectaries, and also an average increase in the length of the proboscis of the moths, and this would be a necessary result from the fact that nature ever fluctuates about a mean, or that in every generation there would be flowers with longer and shorter nectaries, and moths with longer and shorter probosces than the average" (p. 476). Second, Wallace actually mentions Xanthopan (Macrosila) morganii, the species of moth that is now considered the most likely pollinator of A. sesquipedale. Wallace was not aware of the long-tongued Malagasy race of this hawkmoth, but he had measured a specimen of the African mainland form in the British Museum and found that its tongue measured 7.5 inches [18 centimeters]. Wallace (1867) wrote "That such a moth exists in Madagascar may be safely predicted; and naturalists who visit that island should search for it with as much confidence as astronomers searched for the planet Neptune,--and they will be equally successful!" . . . --Steven D. Johnson & Bruce Anderson, 2010. Evolution, Education and Outreach 3(1): 34.
. . . In the 1890s an English linguist, S. H. Ray, pointed out that some of the languages of British New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were not Austronesian. A parallel discovery had already been made in the Moluccas by in the 1850s by the naturalist A. R. Wallace, when he collected vocabularies in these easternmost islands of the Indo- Malaysian archipelago. In a well-known book on his travels in this region Wallace proposed a distinction between 'Malay' and 'Papuan' languages in the Moluccas. Following Wallace's lead, Ray applied the name 'Papuan' to the non-Austronesian languages of Melanesia, as a convenient catch-all. Soon after, Wilhelm Schmidt observed that non-Austronesian languages were present on the north coast of the New Guinea mainland and in New Britain. What was striking about the various small groups of Papuan languages, was that, unlike the Austronesian languages, there was no evidence of common origin. Only in the last 50 years has the full extent of the diversity of the languages of Near Oceania become clear . . . --Jan Lucassen, 2010. In Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches (Brill): 87-88.
. . . any system seeking to utilize all the energy or resources for its own purposes is bound to be challenged by other systems. The consequence of these interactions between self-organizing systems is a continuous stream of new things, or in the case of humans, new thinking. This is diversity. Bateson interpreted self-organizing systems as working together to sustain the existence of an evolving ecosystem. This approach has its roots in Alfred Russell Wallace's work. Wallace saw that the job of evolution was to maintain the constancy of something in his case, the entire ecosystem made up of all species and their environment--a process rather like the cruise control system or constant velocity transmission (CVT) on a motor car. We can also think of it in terms our bodies' ability to adapt to changes in the outside temperature, at least within a limited range. By shivering or perspiring, our body temperature remains more or less constant because we vary internal conditions in response to those changes in outside temperature . . . --Edward Moulding, 2010. In 5s: A Visual Control System for the Workplace (AuthorHouse): 129.
. . . Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is a chain of more than 17,000 islands that stretches between the continents of Asia and Australia . . . Early explorers noticed morphological differences from east to west that were dramatic enough to lead Alfred Russell Wallace to designate a human phenotypic boundary demarcating the transition between Asian and Melanesian features. Relative to his more well-known biogeographic boundary, this line lies slightly east, running between the islands of Sumbawa and Flores (Wallace 1869 . . . ). The languages of the region follow a similar pattern, with the majority belonging to the extensive Austronesian language family but with more distantly related Papuan languages occurring in the Far Eastern provinces, especially in areas where Melanesian features predominate (Wallace 1869). To explain these patterns, the prehistory of this region has often been framed as the story of two major range expansions: the initial Paleolithic colonization of Sahul ~45 ka ago and the much later Neolithic expansion of Austronesian-speaking farmers (4-6 ka ago) out of mainland Asia or Taiwan into Indonesia and the Pacific . . . --Tatiana M. Karafet et al., 2010. Molecular Biology and Evolution 27(8): 1833.
. . . Even within the technologist's definition of technology as dealing with mechanical artifacts alone, Wallace's insight has major relevance. The subject matter of technology, according to the Preface to History of Technology, is "how things are done or made"; and most students of technology, to my knowledge, agree with this. But the Wallace insight leads to a different definition: the subject matter of technology would be "how man does or makes." As to the meaning and end of technology, the same source, again presenting the general view, defines them as "mastery of his (man's) natural environment." Oh no, the Wallace insight would say (and in rather shocked tones): the purpose is to overcome man's own natural, i.e. animal, limitations. Technology enables man, a land- bound biped, without gills, fins, or wings, to be at home in the water or in the air. It enables an animal with very poor body insulation, that is, a subtropical animal, to live in all climate zones. It enables one of the weakest and slowest of the primates to add to his own strength that of elephant or ox, and to his own speed that of the horse. It enables him to push his life span from his "natural" twenty years or so to threescore years and ten; it even enables him to forget that natural death is death from predators, disease, starvation, or accident, and to call death from natural causes that which has never been observed in wild animals: death from organic decay in old age . . . --Peter Ferdinand Drucker, 2010. Technology, Management, and Society (Harvard Business Press): 41-42.
. . . What I have called here the "Wallace insight," that is, the approach from human biology, thus leads to the conclusion that technology is not about things: tools, processes, and products. It is about work: the specifically human activity by means of which man pushes back the limitations of the iron biological law which condemns all other animals to devote all their time and energy to keeping themselves alive for the next day, if not for the next hour. The same conclusion would be reached, by the way, from any approach, for instance, from that of the anthropologist's "culture," that does not mistake technology for a phenomenon of the physical universe. We might define technology as human action on physical objects or as a set of physical objects characterized by serving human purposes. Either way the realm and subject matter of the study of technology would be human work . . . --Peter Ferdinand Drucker, 2010. Technology, Management, and Society (Harvard Business Press): 42-43.
. . . By contrast, Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selection, believed that count words were essential for numerical cognition, in particular arithmetic: "if, now, we descend to those savage tribes who only count to three or five, and who find it impossible to comprehend the addition of two and three without having the objects actually before them, we feel that the chasm between them and the good mathematician is so vast, that a thousand to one will probably not fully express it" (Wallace, 1871, p. 339). The question of the role of language in arithmetic became the focus of recent experimental psychological studies in cultures with few number words, in particular the Pirahã and the Mundurukú, two cultures from the Amazon forest with an extremely limited number vocabulary . . . --Helen De Cruz, Hansjörg Neth & Dirk Schlimm, 2010. In Benedikt Löwe & Thomas Müller, eds., PhiMSAMP: Philosophy of Mathematics: Sociological Aspects and Mathematical Practice (College Publications): 74.
. . . Moreover, Alfred Wallace, co-inventor of the theory of the evolution by natural selection, doubted that evolution could produce anything like states of consciousness. This problem was later labelled the "explanatory gap". Individuals use different names for what it is that they are opposing to physical phenomena. Huxley and Romanes used "consciousness". Some use "sentience" . . . many now refer to "Phenomenal Consciousness" (PC) in contrast with "Access Consciousness" (AC), or, in the terminology of Chalmers, distinguish the so-called "Hard Problem" of consciousness from a (relatively) "Easy Problem". Such formulations presuppose a dichotomy: a binary divide between things that do and things that do not have the problematic extra feature over and above their physical features . . . –Stéphane Doncieux, 2010, in From Animals to Animats 11: 11th International Conference on Simulation and Adaptive Behavior (Springer).
One possibility is that Wallace was deliberately romanticizing his actual observations and experiences there. Nancy Stepan has noted that the popular success of The Malay Archipelago came from its fulfilment of contemporaneous readers' expectations of what an account of the tropics should be, in contrast to his 1853 account of his travels in South America, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, which was not only "unromantic," but "unheroic," and did not sell well . . . However, I would like to put forth another possibility: what if Wallace's portrayal of the archipelago as paradise, and more specifically, his portrayal of interracial relations and "uncivilized" society as positively pre-lapsarian, resulted not from the impulse to romanticize, but rather, a stubborn fidelity to scientific accuracy? . . . --Tiffany Tsao, 2010. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 15: 28-41.
. . . I will show how Wallace arrived at his surprisingly favourable and anti-scientific" assessments of the inhabitant races and communities of the Malay Archipelago by applying the principles of taxonomic classification to the human realm. Given that Wallace's primary employment in the Malay Archipelago was to collect specimens of flora and fauna and classify them according to the principles of the Linnaean taxonomic classification system, his adoption of what I will term a "taxonomic perspective" in viewing the humans whom he encountered should hardly be surprising. Using these same principles of taxonomic classification, Wallace was able to achieve a perspective on the Malay Archipelago hitherto unachieved by authoritative accounts of the region, challenging the predominant scientific views of race held at the time and unsettling even his own views of the "uncivilized" races . . . --Tiffany Tsao, 2010. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 15: 28-41.
. . . for Wallace, feeling "that savages were in some respects superior, would not have necessarily made it true. I would argue instead that his positive portrayals of human life in the archipelago had just as much scientific basis as his opening portrayals of the archipelago's natural environment as an otherworldly Eden. If Wallace's construction of a paradisiacal natural environment relied on his utilization of scientific precedent and natural selection theory, it was his application of taxonomic classification that enabled him to see the human individuals and communities of the archipelago as uniquely paradisiacal as well. Wallace's taxonomic perspective enabled him to break away not only from dominant perceptions of the races as different stages on a single, linear scale of sociocultural evolution, but also from the social Darwinist tendency of his day to view interracial relations as an inexorable struggle in which the white races would prevail . . . --Tiffany Tsao, 2010. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 15: 28-41.
. . . Cloete's poetry does not shy away from inter alia "controversial scientific subjects" in a number of poems, and he contemplates the origin of creation and the development of life on earth. The reader is led to consider Cloete's views on creation and evolution. In this article the emphasis will be on the role of evolution in Cloete's poetry and how he uses a well-known observation by one of the main exponents of evolution theory in one of his poems, "toegedig aan Alfred R. Wallace", to present a text that expresses wonderment at a natural phenomenon . . . --Johann Lodewyk Marais, Desember 2009. Tydskrif vir Geeteswetenskappe 49(4): 548.
. . . This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part I will outline the development of the reciprocal nature of biology and geology. Surprisingly reciprocality had been proposed more than 50 years before Wegener by the biogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace, co-author of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection (Wallace, 1858). I will briefly outline Wallace's biogeographic ideas as they pertain to reciprocality, before examining Wegener's reconstruction hypothesis of the Cretaceous polar region in more detail . . . --B. Michaux, December 2009. Gondwana Research 16(3-4): 656.
. . . The female limitation of mimicry is usually explained by a combination of sex-dependent predation pressure and sexual selection: (1) female butterflies carry heavy egg-loads and are therefore aerodynamically constrained in their escape flights. Thus, females are thought to be more vulnerable to predation and presumably gain a greater fitness advantage from Batesian mimicry compared to males (Wallace 1865 . . . ), and (2) wing colour patterns are assumed to be constrained by sexual selection to a much greater extent in males than in females. Thus, male mimicry is selectively disfavoured when its natural selective advantage is overwhelmed by the sexual selective advantage of nonmimetic coloration that may be more successful during inter- or intrasexual encounters. However, these hypotheses do not explain the presence of and natural variation in female-limited mimetic polymorphism . . . --Krushnamegh Kunte, November 2009. Animal Behaviour 78(5): 1029.
. . . The behavior of females in search of a mate impacts the success of males in mate competition and, hence, the force of sexual selection on male phenotypic characters. The search behavior of females is also subject to selection because the search strategy used by a female determines the likelihood that she encounters a high quality male in the search process. This latter idea is germinal in the views of Alfred R. Wallace who argued that females would, had they evolved the cognitive ability, choose mates who provide them with a fitness benefit (Wallace, 1871, 1889; reviewed by Cronin, 1991). The search strategy favored by selection, in this situation, is the strategy that provides the highest fitness return to searchers. Janetos (1980) stimulated the study of search strategies when, more than one hundred years later, he showed that a fixed sample search strategy provides a higher fitness return to females than several alternative strategies. . . . --Daniel D. Wiegmann, Steven M. Seubert & Gordon A. Wade, October 2009. Journal of Theoretical Biology 262(4): 596.
. . . More than 150 years ago, Wallace had already recognized a profound connection between geology and the distribution of plants and animals, and many of his insights were based on his observations in Southeast Asia. Our understanding of the Earth has changed considerably since Wallace's time but an understanding of the geology of Southeast Asia remains fundamental to interpreting biotic distributions in the region. However, the links between geological history and life are not simple, and a great deal of work is still required to understand the complex interrelationships and feedbacks between plate tectonics, changing distributions of land and sea, emergence of land and rise of mountains, subsidence below sea level and formation of deep ocean basins, uplift and erosion, changing ocean currents, climatic impacts of all these changes, and their effects on plants and animals and their evolution and distribution . . . --R. Hall, October 2009. Blumea 54(1-3): 148.
. . . Because most butterflies can fold their wings together, hiding the dorsal surface, a dorsal-ventral partitioning of visual signals may present one solution to accommodating potentially antagonistic selective pressures. The speculation that dorsal wing patterns are important for mate signalling, while the ventral surface may be more subject to selection by natural enemies is, in fact, not new (Darwin 1871; Wallace 1889), although no study has directly tested this hypothesis in a comparative framework. In addition to a dorsal/ventral partition, butterflies may separate signals between forewing and hindwing, given their ability to hide the forewing behind the hindwing when at rest. These two surface axes, dorsal-ventral and forewing/hindwing, offer butterflies two spatial dimensions that may be partitioned to serve different, potentially antagonistic, signal functions . . . --Jeffrey C. Oliver, Kendra A. Robertson & Antónia Monteiro, 7 July 2009. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 276(1666): 2369.
Island radiations are thought to undergo evolutionarily short 'taxon cycles' of diversification and rapid demise, before being superseded by different lineages of colonizers. The archipelagos of Wallacea (eastern Indonesia), Melanesia (including New Guinea) and Oceania have long served as a natural laboratory to study the evolutionary dynamics of such colonizations and biological radiations (Wallace 1859 . . . ). Yet, the faunal origins and mechanisms responsible for the region's diversification as well as their contribution to global diversity remain poorly understood . . . --Michael Balke et al., 7 July 2009. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 276: 2359-2367.
Darwin (1862) and Wallace (1867) provided a possible explanation for such extreme elongation, suggesting that the long nectar spur of the Malagasy star orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) evolved in a coevolutionary race with a giant hawkmoth. According to this model, selection on the hawkmoth favours longer tongues to better reach the orchid's nectar, while selection on the orchid favours nectar spurs that are longer than hawkmoth tongues because this ensures contact with the orchid's reproductive parts (thus maximizing pollen transfer) . . . Darwin was not proposing a general mechanism for the evolution of corolla tube length, but was specifically interested in the extreme case of A. sesquipedale (Darwin 1862). Furthermore, in expounding on Darwin's idea, Wallace (1867) actually envisioned that initial stages in tube elongation would involve pollinator shifts, and suggested that a coevolutionary race would begin only when the tube length corresponded to the tongue length of the largest hawkmoth in the habitat . . . --Nathan Muchhala & James D. Thomson, 22 June 2009. Proceedings of The Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 276(1665): 2147-2148.
. . . The classical view of reinforcement is that selection can only strengthen prezygotic isolation, not postzygotic because selection cannot favor a further reduction in the fitness of hybrids (Wallace 1889; Dobzhansky 1940). (Selection can favor a reduced fitness of juveniles where these compete with siblings, but the principle is the same). This argument applies where a single allele strengthens isolation, but not when isolation is strengthened by an association between existing incompatibilities. As we show below, the two different incompatibilities then do not have to be at different stages of the life cycle: each may have the same status, and we cannot say that one evolves "to" reinforce the other. The evolution of the association itself can be seen as adaptive, in the sense that (directly or indirectly) it raises the mean fitness of the population. However, it can involve incompatibilities at any stage of hybridization . . . --Nicholas H. Barton & Maria Angeles Rodriguez de Cara, May 2009. Evolution 63(5): 1172.
Two additional attributes that make islands lasting focal points for evolutionary studies--their relative youth and geographical isolation--were clearly identified by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection, in his 1881 book Island Life. First, many islands are either volcanic in origin or have been completely under water at some point in their history. These islands emerge above the ocean surface as blank slates for colonization and subsequent evolutionary diversification, on which the development of ecological and evolutionary systems can be observed from their beginnings. Each island represents a new opportunity for living forms to appear and proliferate. The first colonists, finding untapped resources and lacking the constraints of a resident biota, often diversify in novel directions. This evolutionary idiosyncrasy is enhanced by unbalanced colonization--strong dispersal abilities are not evenly distributed across the ecological spectrum of continental biotas--with the result that some ecological niches on islands are filled by diversification rather than colonization . . . --Jonathan B. Losos & Robert E. Ricklefs, 12 February 2009. Nature 457(7231): 830-831.
Wallace, who promoted Strickland's methods, wrote that every systematic work should include diagrams,"without which it is often impossible to tell whether two families follow each other because the author thinks them allied, or merely because the exigencies of a consecutive series compels him so to place them". In essence, Wallace claims that without diagrams the reader cannot know whether information is meaningful or is simply a product of the representational medium's limitations; Darwin capitalizes on this basic ambiguity within his diagram itself . . . --Heather Brink-Roby, Winter 2009. Victorian Studies 51: 247-273.
. . . Many questions are involved in Wallace's Line, but it represents a line of major faunal break between the Oriental and the Australian regions. According to Sweet & Pianka (2003), varanid species are diversified to the east of Wallace's Line while this side lacks carnivorous placental mammals. The diversity of varanid species and that of carnivorous mammals are virtually inverted to the west of Wallace's Line, a region that harbours nearly 20 mammalian carnivores and that lacks small varanid lizards. These observations suggest that the coexistence of mammalian carnivores and varanid lizards is limited because they are too similar as predators . . . --Marc Augé & Richard Smith, January 2009. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 155: 148-170.
The little that we have learned about the likelihood of reciprocal selection operating in this system helps to explain the observation of extreme trait exaggeration. However, directional selection for trait exaggeration does not act in isolation. In addition to escalating reciprocal selection, there are a theoretically infinite number of other selective forces that simultaneously act on proboscis and tube length and some of these must serve to balance the forces that favor trait elongation (Wallace 1867). Understanding some of these forces and how they vary in strength across the landscape will be important in explaining the observation of twofold variability in proboscis and tube length. For example, one of the many costs of longer proboscis might include increased handling time. It was observed that flies feeding on windy days required several attempts before succeeding in inserting their proboscides into flowers. Possibly windier conditions in the South might lead to stronger balancing selection at this latitude . . . --Anton Pauw, Jaco Stofberg & Richard J. Waterman, January 2009. Evolution 63(1): 275.
Floral trait recognition and pollinator consistency have been extensively studied, i.e., insect pollinators tend to exhaust one floral morph for resources before moving on to other floral morphs. Indeed, A. R. Wallace (1889) may have been the first to suggest that sympatric plant species pollinated by "flower constant" pollinators will profit from having different floral recognition traits. Consequently, we would expect statistically significant correlations among the first appearances of critical floral traits and the diversification of the flowering plants and their insect pollinators. As noted, the first appearances of floral traits and the diversification of flowering plant species are significantly correlated. Likewise, the first appearances of key floral traits and insect families in the fossil record are significantly correlated . . . as are angiosperm species number and insect family number . . . --William L. Crepet & Karl J. Niklas, January 2009. American Journal of Botany 96(1): 372.
. . . Despite of their seemingly large number, aerosol particles are true trace constituents of the atmosphere, their mass fraction typically being below one part per billion and thereby much below that of any important gaseous climate agent. Nevertheless they may have a profound influence on our climate. This perception is not at all new, only 20 years after Aitken discovered the importance of aerosols as condensation nuclei, Alfred R. Wallace noted in 1898: "But in all densely-populated countries there is an enormous artificial production of dust.. This superabundance of dust . . . must almost certainly produce some effect on our climate; and the particular effect it seems calculated to produce is the increase of cloud and fog, but not necessarily any increase of rain." . . . --J. Feichter & T. Leisner, 2009. The European Physical Journal, Special Topics 176(1): 84.
. . . Non-exclusive hypotheses have traditionally been proposed to account for spectacular woodiness examples in the neo-flora of oceanic islands (Wallace, 1878 . . . ). Selection for successful pollination with large, long-lasting inflorescences, niche competition among initial colonizers, and promotion of the outbreeding ratio to overcome inbreeding depression may be related to Echium longevity and woodiness. Irrespective of the causes generating woodiness, the trait utility of this character is manifested by the large number of woody plant groups that rapidly evolved from herbaceous ancestors not only in Macaronesia (Sonchus, Isoplexis, Aeonium group, Pericallis), but also in the Hawaiian (silversword alliance, Schieda), Galápagos (Scallesia), and Juan Fernández (Dendroseris) archipelagos . . . --Federico García-Maroto, 2009. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evoution 52(3): 572.
. . . The current extinction crisis and the extent of anthropogenic alteration of natural habitats have reached alarming proportions . . . Potential hindrances to global assessment of priority list candidates have been divided into eight categories: (1) the extreme heterogeneity of existing data; (2) the restricted availability of relevant data and lack of information exchange between scientists and conservationists; (3) the uncertainty in species number and taxonomic division of the given taxon (Linnean shortfall); (4) the fragmentary knowledge of distributions (Wallacean shortfall); (5) incomplete or erroneous red-listing across the entire distribution of a given taxon; (6) the lack of homogenous and reliable population trend data; (7) the lack of exhaustive information on observed and potential threats; and finally (8) the incomplete general biological knowledge of a given taxon (e.g., its reproduction biology, genetic diversity, dispersal parameters, etc.). It has been demonstrated that Linnean and Wallacean shortfalls are among the most serious problems in modern conservation biology and biogeography, and that the majority of deficits in knowledge during any global conservation status assessment results from these two shortfalls . . . --Gregor Kozlowski et al., 2009. Biodiversity and Conservation 18(9): 2308.
It has long been recognized that Thailand is subdivided into two zoogeographic subregions with the Indochinese subregion to the north and Sundaic subregion to the south with a transition zone in the Isthmus of Kra. Distribution patterns corresponding to this division have been observed in a range of biota including rodents, insects, reptiles and plants. Initially, Wallace (1876) had placed the transition zone at 13-14ºN, whereas Wells fixed the avifaunal transition zone at about 10º30'N, in the Isthmus of Kra. Subsequently, Hughes et al., based on forest birds, found a highly significant transition zone at 11-12ºN, in the north of the peninsula. The distribution patterns of the three species [considered here] were of considerable interest since they strongly support the existing concepts of a subregional division . . . --Pipat Soisook et al., December 2008. Acta Chiropterologica 10(2): 238.
The powerful effect of clinging on the emotional behavior of infant nonhuman primates had been known for many years. It was mentioned by Van Wagenen in her recommendations and in many other naturalistic accounts of primate infants. One of my favorite quotations is from Alfred Russel Wallace, who describes an "artificial mother" of buffalo skin he devised for an orphan orangutan (1869). All of us associated with the nursery project were impressed by the strength of the infants' emotional attachment to their cloths. When I suggested to Harlow that we devise an experiment pitting our monkeys' responses to the feeding station against their attachment to a claspable object, he urged me to proceed. Accordingly, I designed an experiment around two mother surrogates that were the functional counterparts of the diaper and the feeding rack. These prototypes had the bodies of the final versions, although they lacked the famous distinctive faces, which were added later . . . --William A. Mason, December 2008. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 42(4): 390-391.
. . . Wallace wrote that "[i]n the equable equatorial zone there is no . . . struggle against climate. Every form of vegetation has become alike adapted to its genial heat and ample moisture, which has probably changed little even throughout geological periods". We now know that lowland tropical climates have changed substantially and relentlessly ever since species-rich forests resembling modern ones first occupied the lowland wet tropics in the mid-Tertiary. Although the notion of long-term constancy of tropical climates is now universally dismissed, Wallace's view of tropical climates as benign lingers on, underlying the apparently widespread conviction that "[m]any tropical species may well be able to withstand higher temperature[s] than those in which they currently exist." . . . --Robert K. Colwell et al., 10 October 2008. Science 322(5899): 259.
. . . we must consider the possibility that hominids in general and humans in particular have partially escaped from classic Darwinian selective control of some aspects of the genome, and that humans have even escaped the final stage of Baldwinian genetic hard-wiring of long-standing species-specific learned behaviors. This might in turn help to explain the unusual degree of exaptation displayed by the human brain, presented as 'Wallace's Conundrum' in Box 6. The advantages of such novel changes are flexibility, plasticity, more rapidly developing population diversity and greater opportunities--but the disadvantages are that genomes cannot recover what has been irrevocably lost, and cultural advantages can be sensitive to the whims of history and fate . . . --Ajit Varki, Daniel H. Geschwind & Evan E. Eichler, October 2008. Nature Reviews Genetics 9(10): 758.
The importance of avian egg coloration for crypsis, once accepted as a general principle (Wallace 1890, Cott 1940, von Haartman 1957, Harrison 1968), has recently been questioned because tests of this hypothesis have often failed to support a role for egg coloration in deterring predation. As a result, more recent work has emphasized the importance of nest crypsis as the primary mediator of clutch survival . . . --David Westmoreland, September 2008. Journal of Field Ornithology 79(3): 263.
Evolved mimicry of hawks by parasitic cuckoos. Wallace (1889) suggested that the resemblance was an example of protective mimicry, which might reduce attacks from hawks, noting that cuckoos were otherwise 'an exceedingly weak and defenceless group of birds'. Prolonged periods of surveillance for host nests, sometimes from exposed perches, might make parasitic cuckoos especially vulnerable to hawk attack. In Asia, drongo-cuckoos (Surniculus lugubris) may likewise gain from protective mimicry of drongos Dicrurus spp., which are extremely aggressive to larger birds, including birds of prey and crows (Wallace 1889). Alternatively, hawk mimicry might influence host behaviour, either by frightening or luring hosts away to facilitate egg laying or by inducing mobbing to help the cuckoo locate host nests, which may be especially advantageous in open country with few secret vantage points . . . --N. B. Davies & J. A. Welbergen, August 2008. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 275(1644): 1818.
. . . It has been argued that Ostriches lay white eggs because they are powerful enough to defend their nests (Wallace 1889). However, when nests are unattended, such big eggs are quite visible on the ground to both mammalian and avian predators. In our visibility study, a naturally white egg was seen first by the observer, suggesting that the brown eggs are better concealed. Ostriches would therefore have derived a selective advantage in the face of predators by having brown eggs. Our results therefore are consistent with the prediction, and support Bertram and Burger's conclusion, that white Ostrich eggs minimise overheating, but are prone to predation . . . --Flora John Magige et al., July 2008. Journal of Ornithology 149(3): 327.
Why there are so many species in tropical rainforests is one of the most complex and debated questions in evolutionary biology. Among the mechanisms that have been proposed to explain diversification in the tropics is the idea that mode of speciation might differ with latitude. A long-standing hypothesis, first proposed by Wallace (1878) and developed by Dobzhansky and Schemske, is that biotic interactions play a greater role in the adaptation of tropical populations than do abiotic factors, whereas the converse holds for temperate-zone populations . . . --G. Léotard et al., July 2008. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 21(4): 1133.
Within each of his major biogeographical regions, Wallace (1876) distinguished between four subregions. For the Palearctic he recognized a Northern European, Southern European, Siberian, and Manchourian subregion. However, it had already been pointed out by contemporary workers that Wallace's separation of the European and Siberian subregions, for example, was based on insufficient data and that the criteria used were more geographic than faunistic. Nevertheless, in later years Wallace's boundary between the European and Siberian subregions, running along the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, has been used to demarcate western subsections of the Palearctic Region . . . --Mansour Aliabadian et al., 2008. Contributions to Zoology 77(2): 101.
. . . Wallace writes that, among human beings, there is no evident distinction between the mental powers of the most primitive and the most advanced . . . From this manner of observation it follows, Wallace argued, that characteristic human abilities must be latent in primitive man, existing somehow as an unopened gift—the entryway to a world that primitive man himself does not possess and would not recognize. But the idea that a biological species might possess latent powers makes no sense in Darwinian terms. It suggests the forbidden doctrine that evolutionary advantages were frontloaded, far away and long ago. It is in conflict with the Darwinian principle that just as useful genes are selected for cultivation and advancement, useless genes are subject to negative selection pressure and must therefore drain away into the sands of time. Wallace identified a frank conflict between his own theory and what seemed to him to be obvious facts about the solidity and unchangeability of human nature. That conflict persists; it has not been resolved . . . --David Berlinski, April 2008. Commentary 125(4): 35.
. . . Alfred Russel Wallace (1853) was perhaps the first naturalist to write about the white-water, clear-water, and black-water river types of the Amazon basin and to relate the color of tributaries to the nature of their drainage basins. Wallace astutely linked the sediment load of white-water tributaries to erosion in their steep Andean headwaters, and identified clear-water rivers with the crystalline "mountains of Brazil" (the Guyana and Brazilian shields). He knew that black-water rivers emerged from lowland sources, and he correctly attributed their dark coloring to leaching of "decaying leaves, roots, and other vegetable matter" (Wallace 1853) . . . --Michael E. McClain & Robert J. Nainan, April 2008. BioScience 58(4): 325.
While he maintained that 'social heredity' was consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection, Baldwin followed Wallace in claiming that humans had evolved to such a degree of conscious intelligence that they had freed themselves from the pressures of natural selection, and surmounted instinctual constraints on behavior: 'intelligence and the social life which it makes possible so far control the acquisitions of life to limit the action of natural selection as a law of evolution.' In this fashion Baldwin defended human freedom against the hereditarian determinism of Darwin's theory of evolution, by claiming that thought and will had emancipated humans from the constraints of natural selection . . . --John D. Greenwood, February 2008. History of the Human Sciences 21(1): 114.
Later behaviorists rejected the role of consciousness and purpose in human and animal psychology and behavior--with the notable exception of Edward C. Tolman--but continued to stress the critical role of plasticity and learning in adaptive behavior. They also depreciated the explanatory role of inherited instincts, which became the object of sustained critiques by behaviorist psychologists in the 1920s. Like functional psychologists (and Wallace), behaviorists came to believe that humans had developed (through evolution by natural selection) to such a degree that they could surmount the constraints of their biological inheritance, and exploit their intelligence to create a scientific psychology devoted to the further advancement and improvement of the human condition . . . --John D. Greenwood, February 2008. History of the Human Sciences 21(1): 118.
. . . In other words, as Wallace so clearly realized, human symbolic reasoning is not simply an extrapolation of this extended history, simply a little bit more of the same. It is, instead, something truly new and unpredicted by what went before—even by the increase in the mass of metabolically expensive brain tissue that seems to have independently characterized several lineages within the genus Homo, though it was clearly dependent on this development. And while Wallace was regrettably unable to profit from our modern perspective, today it is possible to see that the origin of modern human consciousness must have been an emergent event, whereby an entirely unanticipated level of complexity was achieved by a sheer chance coincidence of acquisitions . . . --Ian Tattersall, 2008. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 3: 111.
Researchers of animal coloration have noted the perplexing nature of egg pigmentation in open-nesting birds (i.e., birds whose nests are not in cavities or enclosed by a dome). One of the founders of the theory of natural selection wrote "the colours of birds' eggs have long been a difficulty on the theory of adaptive coloration, because, in so many cases it has not been easy to see what can be the use of the particular colours, which are often so bright and conspicuous that they seem intended to attract attention rather than to be concealed" (Wallace 1890). Wallace went on to argue that bird eggs are well camouflaged when viewed from below via light penetrating the nest . . . --David Westmoreland & Richard A. Kiltie, November 2007. Journal of Avian Biology 38(6): 686-687.
Alfred Wallace, Darwin's contemporary and rival, argued that when species hybridize, natural selection favors individuals who are more fussy about whom they mate with, which therefore increases female discrimination of males from different species. Modern evolutionary genetics has questioned the importance of the "Wallace effect" (also known as "reinforcement") because genetic recombination between female discrimination and male trait genes would scramble combinations of loci that favor speciation. Several solutions to this have been proposed, including close genetic linkage of such loci. A simpler possibility is sexual imprinting, which causes a female to prefer males that resemble her father . . . --Michael G. Ritchie, 5 October 2007. Science 318: 54.
While Chamupati largely ignored Darwin, whose views of Hindu scriptures were hardly flattering, Chamupati was attracted to the ideas of Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of evolution. Chamupati noted Wallace's praise of the mind of the Vedic hymn makers who, despite the "very limited knowledge [of Nature] at this early period, . . . could not have been in any way inferior to those of the best of our religious teachers and poets—to our Miltons and our Tennysons." For Chamupati and other followers of Dayananda, Wallace was far more congenial than Darwin, for, despite Wallace's espousal of some of the most theologically challenging aspects of evolutionary theory, namely, random variation and natural selection, Wallace made considerable exceptions. He insisted on some sort of "spiritual influx" to account for the origin of life as well as of mind and morality. Accordingly, he was a much safer corroborator of Vedic insights, at least in Chamupati's views . . . --C. Mackenzie Brown, September 2007. Zygon 42(3): 718.
Using the theoretical framework of evolution by natural selection, Wallace developed Crawfurd's proposal that the two distinct aboriginal races were the Malays and Papuans. From his observations, Wallace postulated an ethnological line dividing the Malayan and Polynesian races. The position of this line east of the famous line dividing the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan bioregions demonstrated Crawfurd's hypothesis that the civilized Malays were pushing the savage Papuans back from their natural border. Wallace's ethnological line functioned to support his representation of two races as radically different from each other, not only in terms of physical characteristics but also in what Wallace called 'moral characteristics' (1869: 588) . . . --Daniel P. S. Goh, September 2007. International Journal of Cultural Studies 10(3): 328.
Darwin's originality and priority are, strictly speaking, separate questions. One can be original and yet fail to achieve priority if, for example, someone else comes forward first in print with the same theory without one's knowledge. Such, in fact, is more or less the case with A. R. Wallace. No one, least of all Darwin, doubted that Wallace arrived at his theory independently of Darwin, but Darwin was proven by history to have brought the theory into print—if not exactly publication—first. Nevertheless, Darwin often conflated the two issues in his private correspondence, referring to his originality and priority almost as if they were interchangeable ideas . . . --Curtis N. Johnson, Fall 2007. Journal of the History of Biology 40(3): 533.
At a given latitude, the most striking feature of avian seasonality is the consistency with which the successive stages of reproduction, moult and migration take place each year—not only on a populational scale, but also within individuals. Day-length—the most consistent sources of temporal information about the environment—was suggested to play a role in the scheduling of avian annual cycles, in particular of migration, as early as 1876 (e.g. Palmén 1876; Wallace 1876) . . . --Timothy Coppack, 23 June 2007. Journal of Ornithology 148, Suppl. 2: S460.
[concerning the organization of a forest preserve] . . . Although Wallace's proposal is controversial and raises environmental concerns, it is important to recognize that he was focused on key ecological issues. He fought to preserve in an unsullied state the forests that had not been cleared. He also recognized that severe ecological destruction had been wrought on the state of nature. And in this, he contributed to a philosophy of ecological restoration by raising the issue of how we are to address anthropogenic environmental problems. In "Epping Forest," Wallace documented that environmental degradation had taken place, as profiteers and lords of manors had destroyed whole areas of the forest. He provided a reasoned discussion of the different temperate forests in the Northern Hemisphere and an argument that recognized how the species found in a particular location are, in part, influenced by the much longer, geological, and climate history of the earth. In this, Wallace provided important insights and helped open a realm of debate . . . --Brett Clark & Richard York, June 2007. Organization & Environment 20(2): 231.
Wallace found fault with two aspects of domestication as a heuristic for understanding adaptation in nature. He argued first that the analogy was flawed: artificial selection requires an intelligent selector, whereas no such force acts in natural systems. Additionally, he insisted that the selection itself was fundamentally different, leading to intrinsically different kinds of variation. Domesticated species, he wrote, "are abnormal, irregular, artificial; they are subject to varieties which never occur and never can occur in a state of nature: their very existence depends altogether on human care; so far are many of them removed from that just proportion of faculties, that true balance of organization, by means of which alone as an animal left to its own resources can preserve its existence and continue its race." Both Wallace's lines of argument find modern audiences, from those who see a fundamental difference between the conscious selection of humans and natural processes to those who argue that variation in domesticated species differs from that in nature . . . --Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, Peter L. Morrell & Brandon S. Gaut, 15 May 2007. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, Suppl. 1: 8641-8642.
The coloration of this genus of weevils is among the most astonishing visual effects displayed in nature. Many animal species that are distasteful to predators have evolved aposematism (they have a distinctive, conspicuous coloration, which functions as a warning signal, advertising their inedibility to potential predators). Wallace notes in a passage on the genus Pachyrrhynchus that many weevils have excessive hard integuments, which render them inedible to most birds, and our own dissections of this species confirm their extremely tough exoskeleton. It seems likely, therefore, that the stark coloration of this species is a form of aposematism. Further evidence in support of this comes from the finding that a number of edible species, such as the longicorn beetles Doliops curculionides and Doliops geometrica and the cricket Scepastus pachyrhynchoides mimic various Pachyrrhynchus species weevils . . . --Victoria Welch et al., 30 April 2007. Physical Review E 75(4): 7.
Several features of the results give some reassurance because they support plausible notions and other evidence that most nonsynonymous mutations and many nonsynonymous polymorphisms are deleterious. Our analysis implies that some 19 of 20 new amino acid replacements are deleterious with an average fitness reduction on the order of five times the reciprocal of the effective population size. These estimates pertain only to the subset of nonsynonymous mutations whose effect are not so severe as to preclude their becoming polymorphic, but they support other evidence that selection against deleterious mutations plays in key role in shaping patterns of genetic variation in Drosophila. Likewise, we estimate that [about] 7 of 10 amino acid replacements that are polymorphic in samples are deleterious. One feature of our results that might animate some surprise is the high proportion of amino acid fixations between species that show positive selection, [about] 95% in our data. This finding seems to reflect what Wallace called the "overwhelming odds against the less fit" . . . --Stanley A. Sawyer et al., 17 April 2007. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104(16): 6509.
Given that phenomena strive for reality--that is, to become distinct--then there must by default be a process whereby constitutive elements are demarcated as 'included' and, of course, an opposite process, whereby elements become the 'excluded'. According to [Charles] Fort: "It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called 'being' is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded." This process leaves a trace, however, in the sense that one cannot subsequently provide a full and comprehensive description of the thing in question. Even Darwin, Fort argued, 'was never able to tell what he meant by a "species".' Echoing Wallace's (1875) earlier concerns over the close-mindedness of modern science, Fort argued that this body of knowledge was itself but one instance of localization, wherein an attempt is made to separate out those explanations which are deemed acceptable and proper from those that are not. The raw material of the world becomes organized and interpreted to fit into preconceived notions of how things should work. Slowly but surely, this drive towards explanation causes a plethora of facts and events to emerge from this chaotic landscape, each of which is seen to form part of an overarching pattern. 'A theory feels its way through surrounding ignorance,' he suggested, like 'a wagon train feels its way across a prairie.' And yet, 'Science relates to real knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a department store, or the development of a nation: that all are assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean' . . . --Deborah Dixon, April 2007. Cultural Geographies 14(2): 193.
The conspicuous displays that warn predators of defenses carried by potential prey have been of interest to evolutionary biologists from the time of Wallace and Darwin to the present day. Although most studies implicitly assume that these "aposematic" warning signals simply indicate the presence of some repellent defense such as a toxin, it has been speculated that the intensity of the signal might reliably indicate the strength of defense so that, for example, the nastiest prey might "shout loudest" about their unprofitability. Recent phylogenetic and empirical studies of Dendrobatid frogs provide contradictory views, in one instance showing a positive correlation between toxin levels and conspicuousness, in another showing a breakdown of this relationship. In this paper we present an optimization model, which can potentially account for these divergent results . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, March 2007. Evolution 61(3): 623.
. . . Kantian philosophers do not have the exclusive right to transcendental arguments, which can be and are used by philosophers and scientists alike. For instance, physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose have invoked the anthropic principle, the weak version of which was anticipated by Alfred Russel Wallace (1904, pp 256-257): "Such a vast and complex universe as that which we know exists around us, may have been absolutely required . . . in order to produce a world that should be precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development of life culminating in man." More recently, the biologists John Bonner and Richard Lewontin have offered transcendental arguments for the modular organization of development as a requirement for evolvability . . . --Werner Callebaut, March 2007. Acta Biotheoretica 55(1): 77-78.
In his extensive monograph of the genus, Talbot, building on the earlier work of Wallace (1867), Dixey (1894) and others, originally divided Delias into twenty species-groups, according to differences in form of the androconia, male genitalia and, to a lesser extent, wing pattern. Talbot noted, however, that the Australian endemic D. aganippe, provisionally placed in the belisama group, 'seems somewhat isolated' on structural grounds and is 'placed doubtfully in this group'. Wallace (1867: 349) similarly remarked that, 'It is difficult locate this common Australian species', and placed D. aganippe in the belladonna group . . . --Michael F. Braby & Naomi E. Pierce, January 2007. Systematic Entomology 32(1): 6.
. . . In his notes, essays and correspondence from the field, Wallace consistently emphasized species and genera, and separated these descriptions from his rarer and briefer discussions of individual organisms. The first passage above, from an 1857 article describing collecting in the Aru Islands, is typical: Wallace provides an enthusiastic litany of species, families and genera. It is easy to miss his distinction at the end of the passage, between families, species and individuals, in terms of "abundance." Yet this too is characteristic of Wallace's writings from the field. At a given locality, families contain more or fewer species, and species contain more or fewer individual organisms. Wallace did not collapse or confuse these levels, but carefully distinguished between different sorts of abundance. In general, his natural history writing emphasized species, with clear distinctions between individual organisms and groups . . . --Melinda B. Fagan, 2007. Journal of the History of Biology [electronic file].
The contrast in the two naturalists' writings from the field thus has two aspects. First, Wallace emphasized groups of organisms, while Darwin described many details of individual organisms. Second, Wallace clearly distinguished between groups and individuals, while Darwin was more ambiguous. Both aspects can be explained by differences in natural history practice. Wallace and Darwin's contrasting habits and working routines in the field were shaped in turn by their different circumstances and motivations. The two naturalists went to the field with different training and social connections, different finances and responsibilities, and different theoretical interests . . . --Melinda B. Fagan, 2007. Journal of the History of Biology [electronic file].
The use of soil animals as protein source in human nutrition is still widely represented in indigenous populations in most regions of the world and was first reported by Wallace (1853, 1889) more than 100 years ago . . . --T. Decaëns et al., November 2006. European Journal of Soil Biology 42 (Suppl. 1): S26.
. . . Knowledge about biodiversity remains inadequate and plagued by the so-called Linnean and Wallacean shortfalls (Lomolino, 2004; Whittaker et al., 2005; see also Brown & Lomolino, 1998). The first refers to the fact that most species living on Earth were still not formally described, whereas the second is defined by the fact that, for the majority of taxa, geographical distributions are also poorly understood and contain many gaps. As recently pointed out by Whittaker et al. (2005), these two shortfalls are scale dependent, both on evolutionary and on ecological dimensions. Although work done since the 18th century allows us to make general predictions of broad-scale diversity gradients based on current climate effects (see Hawkins, 2004 and references therein), we are far from a predictive theory capable of predicting species diversity based on complex environmental and historical factors acting at different scales in time and space . . . --Luis Mauricio Bini et al., September 2006. Diversity and Distributions 12(5): 475.
Here I present a critical review of the literature which, when combined with the results of some comparative analyses, suggests that just a few selective agents can explain much of the variation in egg appearance. Ancestrally, bird eggs were probably white and immaculate. Ancient diversification in nest location, and hence in the clutch's vulnerability to attack by predators, can explain basic differences between bird families in egg appearance. The ancestral white egg has been retained by species whose nests are safe from attack by predators, while those that have moved to a more vulnerable nest site are now more likely to lay brown eggs, covered in speckles, just as Wallace hypothesized more than a century ago. Even blue eggs might be cryptic in a subset of nests built in vegetation. It is possible that some species have subsequently turned these ancient adaptations to new functions, for example to signal female quality, to protect eggs from damaging solar radiation, or to add structural strength to shells when calcium is in short supply. The threat of predation, together with the use of varying nest sites, appears to have increased the diversity of egg colouring seen among species within families, and among clutches within species. Brood parasites and their hosts have probably secondarily influenced the diversity of egg appearance. Each drives the evolution of the other's egg colour and patterning, as hosts attempt to avoid exploitation by rejecting odd-looking eggs from their nests, and parasites attempt to outwit their hosts by laying eggs that will escape detection . . . --R. M. Kilner, August 2006. Biological Reviews 81(3): 383.
Wallace's hypothesis for egg colouring is intuitively appealing because it can explain why so many bird eggs are white or speckled or some shade of brown in colour, and because it is consistent with observations that more cryptic offspring are less vulnerable to attack by predators. Furthermore, Lack (1958) found that a species' nest site could explain some of the variation in egg patterning and colouring amongst the Turdinae. He found that hole-nesters were more likely to lay white immaculate eggs, whereas about 80% of birds whose nests were placed in exposed sites covered their eggs in red or brown speckling, which he interpreted as an adaptation for concealment. However, experimental evidence in support of Wallace's hypothesis is rather mixed . . . --R. M. Kilner, August 2006, Biological Reviews 81(3): 385.
Why do organisms age and die? This question has long vexed biologists. Alfred Russel Wallace first suggested that ageing and death might be adaptive (Weismann 1882, Wallace 1889). In the 1860s Wallace wrote "Natural selection . . . in many cases favours such races as die almost immediately after they have left successors." Despite some early support, this adaptive view of ageing and death was soon dismissed, to such an extent that in the 1920s it was labelled a "perverse extension of the theory of natural selection" (Pearl 1922). This has remained the case since with almost all biological gerontologists believing that "longevity determination is under genetic control only indirectly," and that ". . . ageing is a product of evolutionary neglect, not evolutionary intent." Today, there are three largely competing theories used to explain ageing; mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy and disposable soma . . . --Calvin Dytham & Justin M. J. Travis, June 2006. Oikos 113(3): 531.
When you ask beginning students why we age, they usually respond that physical decay culls the old to make way for the young, says evolutionary biologist Ophélie Ronce of the University of Montpelier in France. That explanation carries a long pedigree—it dates back to Alfred Russel Wallace the co-discoverer of natural selection—but most modern evolutionists spurn it . . . --Mitch Leslie, 3 May 2006. Science of Aging Knowledge Environment 2006 No. 8: nf12.
During his collecting expedition in the Rio Negro and tributary Rio Uaupés basins (1850 to 1852), Wallace collected and sketched a specimen that was most likely Tetranematichthys wallacei. His pencil sketch of the specimen (Wallace, 2002: fig. 122) clearly illustrated the elongate dorsal-fin spine, the ossified, curved maxillary barbels, the elongation of the anterior rays of the anal fin, and the overall form of the head and body characteristic of nuptial males of Tetranematichthys (note: the orientation of the fish in the illustration is such that the mandibular barbels are not apparent). Given that T. wallacei is the only species of the genus known to occur in the Rio Negro and Rio Uaupés basins, we identify Wallace's specimen as that species . . . --Richard P. Vari & Carl J. Ferraris, Jr., May 2006. Copeia 2006(2): 176.
. . . It was not just that science was monoparadigmatic; its monoculturalism extended beyond the surveillance of the gaze to the fact that the creation of the object had to deny the subjective self and its knowledge. In relating to the other, modern western science either eliminated, assimilated, ghettoized or museumized them. Science had no place for defeated knowledges; the idea of an alternative science arose as a charter to challenge the current politics of knowledge. It was that great dissenting scientist Alfred Wallace who formulated the problem long before Thomas Kuhn. In his Wonderful Century (Wallace, 1898), a portrait of the achievements of 19th-century science, Wallace begins with a celebration of western science and then observes that a science at its moment of dominance tends to be coercive and to ignore competing theories and hypotheses. Wallace believed that the success of science made it ethically and cognitively imperative for the scientist to invent and explore alternatives . . . --Shiv Visvanathan, March-May 2006. Theory, Culture & Society 23(2-3): 166.
Wallace's field practices fit best into the survey tradition, which flourished during the shift from the 19th-century armchair to intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the early 20th century . . . Both survey and intensive ethnography were attempts to shift knowledge production into the field. Long before researchers gave field ethnography rather than armchair theorizing the highest prestige, Wallace was developing a greater role for regional survey work . . . --Jeremy Vetter, March 2006. Journal of the History of Biology 39(1): 98.
For more than a century, a debate has raged as to whether death constitutes an intentional ontogenetic program, the so-called Wallace-Weismann hypothesis, or the passive result of an inexorable accumulation of defects. By accounting for benefits to kin, the former assertion becomes more plausible. The inability to identify definable discreet mechanistic pathways for programmed death has provided a major source for criticism of this theory. Although evolutionary dynamics and pluralism may both contribute to the Darwinian value of phenoptosis, intuitive appeal persists in the notion of an oligarchy of functional hubs underpinning the many proximate mechanisms of phenoptosis. Indeed, given its processes' central roles in apoptosis, the mitochondrion may represent an ideal candidate to serve as one such hub on the level of the organelle. The induction of cellular damage by reactive oxygen species has been noted to be a mechanism of self-termination that encompasses all scales of biology. However, we believe that identification of hubs that operate on the level of systems as opposed to that of subcellular components may afford greater potential utility for modification and correction. Endocrine pathways, particularly those involving reproduction and circadian rhythms, have already been implicated in this regard . . . --Anthony J. Yun, Patrick Y. Lee & John Doux, 2006. Medical Hypotheses 67(5): 1082.
Whewell (1853) was the first to propose that the Solar System has a habitable region comparable to the modern conception of the CHZ [Circumstellar Habitable Zone]. He termed it the "Temperate Zone." In an impressive treatise for the period, Wallace (1903) enumerated several planetary habitability factors, including obliquity, mass, distance from the Sun, atmospheric composition, and proportion of water to land . . . --Guillermo Gonzalez, December 2005. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 35(6): 556.
. . . In this paper, we describe individual-based evolutionary model of aposematism and defense in spiny and poisonous species. We show that with spines, aposematism is easy to explain by a route in which predator biases are not out of sequence. Thus, aposematism evolves in our simulations if predators: (1) can recognize spines as dangerous (because they are common in prey populations anyway), (2) can use conspicuous markings to better notice and evaluate the significance of spines (resulting in cautious handling), and (3) can use conspicuousness as a cue for distinctiveness such that animals with colourful spines are less easily confused with nonspiny edible prey (as Wallace, , originally suggested for the general function of aposematism). . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, December 2005. Evolution 59(12): 2501.
. . . In the past, applying the logic of adaptationism to such central and seemingly unique human capacities has often triggered strong resistance. Wallace himself, although the co-creator of natural selection theory, considered self-consciousness as too complex to be one of its outcomes (Wallace, 1889). Note that his main argument was that the sense of self seemed to constitute a radical departure from other forms of phenomenal awareness. But this argument itself relied on the assumption that there is an integral self-system. Given that assumption, it seems indeed difficult to consider the self as the result of a slow, incremental process of natural selection, each step of which is conducive to better reproductive potential. It is by contrast more tractable to evaluate the potential evolutionary background of separate self-relevant systems . . . --Pascal Boyer, Philip Robbins & Anthony I. Jack, December 2005. Consciousness and Cognition 14(4): 653.
As is often the case in evolutionary ecology, mathematical models have outpaced empirical data and the theoretical basis of the Wallace Effect has been established in more than 100 mathematical models. Supporting field data are less common, however, and are rarely unambiguous. Part of the problem is in not knowing the origin of the supposedly split populations: the only way properly to test the basis for sympatric speciation would be to experimentally manipulate a population, but the timescales of speciation are too long for such a study to observe incipient speciation within the lifespan of a single research project . . . --Jeff Ollerton, 3 August 2005. Heredity 95: 181.
In between Mill and Edgeworth, the classical economists' notion of sympathy was attacked, and was largely overcome. The co-discover of the Law of Natural Selection, A. R. Wallace, had argued in 1864 that the doctrine of natural selection did not apply to humans because of ethical concerns generated by human sympathy. Our morals do not allow us to let the infirm perish (Wallace, 1864, clxii). In response, the co-founder (with Francis Galton) of eugenics, W. R. Greg, insisted that if sympathy blocked the 'salutary' effects of the survival of the fittest, such sentiments should be suppressed. So, when the 'law' of 'natural selection' failed for humans--because of sympathy and ethics--the eugenic thinkers who so influence post-classical economics proposed to rid humanity of sympathy. --Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy, August 2005. Canadian Journal of Economics 38(3): 950.
Another English socialist of a very different temper, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of natural selection, took a different tack. The humane Wallace was a reformer but also a stout defender of Darwinian inheritance. So, although he believed that English society was increasingly dysgenic, Wallace rejected compulsory eugenics as elitist and barbarous. Wallace proposed that eugenic ends could be realized by an expansion of women's education and their political and economic freedom. Like Mill, he believed that the law could reduce women's economic dependency, which, he argued, would work to reduce the incentive for women to make dysgenic marriages. "Progress is still possible, nay, is certain," said Wallace, "by . . . that mode of selection which will inevitably come into action through the ever-increasing freedom, joined with the higher education of women" (1892). He envisioned selection as "effected through the agency of female choice in marriage" (1890). In leaving "the improvement of the race to the cultivated minds and pure instincts of the Women of the Future" (1890), the idealistic Wallace partly anticipates the eugenic feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman . . . --Thomas C. Leonard, July 2005. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64(3): 782.
. . . At present, this genus of tropical and subtropical America, distributed from the central part of Mexico to the north of Argentina, including the West Indies, consists of ca. 350 species and is confined mainly to humid forests or grows along the edges of rivers. Its accumulated species diversity may be explained by gradual addition through geological time. This process was proposed by Wallace (1878) and turned out to result in greater accrual of species in tropical zones than in temperate regions. This, as explained by the "museum model," suggests that a stable tropical climate permitted the buildup of species through time . . . --L. Calvillo-Canadell & S. R. S. Cevallos-Ferriz, July 2005. International Journal of Plant Sciences 166(4): 688.
Wallace (1878) was among the first to argue that the low diversity of the polar regions is largely a reflection of past episodes of glaciations and climatic change that repeatedly drove many high-latitude taxa to extinction, leaving little opportunity for diversity to recover, and this idea has had subsequent proponents . . . --Emma E. Goldberg et al., June 2005. American Naturalist 165(6): 628.
The conditions under which aposematism, the conspicuous coloration of unpalatable or otherwise defended prey, could evolve have long been a topic of speculation (Wallace 1867; Poulton 1890). A perceived roadblock to the initial establishment of rare, aposematic mutants is the intense predation to which they would be subjected by naive predators. Conspicuous prey, albeit defended, are much more likely to be seen by predators, and if predators are unaware of their defence (and do not show neophobia), then such prey are more likely to be attacked on encounter. This means that rare conspicuous mutants of defended prey should, on average, be attacked more frequently than their cryptic conspecifics. A possible solution to this problem, first suggested by Fisher (1930), is that gregariousness could facilitate the evolution of distastefulness (and hence aposematism). Thus, if prey are warningly coloured and aggregated, then an attack on one individual by a naive predator could lead to subsequent avoidance of others in the group, often relatives, that share the same trait (this proposal was the initial inspiration for Hamilton's (1963) theory of kin selection) . . . --Christopher D. Beatty, Roderick S. Bain & Thomas N. Sherratt, 23 May 2005. Animal Behaviour 70: 199.
The Darwinian theory and Wallace's original theory can be formalized in terms of what is called today the carrying capacity of the environment, usually denoted by K; in Wallace's words, this is the level at which "the population must have reached its limits, and have become stationary." Suppose that the carrying capacity of the parental form on its own is K, and that the carrying capacities of the parental form and the advantageous variation when they coexist are K1 and K2 respectively. Under Darwin's theory K1Z0, whereas K2 is equal to or perhaps slightly greater than K, so that the parental form eventually becomes extinct even in a constant environment. Under Wallace's theory both carrying capacities are greater than zero, with K1!K2, so that both forms can coexist; if the environment deteriorates, both carrying capacities decrease, and if the deterioration is severe K1 becomes 0, so that the parental form becomes extinct. When the environment recovers, the carrying capacities return to their original values so that both types can again coexist . . . --Michael Bulmer, 22 May 2005. Notes & Records of the Royal Society 59(2): 130.
It was Wallace (1855) who was the first to recognize the correlation between geographic distribution and evolutionary relationship. Wallace (1855) in fact described how a process akin to what is now called vicariance might have produced modern faunal differences in the Galapagos Islands if these now distinct islands were once joined. In effect, Wallace (1855) was arguing that one way the geological world impinges on the biological world is through the mechanism we now refer to as allopatric speciation. If speciation is allopatric, species can disperse over geographic barriers (that have geological or climatic causes) and become isolated, or geological or climatic changes can cause populations of species to become isolated from one another by creating barriers within formerly continuous ranges; the latter is termed vicariance. In either case, the isolated populations diverge and eventually speciate . . . --Bruce S. Lieberman, 11 April 2005. Palaeogeography, Palaeocimatology, Palaeoecology 219: 25.
Although these definitions vary, the common emphasis is on the provision of a more stimulating environment. Historically Alfred Russel Wallace may have been one of the first individuals to provide enrichment to captive animals (Wallace 1869). Upon receipt of an orphan orangutan in his camp, he fashioned an artificial mother from a buffalo skin that appeared to comfort the animal, served as a surrogate mother, and thereby enriched the animal's environment. Shortly afterward, Wallace received another animal in camp, a cynomolgus monkey, and the two animals were successfully paired. Thus Wallace's earliest attempts at enriching the animal's environment included the provision of both inanimate and animate exemplars of enrichment . . . --James L. Weed & James M. Raber, March 2005. ILAR Journal 46(2): 118.
A. R. Wallace originally invented the concept now known as aposematism to describe prey that combine warning displays with secondary defences (Wallace 1867, 1889). More than a century later, the evolution of aposematism remains a remarkably fertile and controversial area of research. Warning displays are still of interest to researchers, in part, because the proximate mechanisms by which they operate tell us much about predator behaviour and predator-prey coevolution. As originally envisaged by Wallace (1867) and Poulton (1890), warning displays function to enhance discrimination, to accelerate learning and perhaps slow down forgetting . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, 21 February 2005. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 272: 431.
. . . aposematic displays remain the focus of considerable attention because, for many researchers, their initial origins contain at least two important evolutionary paradoxes. First, it is generally assumed that before the first aposematic traits evolved, prey were both highly cryptic and had effective secondary defences. If secondary defences are costly (and they often are), then their presence in prey already highly protected by crypsis is paradoxical: why pay for repellent secondary defences if your enemy rarely finds you? Second, there is a better-known paradox of warning signals, which also emerges from commonly held assumptions about initial conditions. Ever since the seminal theoretical model of Harvey et al. (1982), it is widely taken that aposematic mutants must emerge from defended cryptic species. When this is the case, new aposematic forms suffer combined and highly effective barriers to survival because of their rarity and their conspicuousness . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, 21 February 2005. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 272: 431.
. . . as Wallace originally envisaged, warning displays might be conspicuous so as to be "very distinct from the protective tints of the defenceless animals allied to them" (Wallace 1889, p. 232). Hence a good reason that aposematism may evolve initially is to prevent confusion with undefended prey. On its own, behavioural conspicuousness itself may not be a sufficiently reliable signal of non-profitability to function as an aposematic display. As we found . . . prey can evolve some heightened levels of behavioural conspicuousness even when they do not evolve adaptive secondary defences. Hence, some additional discriminative cue may be necessary for defended prey to minimize erroneous attacks by educated predators . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, 21 February 2005. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 272: 436.
The language faculty is one component of what the co-founder of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, called "man's intellectual and moral nature": the human capacities for creative imagination, language and symbolism generally, mathematics, interpretation and recording of natural phenomena, intricate social practices, and the like, a complex of capacities that seem to have crystallized fairly recently, perhaps a little over 50,000 years ago, among a small breeding group of which we are all descendants--a complex that sets humans apart rather sharply from other animals, including other hominids, judging by traces they have left in the archaeological record. The nature of the "human capacity," as some researchers now call it, remains a considerable mystery. It was one element of a famous disagreement between the two founders of the theory of evolution, with Wallace holding, contrary to Darwin, that evolution of these faculties cannot be accounted for in terms of variation and natural selection alone, but requires "some other influence, law, or agency," some principle of nature alongside gravitation, cohesion, and other forces without which the material universe could not exist. Although the issues are framed differently today within the core biological sciences, they have not disappeared . . . --Noam Chomsky, Winter 2005. Linguistic Inquiry 36(1): 3.
. . . Rohde (1978, 1992) expanded earlier suggestions that high-energy levels may increase speciation rates (Wallace, 1878). Relationships between speciation/extinction rates and energy may arise directly through the influence of solar energy on mutation rates, and most literature on the diversification rate mechanism focuses on this relationship. Alternatively, both solar and productive energy availability may influence speciation/extinction rates indirectly through variables such as body size and reproductive rates . . . --Karl L. Evans, Philip H. Warren & Kevin J. Gaston, February 2005. Biological Reviews 80(1): 14.
. . . adaptationism is usually traced back to Alfred R. Wallace, one of the two great biological revolutionaries, who was also one of the forefathers of modern astrobiology with his intriguing and remarkably prescient 1903 book Man's Place in the Universe. This view is the scientific foundation of Schroeder's solution to Fermi's paradox. Intelligence is an adaptive trait, like any other. Adaptive traits are bound to disappear once the environment changes sufficiently for any selective advantage which existed previously to disappear. In the long run, the intelligence is bound to disappear, as its selective advantage is temporally limited by ever-changing physical and ecological conditions . . . --Milan M. Cirkovic, January-February 2005. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) 58(1-2): 65.
The first report of a tool-using parrot in the wild was in 1869, by Wallace (2000). He described a black palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus) in New Guinea using a piece of leaf as a wedge while feeding from kanary nuts (Canarium commune). According to the author, after starting to groove the nut with its lower mandible, the bird held it in its foot and bit off a piece of leaf. This was retained in the deep notch of the upper mandible while the bird started to seize the nut once again, fixing the edge of the lower mandible in the notch and braking off a piece of shell by a powerful nip. Wallace suggested that the nut was prevented from slipping by the elastic tissue of the leaf (Wallace 2000) . . . --Andressa Borsari & Eduardo B. Ottoni, January 2005. Animal Cognition 8(1): 48.
. . . the Wakatobi Marine National Park includes all coral reefs, islands, and communities within its boundaries and is centered around the main islands in the Wakatobi archipelago. The area is considered "a geological and biological anomaly" and is located at a zone of transition between the two distinct faunas associated with the Asian and Australian continents. Wallace (1869) postulated that the islands of Sulawesi had been isolated far longer than the surrounding islands, giving evolution a much greater opportunity to shape a unique fauna . . . --Benjamin P. Horton et al., January 2005. Journal of Foraminiferal Research 35(1): 4.
Wallace's rhetorical world was as remote from Darwin's as their social worlds--they wrote up their theories differently. Although a colonial infrastructure made much of Wallace's fieldwork possible, the solitary English collector, living alongside natives and dependent on their knowledge and skills, eschewed the rich imperial language in which Darwin depicted evolving life. Wallace thought spatially and described his theories in ways appropriate to the Welsh mapmaking enterprise from which he first learned about native habitats. He wrote with artless clarity. One searches in vain for conquering colonial imagery in his major theoretical essays between 1855 and 1864. Here "organic beings" are continually "peopling" the earth and making it a "theatre of life." New species evolve under changed "physical conditions" in "an unbroken and harmonious system." The faunas of "neighboring countries" testify to their geological past, showing that new species were "gradually introduced" as the regions became isolated. The arrival of "chance immigrants" is often followed by "natural extinction and renewal of species," and those organisms with "greater powers of dispersion" and "a greater plasticity of organization" have "extended themselves" over continents. The "regular and unceasing extinction of species, and their replacement by allied forms" is an "established fact," contingent in every case on the quantity and quality of available food . . . --James Moore, 2005. In David N. Livingstone & Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Revolution (University of Chicago Press): 121-122.
In The Malay Archipelago, Wallace's most popular and widely read book, the only "empire" is Austrian, "imperial" is a common species name, and only the Dutch, the Portuguese, and ants have "colonies." "Aborigines" are always human, "natives" are established residents (also marsupials in the Moluccas and flowers in the Himalayas), and people wage "war," "conquer," and "exterminate" one another (also the flying opossum). "Competition" too is a human prerogative, but no "invasion" crops up, nor any of its cognates. Districts may be "overrun" and indigenous populations "supplanted"; "inhabitants" and "enemies" of different species may "struggle" and "migrate." Yet Wallace is remarkably consistent--startlingly so compared to Darwin in the Origin of Species--in omitting to cast living organisms in imperial Britain's image. . . . James Moore, 2005. In David N. Livingstone & Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Revolution (University of Chicago Press): 124.
What role, if any, natural selection itself plays in reproductive isolation in the earliest stages of speciation when populations first begin to diverge has been a contentious issue since the late 19th century when Alfred Russel Wallace (1889) advocated the idea that the low fitness of hybrids should select for reproductive isolation between diverging populations. This selective mechanism has been called the Wallace effect or (more frequently) reinforcement. Support for reinforcement waxed and waned throughout the 20th century, enjoying increasing popularity after Dobzhansky elaborated the theory in the 1940s, going out of favor in the 1980s when theory discounted it, only to recover more recently when new theoretical models turned in its favour. Prezygotic isolating mechanisms have now been investigated in over 100 mathematical models, firmly establishing a theoretical basis for the evolution of reinforcement under the right conditions . . . --J. Silvertown et al., 2005. Heredity 95: 198.
Accordingly, we summarize four macroevolutionary patterns exhibited by venomous snake mimicry as the Savage-Wallace Effects: First, mimicry is more likely among closely related organisms that share a common body plan (e.g., among lepidopterans, among fishes, and thus their specific similarities (e.g., wing color patterns in butterflies) are representative of evolutionary parallelism . . . Second, mimicry spanning distantly related organisms, representative of evolutionary convergence, is more likely to involve planarians, myriapods, fishes, snakes, and other groups with relatively simple body forms . . . Third, among vertebrates, snake mimicry is unusually widespread because of (1) and (2), and because venomous species can severely injure or kill predators . . . Fourth, the origin of noxious attributes can markedly increase diversity within a clade beyond that encompassed by unpalatable species; dangerous models thereby make otherwise "unprotected niches" possible for harmless relatives, and even for lifestyles not used by the models themselves . . . --Harry W. Greene & Roy McDiarmid, 2005. In Maureen Donnelly et al., eds., Ecology and Evolution in the Tropics: A Herpetological Perspective (University of Chicago Press): 205-206.
Proposed originally by A. R. Wallace in the mid 19th century (Wallace 1852), the riverine barrier hypothesis states that major Amazonian rivers significantly reduce or prevent gene flow between populations inhabiting opposite river banks, hence promoting speciation. In a phylogeographic framework, the main prediction of the riverine barrier hypothesis is that sister intraspecific clades and species will exist across major rivers rather than within major Amazonian interfluves; furthermore, phylogeographic and population genetics data can distinguish between primary divergence across rivers (predicted by the riverine barrier hypothesis) versus secondary contact along rivers between nonsister taxa that diversified elsewhere. A second prediction of the riverine barrier hypothesis comes from the observation that the upper reaches of all major Amazonian rivers are narrower than the lower reaches; therefore, a gradual reduction of the "river-barrier effect" is expected to take place from the lower to the upper part of the river's course . . . --Alexandre Aleixo, June 2004. Evolution 58(6): 1303.
. . . the possibility that at least some instances of similarity among distasteful species may have evolved through selection to deceive predators has been frequently raised. Even before the publication of the theory of Mullerian mimicry, Wallace (1871) proposed that "distasteful secretion is not produced alike by all members of the family and that where it is deficient, protective imitation comes into play" . . . -- Thomas N. Sherratt, Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, May 2004. Journal of Theoretical Biology 228: 217-218.
Alfred Russel Wallace was the first to suggest that aging and death might be evolved traits. In the 1860s, he suggested that individuals are programmed to die so that they do not compete with their offspring. His idea had some early support, notably from the influential German biologist August Weismann, but by the 1920s it had been dismissed as a "perverse extension of the theory of natural selection". By the middle of the last century, the focus of evolutionary theory on senescence had shifted to other theories such as mutation accumulation and antagonistic prejotropy . . . Recent discoveries in nematodes, insects, and mammals of genes that, when mutated, increase life span, have increased interest in the evolution of aging. In this article, I show that within a spatially structured population, programmed death does evolve and suggest that it is time to reconsider the "perverse" theories of Wallace and Weismann . . . --Justin Travis, April 2004. Journal of Gerontology A: Biological Sciences 59(4): 301.
Conspicuous and simple color patterns (often red, yellow, or white in combination with black) are common among animals that are distasteful, noxious, or otherwise potentially dangerous to their predators ( . . . Wallace, 1867). The common view is that conspicuousness has evolved because it constitutes a strong visual signal that is easy for receiving predators to detect, learn, and associate with unpalatability. However, conspicuous coloration may provide protection against predators even if the prey lacks chemical or structural defense mechanisms, because coloration may elicit spontaneous avoidance behaviors in naive predators. It has been suggested that bilateral asymmetry also may play a role in communication, but this has been studied primarily within the context of mate choice . . . --Anders Forsman & Joakim Herrström, January-February 2004. Behavioral Ecology 15(1): 141.
Although we have many species from most of the major species groups and subgroups related to D. melanogaster in our analysis, speciation patterns for independent species groups and subgroups need to be examined with a number of genes to generalize these inferences. Nevertheless, if the observed correspondence between the time of species divergences and paleoclimate changes is true, it supports Wallace's hypothesis for a rapid species change resulting from climatic change (Wallace 1870a, b). In the present case, the factor is postulated to be climatic cooling in the Cenozoic. A major consequence of this cooling was an extensive increase in aridification in the middle to low latitude regions, which lead to expansions of savannas and grasslands as well as the fragmentation of forests that were primary habitats of ancestral fruit fly species and populations. The adaptation to the newly arisen dry environment and the allopatry caused by the forest fragmentation are potential causes for stimulating fruit fly speciation. The former adaptation is supported by the distribution patterns of D. teissieri and D. yakuba, which are adapted to forests and savannas, respectively . . . --Koichiro Tamura, Sankar Subranmanian & Sudhir Sumar, January 2004. Molecular Biology and Evolution 21(1): 42.
For Wallace, the mind overarched natural selection. He believed there was a more daring, vertical movement that boosts life toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness. After all, if evolution were merely a matter of survival by adaptation, we might still be a planet of hearty bacteria. Those bacteria would have their history, an eons-long series of variations and adaptations, all responsive to selection, but without movement toward greater complexity. For that matter, if complexity beyond the unicellular level were rare and episodic, coming and going over the eons, we would still have evolution as Darwin explained it. But in the only example we have of evolving life--our own Earth--we see something more dramatic. We see a steady undeterred thrust toward a net gain in complexity. The microbes continue, but life has branched out into an amazing array of new species. It has been building itself up into ever more delicate, sentient forms. To ignore that fact would be to ignore the defining feature of evolution. . . . --Theodore Roszak, 2004. In David Rothenburg & Wandee J. Pryor, eds., Writing the Future: Progress and Evolution (MIT Press): 3-4.
Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works) and Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea) speak for mainstream evolutionary theory when they insist that the mind was built up incrementally by way of small, selective advantages in the same way as a bird's wing. They see the growth of intelligence as wholly a matter of problem solving and toolmaking--practical talents to which natural selection easily applies. They simply ignore Wallace's dilemma, offering no reason why the mind should ever have developed beyond simple counting, toolmaking, and enough verbal ability to coordinate a hunting expedition . . . --Theodore Roszak, 2004. In David Rothenburg & Wandee J. Pryor, eds., Writing the Future: Progress and Evolution (MIT Press): 5.
One could argue that males can survive better by being smaller and more cryptic than females. The importance of predation to the evolution of sexual dimorphism was first stressed by Wallace (1889), who suggested that crypsis in females is favoured because bright colours potentially attract nest predators. Recent comparative studies, such as that undertaken by Martin & Badyaev (1996), seem to confirm this point. In tinamous, reversed sexual roles and predation risks incurred by incubating males may explain why they are less colourful than their conspecific females. Small size and cryptic coloration are probably complementary strategies to avoid predators . . . --P. L. Tubaro & S. Bertelli, November 2003. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 80(3): 526.
To understand why small monitor species have radiated so dramatically through Australia, New Guinea, and their adjacent islands, but not elsewhere, we examined the possible role of Wallace's Line . . . In contrast to its influence on the mammals, Wallace's Line is not a barrier to monitors--or is it? That depends on the adult size of the species . . . Large monitor species (in which adults are greater than four feet long) are just as diverse on lands east of Wallace's Line as they are to the west, or for that matter in mainland Asia and Africa. Small monitor species, however, occur only to the east of the line . . . --Samuel S. Sweet & Eric R. Pianka, November 2003. Natural History 112(9): 44.
It has long been recognized that prey that possess significant defenses against predators tend to be conspicuous in some way (Wallace 1867; Darwin 1871; Poulton 1890). The contemporary explanation for this phenomenon, termed "aposematism" (Poulton 1890), is that there is "something special" about the educational properties of conspicuous traits as a signal of defense. For example, it has been repeatedly shown that predators learn to avoid unpalatable prey more quickly when they are conspicuous than when they are cryptic. This theory for the evolution of aposematism is plausible, but there is an important caveat. Whatever the underlying cause of aposematism, it is likely that predators would evolve an enhanced psychological predisposition to learn to avoid conspicuous prey precisely because such prey tend to be defended . . . --Thomas N. Sherratt & Christopher D. Beatty, October 2003. The American Naturalist 162(4): 377.
'The Darwinian theory is wrong because random variations tend to worsen performance'. Thus wrote Fred Hoyle in his famous book 'The intelligent universe'. Hoyle pointed out three important things in this book. First, that the idea of natural selection had been around for several decades before Darwin wrote The Origin. Secondly, that it was Wallace's clear letter of 1858 that really clarified Darwin's mind on the matter. Thirdly, and more important, natural selection as conceived by Darwin and Wallace just won't work mathematically. The odds are stacked hugely against random change producing even one new protein . . . --Anthony K. Campbell, July 2003. Astrophysics and Space Science 285(2): 571.
With respect to the theory of sexual selection, Darwin (1859, 1872) developed this novel concept but did not describe the function of this behaviour (for instance, the role of the male peacock's tale). As Dawkins has pointed out, it was Wallace who speculated that a male with brightly coloured tail feathers is showing that he is a high-quality individual. Subsequent studies have shown that this idea is supported by experimental evidence. Hence, with respect to the second mode of selection in nature, Wallace developed the concept originally proposed by Darwin (1859, 1872) and did draw the correct conclusions . . . --U. Kutschera, 1 May 2003. Theory in Biosciences 122(4): 357-358.
Why do we believe Wallace when he writes about evolution yet ignore him when he turns to spiritualism? Part of the reason is the context in which we receive his writings today. Spiritualism is now out of fashion, hoaxes have been exposed, and there is no longer a social context for the idea of spiritualism. The experiments, while repeatable in Wallace's day, are no longer repeatable, and thus they fail one of the hallmarks of the scientific method. But they were repeatable then! When one reads Wallace's works, one is struck by how he acted with complete warrant in exploring spiritualism scientifically. As Kuhn has demonstrated, Wallace was operating under the social constructs of his day . . . --Steven L. Peck, March 2003. Zygon 38(1): 11.
As we shall show, the concept of the diorama emerged from the construction of biogeographical zones. Moreover, the concept of biogeographical zones not only triggered the vision of the diorama as its "musee imaginaire" but, from the very beginning, theorizing on biogeographical zones was captured by visual means such as maps and illustrations. These images had a strong impact on the emergence of dioramic displays by providing two-dimensional forerunners for what were later implemented as three-dimensional museum installations. As we show in this paper, the new mode of illustration introduced by Wallace in 1876 formed a crucial influence. In The Geographical Distribution of Animals Wallace elected to illustrate different biogeographical zones by the simultaneous display of animals from different taxa against an ecologically appropriate background. By and large, each animal was itself in some way unique to its zone and could potentially have been used as a surrogate for the zone . . . --Julia Voss & Sahotra Sarkar, February 2003. Philosophy & Geography 6(1): 61.
Wallace insisted that none of these suggestions went to the heart of the problem. None of these people had suggested anything more than some 'force'--but force is a cause of motion, not a cause of organization. There must be something more than merely a force. There must be some agency that guides and coordinates the process which builds up that infinitely complex machine, the living organism. Wallace thought of the cell as being not only self-repairing, but also self-renewing, self-multiplying, self-adapting to its ever-changing environment, so as to be, potentially, everlasting . . . --Roger Steer, 2003. In his Letter to an Influential Atheist (Authentic Lifestyle): 27.
The co-inventor of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, was aware of the significance of Darwin's views. In his book, Darwinism, (originally published in 1890) Wallace took pains to distance himself from Darwin on the question of human capacities. He pointed to the mistake that someone might make by conjecturing that all geological changes are due to factors such as flooding, volcanic activity, the action of the wind and the sun, and so on while overlooking the special contribution made by glaciation. Glaciation is an important cause of change, but is radically different from the other causes of geological change. By analogy, Wallace argues, "Because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature . . . has been developed by the same causes only (Wallace 1897: xx)." Our mental capacities and our morality, Wallace suggests, may be due to something quite different from natural selection . . . --Andrew Brennan, 2003. Worldviews 7(3): 276-277.
In the second edition of Primitive Culture, Tylor's doubts about psychic phenomena were suppressed and Spiritualism roundly denounced as a survival of animistic beliefs (Tylor 1873). Yet, even the formulations used in Primitive Culture betray an ambivalence within its scheme of mental evolution that seems fundamental to contemporary scientific politics. Tylor felt forced to class modern Spiritualism with "primitive" animism--the kind of arbitrary classification that Wallace was up against in his critique of Primitive Culture and in his earliest writings on botany. But Tylor also had to acknowledge that Spiritualism was not just a survival but an extraordinary revival of animism. He even went as far as to recognize the anomalous status of Spiritualism within his progressionist scheme, because the former "is a truly remarkable case of degeneration" (1873), the possibility of which Primitive Culture was originally intended to argue out of existence . . . --Peter Pels, 2003. In Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revolution and Concealment (Stanford Univ. Press): 258.
. . . In Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, the argument about perception was developed after Wallace denounced the theoretical fallacy of assuming that because Spiritualist phenomena ran counter to our knowledge of the laws of nature, they cannot exist. He argued that the physical phenomena that occur during a seance, can only be explained by presuming invisible intelligences, which was only "another and more striking illustration than any we have yet received of how small a portion of the great cosmos our senses give us cognisance" (1874). He compared the force exerted by these intelligences with light, heat, electricity, and magnetism (ala "modes of motion" of a space-filling "ether") to show how these "diffuse and subtle" forms of matter can act upon "ponderable bodies" and become known to us only by their effects. The fact that we do not know this higher sense is no argument, Wallace wrote, because likewise the "faculty of vision" would be "inconceivable" to a race of blind men. "It is possible and even probably that there may be modes of sensation as superior to all ours as is sight to that of touch and hearing" (1874). The subject of divination, in particular, allowed Wallace to elaborate on this? The clairvoyance that is at the basis of divination led him to suppose a "new sense" that amounts to "a kind of rudimentary perception, which can only get at the truth by degrees." . . . --Peter Pels, 2003. In Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revolution and Concealment (Stanford Univ. Press): 262.
. . . The lesson seems to be: if you think hard about species origins, then it does not matter how you travel, you will reach the theory of natural selection in the end. On closer inspection, however, the Wallace case offers at least a few openings to those sceptical about the independence of the theory from its history. One move would be to deny that Wallace did, in fact, 'co-discover' the theory of natural selection. Rather, he came up with a theory quite different from Darwin's, and Darwin's overreaction in 1858 has misled historians ever since . . . --Gregory Radick, 2003. In Jonathan Hodge & Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge Univ. Press): 150.
Three features of Wallace's account of the evolution of human mind and morals stand out. First, he conceived the selective environment to be other proto-human groups--which would have an accelerating effect on the evolutionary process, since social environments would rapidly change through responsive competition. Second, he proposed that selection worked on the group, rather than the individual--which allowed him to explain the rise of altruistic behaviour, that is, behaviour perhaps harmful to the individual but beneficial to the group. In his original essay on the transmutation of species (1858), Wallace conceived of the struggle for existence as occurring among varieties instead of individuals. He continued to think in such group terms when considering the evolution of moral behaviour. Finally, in a note to the published version of his talk to the Anthropological Society, he mentioned that he was inspired to develop his thesis by reading Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. Spencer's own early brand of socialism had pulled Wallace to his side. In Social Statics, (1851), Spencer had envisioned a gradual and continual adjustment of human beings to the requirements of civil society, with individuals accommodating themselves to the needs of their fellows, so that eventually a classless society would emerge in which the greatest happiness for the greatest number would be realised. Spencer assumed that the inheritance of useful habits would be the means by which such evolutionary progress would occur, while Wallace believed natural selection to be the agent of that progress . . . --Robert J. Richards, 2003. In Jonathan Hodge & Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge Univ. Press): 102-103.
On the basis of personal experiments and reliable reports from other scientists, Wallace concluded that the universe is populated with a hierarchy of spirit beings, some of whom are in contact with the human population on earth, usually through mediums. According to Wallace, the spirit beings lower in the hierarchy, acting through mediums, were responsible for a variety of paranormal phenomena, including clairvoyance, miraculous healings, communications from the dead, apparitions, materializations of physical objects, levitations, etc. More powerful spirit beings may have played a role in the process of evolution, guiding it in certain directions . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 102.
. . . Hume appealed to uniform human experience in his refutation of miracles. For example, Hume observed "it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age of any country" Wallace noted two flaws in this argument. First, the appeal to uniform human experience, granting the truly uniform nature of the experience, insures that no really new fact could ever be established. Second, Wallace questioned the veracity of Hume's version of uniform human experience. "Reputed miracles abound in all periods of history," wrote Wallace (1896, p. 8). And they continued up to the present, thus nullifying Hume's assumption. . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 116.
. . . The space-filling ether of nineteenth century physics is no longer with us. But there are modern scientific concepts that would allow Wallace's basic system to operate. According to deterministic chaos theorists, immeasurably small random perturbances of matter can rapidly propagate into large-scale effects that are not easily predictable. Scientists sometimes give the example of a Caribbean butterfly that by its wings sets off motions of air molecules. These movements might eventually amplify to steer a hurricane from open sea into the American coast. If the butterfly had flapped its wings slightly differently, the hurricane might not have hit land. According to this idea, Wallace's spirit beings might make infinitesimal adjustments on the subatomic level that would quickly propagate into observable spiritualist effects. One might also propose that they are somehow capable of manipulating the curvature of Einstein's space-time continuum. They could thus produce gravitational effects, for gravity is said to be the result of curvature in the continuum. Or one might propose that the spirit beings induce slight changes in the quantum mechanical vacuum, which in some ways resembles an ether. Of course, this approach is limiting, and rather than straining to find ways to explain spiritualist phenomena in conformity with currently accepted physical laws, it may make more sense to come up with a new theoretical system that more naturally incorporates both the normal and paranormal phenomena . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 128.
. . . Wallace favored the latter course, but his system has certain puzzling features. Although a dualist, he does not appear to accept the existence of individual conscious entities before their earthly embodiment. According to Wallace, there is an original spiritual mind from which matter is generated. Individual spiritual minds, associated with spiritual bodies (souls), are only developed from and in material bodies, as they come into existence (Wallace 1885; in Smith 1991, p. 100). After death, the individual minds, as above stated, go to "the first grade of spirit life," where they experience progress or the lack of it based on their earthly habits. But if individual spirit souls can exist after earthly embodiment, why not before? And why is there any need at all for earthly embodiment, which is not an altogether pleasant experience? Why not skip that and go directly to the highest grade of spiritual life? . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 129.
. . . Here is another problem with Wallace's system. In his works, Wallace details reports of varied spiritualistic phenomena, such as levitation, apparitions, and clairvoyance, from his own time and throughout history. But he ignores reports of transmigration of souls, which occur widely in almost all times and places. The reports of transmigration are just as credible as any other category of evidence he considers. The existence of this phenomena requires, however, certain modifications in Wallace's system. At death, souls would pass not necessarily into the first phase of spiritual existence but perhaps into new material bodies. According to religious systems that incorporate transmigration, such as the Vedic system, some souls, because of their strong attachment to their last embodiment, do not attain new material bodies, but remain for some time as ghosts. This actually fits in quite well with the observations of Wallace and other spiritualists, who found that the spirits they contacted often desired to communicate with living friends and relatives . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 129.
Instead of unthinkingly placing English society at the top of the evolutionary tree, he argued that the evolutionary process had gone awry. In Wallace's hands evolutionary theory ceased to act as a rationalization of what was and became a promise of what could be. The key here was to hold up so-called savage societies as occasionally more civilized and more advanced than the West. Thus towards the end of his popular travel book The Malay Archipelago (1869), Wallace favourably contrasted primitive morality with the 'social barbarism' of Victorian England. If a savage society could attain a higher level of morality, then something must have disturbed England's evolutionary progression. The villain was laissez-faire individualism. Human evolution--the development of man's moral and intellectual faculties--depended upon the extent to which man was exempted from an individualist, physical struggle. Yet Victorian society celebrated individualism . . . --David A. Stack, 2003. In his The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859-1914 (New Clarion Press): 28.
Historians of science have raised the suggestion that Wallace's version of natural selection was not quite so Darwinian as Darwin himself believed. Wallace persistently used the word 'variety' as the level of entity at which natural selection acts. You heard an example in the long passage I have just read out. And some have suggested that Wallace, unlike Darwin who clearly saw selection as choosing among individuals, was proposing what modern theorists rightly denigrate as 'group selection'. This would be true if, by 'varieties', Wallace meant geographically separated groups or races of individuals. At first I wondered about this myself. But I believe a careful reading of Wallace's paper rules it out. I think that by 'variety' Wallace meant what we would nowadays call 'genetic type', even what a modern writer might mean by a gene. I think that, to Wallace in this paper, variety meant not local race of eagles, for example, but 'that set of individual eagles whose talons were hereditarily sharper than usual.' . . . --Richard Dawkins, October 2002. The Linnean 18(4): 20.
. . . Modern Wallaceans accept that peacocks' tails and similar bright organs are advertisements to females. But they want the males to be advertising genuine quality. A male with bright coloured tail feathers is showing that he is a high quality male . . . The late W. D. Hamilton, of Oxford University, was a prime example of a Wallacean in this sense. He believed that sexually selected ornaments were badges of good health, selected for their capacity to advertise the health of a male--bad health as well as good. One way to express Hamilton's Wallacean idea is to say that selection favours females who become skilled veterinary diagnosticians. At the same time, selection favours males who make it easy for them by, in effect, growing the equivalent of conspicuous thermometers and blood-pressure metres. The long tail of a Bird of Paradise, for Hamilton, is an adaptation to make it easy for females to diagnose the male's health, good or bad. An example of a good general diagnostic is a susceptibility to diarrhoea. A long dirty tail is a give-away of ill-health. A long clean tail is the opposite. The longer the tail, the more unmistakeable the badge of health, whether good health or poor . . . --Richard Dawkins, October 2002. The Linnean 18(4): 22-23.
. . . A significant positive correlation between the proportion of range area above 100 m and total range size for each species is used to suggest that past sea-level rises may explain smaller range sizes in low-lying regions and that riverine barriers have been important in shaping the current distribution of C. cleonus group species . . . Unfortunately, it is not clear exactly how important rivers have been or continue to be in the current distribution of C. cleonus group species because some of the central and lower Amazonian material is historical and the label data probably generalized; in such cases, uncertainty remains as to which bank specimens were really collected from, especially with the possibility of subsequent shifts in river course. Having said this, several lines of evidence do suggest that rivers have been influential in shaping the current distributions of C. cleonus group species . . . --Jason P. W. Hall & Donald J. Harvey, July 2002. Evolution 56(7): 1489, 1493-1494.
Some cosmologists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies, have formed the opinion that, in the words of Fred Hoyle, "the universe is a put-up job". They are expressing their marvel that the values of its constants and the forms of its laws are just those which allow such phenomena as the formation of planets, complex chemistry, life and intelligence. Some of them--including Paul Davies--go further than this. They argue that the laws of the universe were somehow legislated with purpose so that planets, chemistry and life could develop . . . Wallace, Hoyle, Dyson and others have made the point that even slight changes in some values of fundamental or cosmological constants, or even in the laws of physics themselves, would imply a universe in which life as we know it would not exist. Here are a few examples: If the Universe were much less dense, then stars and planets might not form. If the universe were much more dense, then it would have stopped expanding and contracted back into a hot big crunch long ago, possibly before any supernovae had had time to generate the elements needed for life. What if the laws of physics were different? If the strong nuclear force were much weaker than it is, then the electrostatic repulsion between protons would prevent the formation of large nuclei--hydrogen might be the only element. If gravity were different, or if the geometry of space-time were different, then stars might not form or planets might not have stable orbits . . . --Joe Wolfe, http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/danish.html (accessed 3 March 2002).
The check that 'human nature' placed upon hopes of social improvement is illustrated by Malthusianism. This was popularly conceived of as an argument about the limits human nature--in particular the impulse to procreation--placed upon progress. Thus the transformation sought by Owen in social relations was predicated upon the malleability and educability of the individual. Human nature can be improved beyond the limits set by present-day social relations, and education and environmental reform both play a role in this. Did these ideas influence Wallace's views on nature? In one important respect they did. Wallace's views on instinct and its role in animal and human behaviour are different from those of Darwin and contradict much of what passed for Darwinian psychology after the publication of the Origin. When Wallace talks about instinct in nature, whilst not denying its existence, he tends to discount the role of preformed, inherited behaviour and to talk up the notion of learning. Moreover, he returns throughout his life to the same proposition: the role of instinctive behaviour is small, that of learning relatively greater . . . --Greta Jones, March 2002. British Journal for the History of Science 35(1): 81.
. . . Wallace saw many instances of mismatch between existing faculties and the environment. The natural world, like the social, was a site of dissonance between wants and the environment. The wants were relatively fixed points--the need for food and so on--but the behavioural responses to these were malleable. He noted a species of bird which in Africa and India 'eat only insects' whilst those in South America 'in great measure live upon fruits which they capture on the wing as they do insects. There is no difference in their structure but being in different countries surrounded by different circumstances they are led to adopt different habits'. In downgrading instinct Wallace introduced the idea there was always space for change, a potential for specialization or variability in behaviour even among individuals from the same species. Nature was not filled up with all that was possible for its full exploitation. The potential spaces in it were not necessarily occupied nor all the forms of behaviour found in natural organisms perfectly matched to their environment. Wallace constantly repeated this. In the case of the anatomy of birds wants and habits were limited by their structure, not structure by wants and habits, but even with the same structure behaviour differed. There is always room for modification and change. This contributes to the unsettled and evolving natural world . . . --Greta Jones, March 2002. British Journal for the History of Science 35(1): 83.
. . .The difference in approach between Darwin's and Wallace's views on population is discernible in their respective contributions to the Linnean Society in 1858. Darwin introduces Malthus almost immediately and proceeds to litter his text with phrases and analogies from the Essay on Population. For Darwin, nature at war is 'the doctrine of Malthus applied in most cases with tenfold force'. Along with the struggle for mates introduced in his closing paragraphs, death is a major selective factor and death is the consequence of this 'enormous multiplying power'. In contrast Wallace begins with the question of varieties and the instability of species. He does not mention Malthus in his paper but he does quickly turn to the 'struggle for existence' and to population. However, in Wallace's hands the force of population increase loses that all-encompassing ontological character it displays in Darwin's first public exegesis of his theory. Malthus is certainly present in Wallace's paper but it is Malthus read by an Owenite . . . --Greta Jones, March 2002. British Journal for the History of Science 35(1): 93.
Selection in favour of individuals that resemble the background has been invoked as the probable cause of cryptic coloration in prey species for over a century and there have been numerous demonstrations that predators preferentially feed on more conspicuous prey items. Our study is, however, the only work other than Endler's research on colour-pattern selection in guppies that has shown significant directional selection by predators over multiple successive prey generations when compared with a non-select control . . . --Alan B. Bond & Alan C. Kamil, February 2002. Nature 415(6872): 612.
The evolutionism of Darwin (1859) and Wallace (1875) is radically different from all previous lines of thought in that it uses the notion of contingency applied to living beings. Francois Jacob writing about this issue stated: "with the theory of evolution, as with statistical thermodynamics, the notion of contingency became established in the very heart of nature. Since Newton (1934), physics had been based on a rigid determinism, which extended to all sciences. Evolutionary theory and statistical thermodynamics completely transformed the way of looking at nature, mainly because they brought together and gave the same status of related and measurable quantities to order and chance--two concepts which until then had been incompatible." . . . --Bernardo Dubvrovsky, January 2002. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry 26(1): 2.
The theories he worked out during and after his travels in the East Indies dwelled essentially on spatial relationships, the reason to consider Wallace as being, fundamentally, a geographer. Consequently, geographical information was instrumental for Wallace both for his biogeographical as well as evolutionary contributions to biology. In several seminal papers and books he developed innovations in the historical reconstructions of faunas and, thus, implemented zoological geography as a biological discipline within the framework of evolutionary theory. It is, as Smith correctly stated, usually little appreciated how strongly natural processes are constrained by the necessity of having to take place in a three-dimensional space, and Wallace's skill at spatial analysis is best illustrated by his contribution to the biogeography of the Australasian region . . . --Matthias Glaubrecht, 2002. Verhandlungen zur Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie 9(2): 265.
From Darwin's publication of Origin of Species until Wallace's publication of his autobiography in 1905, Wallace was perhaps the most influential critic of the idea that the bright coloration of animals could be the outcome of female mate choice. Wallace saw no reason to invoke what to him was an unsubstantiated assumption that females of non-human animals were capable of and inclined to discriminate among males based on the quality of their ornaments (Wallace 1878, 1889). Instead, Wallace searched for explanations of colorful plumage that would allow such traits to be understood as utilitarian, not ornamental and extravagant. In his studies of bird coloration, Wallace did not focus exclusively or even primarily on gaudy plumages. Rather Wallace focused much of his research on the subtle differences among species and individuals in explicitly non-ornamental traits like the buff, brown, gray, and green plumage of birds (Wallace 1878, 1889) . . . --Geoffrey E. Hill, 2002. In his A Red Bird in a Brown Bag: The Function and Evolution of Colorful Plumage in the House Finch (Oxford University Press): 7.
. . . Far more convincingly than Darwin, Wallace showed how most plumage coloration supported the theory of evolution by natural selection. Most species, most of the time, are colored in ways that appear to enhance their survival and fecundity. Wallace provided an explanation for sexual dichromatism and drab female plumage that stands today as a triumph of the power of the comparative method in addressing evolutionary questions. Through his knowledge of the nesting biology of birds, Wallace showed that species with exposed nests in which the female alone incubates almost invariably have drab female plumage whether the male is colorful or not. Retesting and confirmation of this idea have only lately occurred. Wallace also was the first to set forth the idea that colorful plumage functions as a signal of species recognition. This became the most widespread explanation for colorful plumage for over seventy years, and it remains a too-often-ignored hypothesis in modern treatments of plumage coloration. Wallace also foreshadowed the now popular and well-supported idea that ornamental plumage could serve as a reliable signal of condition in his discussions of vital energy (Wallace 1878, 1889) . . . --Geoffrey E. Hill, 2002. In his A Red Bird in a Brown Bag: The Function and Evolution of Colorful Plumage in the House Finch (Oxford University Press): 10.
Wallace never seems to have suffered from the abstract doctrine of Philosophical Necessity. Charting his intellectual progress toward science, he notes that Robert Owen provided his introduction to "advanced views." Owen's "fundamental principle, on which all his teaching and all his practice were founded, was that the character of every individual is formed for and not by himself, first by heredity . . . and second by environment." Here, as with Martineau, Mill, Galton, and Darwin, philosophy intersects moral vocation, for this view requires restructuring the moral and legal system, which is based on the view that "all men could be good if they liked." In a determinist system, people cannot be "deterred from future aggression" unless the conditions in which they develop are changed. Hence Owen's "successful" New Lanark. For Wallace, implicitly, the vocation of science and, one might hazard, the nature of his theory, grow from this insight into hereditary and environmental determinism . . . --George Levine, 2002. In his Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press): 110.
. . . While Wallace defers to chance in amusing ways and exhibits a Darwinian modesty in relation to his career, he sees a pattern of happy accident that implies something other than mere material causation. For himself, he can argue that: "many of the conditions and circumstances that constitute our environment, though at the time they may seem unfortunate or even unjust, yet are often more truly beneficial than those which we should consider more favourable. Sometimes they only aid in the formation of character; sometimes they also lead to action which gives scope for the use of what might have been dormant or unused faculties (as, I think has occurred in my own case)." But often, he says, those circumstances are not favorable, and if they consistently lead to bad consequences, "the system of society" is at fault. Wallace's willingness to accept inconsistency, to refuse the totalizations of a system making, marks his autobiography and his scientific life, and surely was consistent with--either as cause or effect--his own strong leanings toward socialism . . . --George Levine, 2002. In his Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press): 111.
Abstract: An annotated facsimile of those pages of Alfred Russel Wallace's notebook recording his consignments from the Malay Archipelago to his London agent, Samuel Stevens, is provided. Records of individual consignments are linked with the stages of Wallace's and Charles Allen's itineraries to which they relate and are amplified from data provided by Wallace elsewhere; wherever possible, dates and places of the despatch of consignments and of the dates of their receipt in London are noted; and the dates of material becoming available for study are established, chiefly from British Museum accessions registers. It is intended that this should provide readier access to scattered collection data and should in particular assist in determining what specimens may properly be regarded as types or syntypes of the many taxa described by numerous contemporary authors from Wallace's material . . . --Daniel B. Baker, December 2001. Zoologische Mededelingen 75(16-25): 251.
It was precisely this latter characteristic, and the way in which Wallace's radical positions intertwined--his faith that some kind of willpower or spirit, lying outside or beyond natural selection, was responsible for moral evolution in the human species; his rejection of the more crude, social Darwinian deductions from biological theory; and his attack on the wastage of nature caused by rampant industrialism--that make him a valuable exponent of both the potentialities and the limitations of evolutionism as a philosophy. I am particularly interested here, of course, in Wallace as a tropicalist, especially the concern he articulated for the despoliation of tropical nature, a theme that emerged in his mature consideration of his tropical experiences and which, though connected to the new evolutionary outlook, was not a necessary outcome of it (Darwin, for example, did not share Wallace's concerns about the consequences of tropical destruction). This is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Wallace's multifaceted contributions (most histories of environmentalism make no mention of him). In this chapter, then, I approach Wallace as arguably the most interesting student of tropical nature in the second half of the nineteenth century, a writer of popular natural-history books who was also a philosopher of nature, someone whose evolving representations of tropical nature take us into the post-Humboldtian, evolutionary era, and into the beginnings of the ecological era properly speaking . . . --Nancy Leys Stepan, 2001. In her Picturing Tropical Nature (Cornell University Press): 59.
. . . It was in the tropics, especially the islands of the East Indies, that Wallace first became aware of the ambiguities of the human presence in nature, the fragility of the evolutionary balance and the threat posed to it by overweening domination for purposes of commerce and gain. In his mature writings, he expressed the ideas that nature had not, in fact, been created just for human appreciation or consumption; that plants, animals and human beings formed a network of mutual interdependence; and that it was Europeans' actions that had the most profoundly negative effects on nature and culture, effects which could not be repaired easily . . . --Nancy Leys Stepan, 2001. In her Picturing Tropical Nature (Cornell University Press): 80.
Wallace's Line, essentially based on information about birds and larger mammals, with later attempts to delimit the Oriental from the Australian realm, has had enormous heuristic value and may even have triggered much of the biogeographic research which has been carried out in the region. Even today, as exemplified by the conference from which this volume arose, interest in the Wallacean region persists and may even have increased. With the availability of new data in geology and new methods, in particular for phylogeny reconstruction and for the measurement of genetic distinctiveness, the area has become even more interesting for biogeographers . . . --W. R. Erdelen, 2001. In Ian Metcalfe et al., eds., Faunal and Floral Migrations and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (A. A. Balkema Publishers): 129.
. . . there was undeniably an 'individualist' accent to Wallace's program of interventionist egalitarianism. Wallace was not a collectivist. His socialism was never an attraction to a great and organising state. "Socialism" was to Wallace 'the use by everyone of his faculties for the common good, and the voluntary organisation of labour for the equal benefit of all' (Wallace, 1905). The use of the word 'voluntary' in his definition of socialism is surely significant. Under Wallace's socialism industry would be run by enterprises composed of capital-owning workers. Land nationalisation would not amount to a system of state farms or agricultural collectives. Rather, the state would be the sole owner of land, and would rent out its land to a throng of individual tenants . . . --William Coleman, 2001. In John Laurent & John Nightingale, eds., Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics (Edward Elgar): 42.
. . . The previous sections have used the case of Alfred Russel Wallace to scrutinise the proposition that natural selection was a projection onto nature of a political economy apologetic for a dominant class interest. This proposition is just one manifestation of a general and familiar vision of science . . . Alfred Wallace's scientific achievement, we have argued, makes for a jarring disconfirmation of this theory. Rather than seeking to inscribe norms justifying the dominance of one class, one race, one genera, Wallace sought to overturn such conventional dominance: of the wealthy, of the white race and (we may add here) of men. And, rather than being 'organically connected' to science's ruling elite, few could be less connected than Wallace to the elite and its social formations . . . --William Coleman, 2001. In John Laurent & John Nightingale, eds., Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics (Edward Elgar): 44.
Our results find that Wallace's Line is supported by the data he collected in the field and suggest that Wallace's Line does indeed demarcate a major faunal break. These results are in keeping with modern geological evidence on the origins of the region, and hence with Wallace's original contention. Wallace's data conform with his suggestion that the modern distribution of species reflects the geological history of the land masses. Modern geological knowledge indicates that the islands west of Wallace's Line comprised the single land mass of Sundaland connected to mainland Asia until the Eocene. Similarly, many islands on the Sahul shelf were also connected to New Guinea/Australia. The central islands, however, have a far more complex and isolated history. Sulawesi, for example, seems to be an amalgam of a number of different islands with different biogeographic origins. Similarly, the northern Moluccan islands seem to have been very recent arrivals for the eastern Pacific Arc which may have had closer contact with Australia and New Guinea than their present location suggests . . . --D. Clode & R. O'Brien, 2001. In Ian Metcalfe et al., eds., Faunal and Floral Migrations and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (A. A. Balkema Publishers): 118.
. . . With the complex geological history of this region increasingly being understood, we now stand a far better chance of assessing Wallace's real legacy--the extent to which species distributions are limited by underlying geological history. This is a far more interesting question than arguing over the placement of arbitrary and illustrative lines. Different taxonomic groups (with different histories and different dispersal abilities) will undoubtedly differ in the extent to which they adhere to different biogeographic boundaries (as foreshadowed in Wallace, 1877) including Wallace's Line. Such variations merely reflect our expanding knowledge of both the species and the effect their geographical history has had on them . . . --D. Clode & R. O'Brien, 2001. In Ian Metcalfe et al., eds., Faunal and Floral Migrations and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (A. A. Balkema Publishers): 119.
The Amazonian tropical rainforest harbors a species diversity that is vastly disproportionate to its geographic area. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to account for this, tending to emphasize aspects of the maintenance or origins of the megadiversity. The oldest such hypothesis has its roots in the works of Alfred Russel Wallace, who observed that the ranges of some closely related neotropical vertebrate species (primates, birds) abut at major rivers. Indeed, Wallace defined distinct areas within South America, bounded by major Amazonian rivers like the Negro, Madeira, and Amazon, which differed in species composition of communities. These and similar observations have prompted the suggestion that lowland Amazonian rivers, of which there are many, may function as effective barriers to the dispersal of organisms. This may have a variety of consequences for patterns of species diversity on the Amazonian landscape. First, major Amazonian rivers may have played a significant role in species generation by impeding gene flow between populations with the eventual evolution of sister species on opposite banks. Second the expansion of species from their centers of origin may be halted by the presence of large watercourses; therefore, they may be restricted to only one bank. Finally, compared with a species distributed across landscapes without barriers, the probability of subsequent recolonization of a species that has gone locally extinct on one bank will be lower because immigration from the opposite bank is less likely . . . All of these factors might be expected to accentuate differences in species composition of opposite-bank communities . . . --Claude Gascon et al., 5 December 2000. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97(25): 13672.
Whether the great rivers of Amazonia have something to do with species origins or are simply biogeographic sutures, the biotas of opposite banks ought to differ if the riverine barrier hypothesis is correct. Characteristically, in Wallace's monkey paper, he not only presented his data on primate distributions in relation to major rivers in the Amazon basin, but also suggested a testable, quantitative hypothesis: that the composition of species assemblages would differ in relation to the width of the river, the difference thus increasing from headwaters toward the mouth . . . --Robert K. Colwell, 5 December 2000. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97(25): 13470.
The part that natural selection plays in the origin of species has long been debated. It is easy to see that if two populations are kept separate--by mountains or ocean, for example--they will eventually become so different that they can no longer interbreed successfully. Their differences may have evolved by natural selection, but their reproductive isolation is merely a side effect of changes that emerged for other reasons. This view seems unsatisfactory to those who emphasize the positive aspect of selection in evolution. Both Alfred Russel Wallace and Theodosius Dobzhansky argued that natural selection would reinforce reproductive barriers between diverging populations. There has been little evidence, however, that selection has in fact contributed directly to the formation of new species (speciation) in this way. Reports by Higgie et al. and Hendry et al., on pages 519 and 516 of this issue, provide examples from fruit fly and sockeye salmon populations showing that selection can produce the kind of isolation that separates species in the wild, and moreover, that it can do so within a very short time (a dozen or so generations) . . . --Nick Barton, 20 October 2000. Science 290(5491): 462.
What is less explicable is why the differences between Wallace and Darwin over the origin of distributional patterns have been confounded. Apart from a single chapter in The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote little on biogeography, yet his views on the efficacy of dispersal dominated biogeographical theory until relatively recently. I think the answer lies in Wallace being too far ahead of his time. I have often wondered what Wallace would have thought about modern geological evidence concerning the origin of Indonesia, and I am convinced it would have given him the key to understanding the distributional patterns he described in Malay Archipelago. The problem, of course, was that this evidence was not available until a century later. Given the lack of credible alternative explanations and the pressure from Darwin to conform to accepted ideas, Wallace was unable to develop his own theory fully. Over time his original thoughts were lost and his name became associated with Darwin's idea of dispersal. A reappraisal of Wallace's work on its own terms seems long overdue and would be a fitting millennial tribute to an outstanding scientist . . . --B. Michaux, January 2000. Journal of Biogeography 27(1): 221-222.
. . . Florence Clemens was the first to show how Conrad made use of Wallace's work in his fiction. She demonstrated how, in Lord Jim, Conrad used Wallace's account of his visit to the Rajah of Goa as the basis of his description of Doramin's household; how he used Wallace's account of his friend, Mr. Mesman, in describing Stein; how he drew on Wallace's own experiences for his presentation of Stein's activities as a naturalist. She argued that Conrad used The Malay Archipelago, in particular, 'for backgrounds with which he was unfamiliar'. Conrad, for example, had never visited Bali or Timor: 'all the information which Dain Maroola of Almayer's Folly gave Nina Almayer about his country on Bali could have been gleaned' from Wallace; similarly, 'all that is told in Victory of the Timor scene and government' in the account of Morrison's experiences in Delli derives from Wallace also. The Malay Archipelago was acknowledged by Conrad as one of the sources for his Malay fiction . . . --Robert Hampson, 2000. In his Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (Palgrave): 73.
The lowland forests of the Amazon Basin contain a disproportionately large fraction of global species diversity. A number of vicariant speciation mechanisms have been presented to explain this high diversity. These hypotheses share the idea that historical and geographically pervasive barriers to gene flow have facilitated speciation in allopatry across much of Amazonia, but obviously differ with respect to the identity, location and duration of these barriers. The oldest of these, the riverine barrier hypothesis, derives from observations of animal distributions made by Wallace (1849, 1876). It posits a role for major Amazonian water courses in impeding gene flow between populations on opposite banks. The predictions for this hypothesis include that (i) many recently evolved sister taxa occupy opposite banks of large rivers, (ii) levels of genetic differentiation between populations on opposite river banks increases with increasing river width and flow rate and (iii) taxa of the upland terra firme forest show higher levels of differentiation across rivers than taxa of the seasonally flooded varzea forests found adjacent to the river. This last prediction assumes that the strength of the barrier to gene flow is greater for exclusively terra firme species because it consists of both the river itself plus the varzea forests of both river banks . . . --S. C. Lougheed et al., September 1999. Proceedings of The Royal Society of London B 266: 1829.
. . .the "pan-selectionist" view that variation is potentially available in all directions from any given phyletic starting-point, and that selection determines which subset of variants prevails. The alternative is the "developmental constraint" view that many of the gaps we observe between different morphologies do not arise from the non-adaptiveness of the absent forms but rather from the difficulty of making them through an ontogenetic process. The pan-selectionist view can be traced back to Wallace (1870), who considered variation to be omnipresent and available in all phenotypic directions imaginable, apparently without even a quantitative bias in any direction. He refers to "Universal variability--small in amount but in every direction", and Mayo (1983) boldly states that "The major constraint on natural selection as an agent of change is natural selection as a stabilizing force", apparently relegating any kind of developmental constraint to a minor role at best . . . --Wallace Arthur & Malcolm Farrow, June 1999. Journal of Theoretical Biology 200: 183-184.
Under Wallace's scheme, the event that concerns Romanes--the initiation of the speciation process--already has taken place. Wallace deals with events subsequent to the process of reproductive isolation. The idea that the infertility he notes might relate to what Romanes proposed does not occur to Wallace. In a separate section of his book he describes physiological selection as "another form of infertility," and then proceeds to attack the theory . . . --Donald R. Forsdyke, Spring 1999. Queen's Quarterly 106(1): 121.
Wallace's first essay on the origin of the colour sense was published simultaneously with, but independently of, Gladstone's paper. He had presented a possible evolutionary route for animal colour vision, starting with perception of degrees of brightness, ending with perception of colours according to wave length. In his view, green and blue would have been the first colours to which the eye became specially adapted, in accord with their universal presence in foliage and sky, as well as their soothing influence. Reds, yellows and violets would follow, as present in small amounts, offering great contrast, and useful to animals hunting for food and mates. This essay was revised and republished a year later, with specific response to Gladstone (and through him, to Magnus and Geiger). 'These curious facts' wrote Wallace, with regard to Gladstone's Homeric data, 'can not, however, be held to prove so recent an origin for colour-sensations as they would at first sight appear to do'. He pictured brightly coloured structures as having evolved in response to an already present and well-developed ability of animals, especially birds, to see colour, long before the arrival of man. Wallace concluded that 'Man's perception of colour in the time of Homer was little if any inferior to what it is now . . . owing to a variety of causes, no precise nomenclature of colours had become established . . . --Elizabeth Henry Bellmer, 1 January 1999. Annals of Science 56(1): 38.
As the new century ripened and imperialist rivalries increased, Wallace became convinced that a vast civilizational crisis was at hand and that the very survival of the human species demanded the rapid overthrow of capitalism. A few months before his death in 1913, he wrote (The Revolt of Democracy), "There must be no further compromise, no mere talking. To allow the present state of things to continue is a crime against humanity." How ironic to recall his warnings today when billionaire arsonists have set almost the entirety of Wallace's Malay Archipelago ablaze with their greed . . . --Mike Davis, March 1998. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 9(1): 77.
Wallace's major contribution to the literature of reform is his corrosive criticism of nineteenth-century society, through which he offered a human vision of social reformation. He advocated recognizing racial equality, nationalizing land, giving women equal opportunity for education and employment, decreasing military expenditure, and saving the environment. His friend James Marchant wrote in Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (1916) that "his greatest ambition was to improve the cruel conditions under which thousands of his fellow-creatures suffered and died, and to make their lives sweeter and happier." . . . --Charles Blinderman, 1998. Alfred Russel Wallace. In Gary Kelly & Edd Applegate, eds., British Reform Writers, 1832-1914 (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 190; Gale Research): 326-327.
. . . With other socialists Wallace believed that neither genetic endowment nor divine prescription was responsible for the behavior of men and women, that instead the prime agent of social discord was bad government. He argued that the state ought to provide equality of opportunity and that no one should get a head start through inheritance: "To secure equality of opportunity there must be no inequality of initial wealth. To allow one child to be born a millionaire and another a pauper is a crime against humanity." Andrew Carnegie would later share this view on the inheritance of wealth. Wallace further argued that the state ought to own and manage railways and pay the doctors. He envisioned a Ministry of Public Health, its doctors acting as servants of the state, that is, of people--and he added, perhaps mischievously, "they should be paid according as they keep people well and not ill." . . . --Charles Blinderman, 1998. Alfred Russel Wallace. In Gary Kelly & Edd Applegate, eds., British Reform Writers, 1832-1914 (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 190; Gale Research): 330.
It is possible that the initial condition in the pheasant was plumage monomorphism, with the cryptic female-type plumage subsequently having evolved under natural selection from predators. In fact, this hypothesis, formerly defended by Wallace (1889), is generally applicable to those birds, like pheasants, with a polygynous mating system without male parental care, that nest on the ground in open habitats, and are sexually dimorphic in plumage throughout the year. Also, it has not yet been proven that maintaining a colourful and bright plumage is costly, nor that it is a handicap for survival . . . --Concha Mateos & Juan Carranza, November 1997. Animal Behaviour 54(5): 1211.
The approach taken by Gregorius for modelling and analyzing the population genetic basis of Wallace's theory of speciation will be extended to allow analysis of the opposite case, where speciation is prevented by the reinforcement of genetic coherence. In this approach, a mutant gene modifies the current mating preferences without implying any advantage or disadvantage in fitness (including mating success). The latter assumption is indispensable in order to avoid confusion of the secondary effects of mating systems on fitness with their primary recombinational effects. It also reduces the analytical problems resulting from having to disentangle effects of fitness and mating preference on the evolution of mating behaviour . . . --Wilfried Steiner & Hans-Rolf Gregorius, November 1997. BioSystems 43(2): 139.
In 1881 Wallace took the lead. He formed The Land Nationalization Society on his own lines, with himself as President. In Land Nationalization (1882) he laid out his program. The state was to assume title to all land. To meet a conservative debating ploy, he would compensate present landowners. However, he ingeniously minimized the amount in a manner that tells us he knew the nuts and bolts of his subject. Compensation was to be an annuity limited to the duration of lives in being. It was to be based only on the net income actually being derived from the land before nationalization--i.e. not from the highest and best use, and not from future higher uses. All men and women (Wallace, like Mill, was also a feminist) could bid to lease parcels from the state for actual use. In the socio-biological terms in which he thought, this would consummate the natural relation of man to nature. It would also let men alternate between industry and agriculture as Wallace, a loving gardener, himself did. Wallace's Land Nationalization was individualist, not collectivist. Individual lessees were to have secure tenure, and tenant-rights to improvements. Rents to the state would be used, not to engross the state, but to obviate taxes. These rents would be based on the assessed "inherent value" of land, dependent only on natural and social conditions. As a surveyor and a biogeographer, Wallace readily distinguished "inherent value" from man's improvements to land, which he saw as transitory. Tax assessors in most American states and other former English colonies distinguish land and improvements routinely today, and many did then, too, although in England itself the concept was somewhat novel . . . --Mason Gaffney, October 1997. American Journal of Economics & Sociology 56(4:): 613.
Wallace, on the other hand, explained evolution not in terms of competitive struggles between species and the environment, but in terms of the governor that regulates the speed of a steam engine by maintaining constancy in the angular velocity of a flywheel. As Bateson puts it, building on Wallace's idea, the job of evolution is to maintain the constancy of something--specifically, the survival of the entire system comprised of all species and the environment. Darwin, according to Bateson, focused on the wrong subject--the individual species--when in fact the real subject of evolution is the species plus environment. In fact, the species and the environment co-evolve, to use a term that is popular among management writers today. Moreover, if you add the remarkable findings reached in the past thirty years by biologist Lynn Margulis, this process of co-evolution sustains the total system through cooperative symbiotic relationships, not competitive knock-outs . . . --H. Thomas Johnson, 11 October 1997. Keynote Presentation, The Deming Institute Fall 1997 Meeting, Washington, D.C.
Perhaps the effect of Wallace's line most relevant to us is its possible role in a decisive step of human evolution. Paleontologists tend to stress Africa as the cradle of humanity, to view Cro-Magnon Europe as the site where late ice age human culture flowered, and to neglect Australia as a remote outpost occupied by supposedly primitive Aborigines. Human behavior took a Great Leap Forward sometime between 100,000 years ago, where there were still no signs of art or complex tools anywhere in the world, and the period around 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, when great art and complex tools began to abound in Europe. Paleontologists usually assume that this development began among humans in Africa or the Mideast, then spread to Europe and finally (in diluted form) to our poorer cousins in aboriginal Australia. But anatomically modern humans appeared in Australia before they did in Europe--probably by 60,000 years ago and possibly even earlier. To reach Australia, the protohumans who had reached Asia from Africa around one million years ago (as attested by the famous Java Man fossils) had to cross a dozen straits separating Australia from Asia. . . .Each next strait would have been a stimulus to improve our nascent watercraft technology; each new island, a stimulus to adapt to a new environment and to invent new technologies; each island's untapped rich resources, the basis for a new human population explosion . . . --Jared M. Diamond, August 1997. Discover 18(8): 83.
Wallace's writings of this period make free use of the contrast between 'savage' and 'civilized', he talks often of 'higher' and 'lower' races, and was clearly committed to a notion of long-run progressive change in organic evolution and in human history. Yet there is no easy or simple mapping of the higher and lower, civilized and savage onto the progressive evolutionary narrative. Social, moral and intellectual progress are differentiated from one another, and lack of harmony between them can be catastrophic in its consequences. The hierarchical ordering 'higher' and 'lower' is sometimes used by Wallace to refer to inherited differences between peoples, but is also sometimes used to denote levels of civilization, and to do so in ways which do not carry any obvious value connotation. The word 'civilization' carries a negative as often as a positive valuation in Wallace's writing. Whilst the civilized nations remain in a state of social and moral 'barbarism', uncivilized savages approach a 'perfect social state'. . . --Ted Benton, Spring 1997. Studies in Travel Writing No. 1: 109-110.
. . . It is here that we encounter the central intellectual and moral tension in Wallace's thought, a tension which was to bring about a growing gulf between his and Darwin's views on human origins and nature and which may, indeed, go some way towards explaining Wallace's later involvement in spiritualist activities. Wallace's radical political philosophy and his capacity to admire and respect the achievements, customs and social solidarity of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago were increasingly at odds with his version of evolutionary naturalism . . . --Ted Benton, Spring 1997. Studies in Travel Writing No. 1: 110.
It is not just Darwin's opponents who regard the analogy as evidence against the causal efficacy of selection. A. R. Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, addresses the analogy in his opening comments of the Darwin-Wallace paper of 1858. "One of the strongest arguments which have been adduced to prove the original and permanent distinctness of species is, that varieties produced in a state of domesticity are more or less unstable, and often have a tendency, if left to themselves, to return to the normal form of the parent species; and this instability is considered to be a distinctive peculiarity of all varieties." For Wallace, modification by artificial selection is limited and temporary, and therefore causally inefficacious in the production of new species. If natural and artificial selection were truly similar, then the analogy suggests that natural selection is incapable of forming new species. Consequently, Wallace argues against the analogy by emphasizing the differences between domestic breeding and nature. "It will be observed that this argument rests entirely on the assumption, that varieties occurring in a state of nature are in all respects analogous to or even identical with those of domestic animals . . . But it is the object of the present paper to show that this assumption is altogether false" (emphasis added). Wallace's vow to argue against the analogy is inexplicable unless he has embraced the view that artificial selection is inefficacious in the formation of new species. Surely Darwin was aware of Wallace's views, expressed so forcefully in the Darwin-Wallace paper, as he wrote the Origin . . . --Richard A. Richards, March 1997. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 28(1): 76-77.
. . . Darwin recognized some important distinction between domestic and natural varieties, and happily agrees with Wallace on the distinction. Wallace, in the preface to his Darwinism, likewise emphasizes his agreement with Darwin, describing his views as complementary. "I have endeavoured, by means of a series of diagrams, to exhibit to the eye the actual variations as they are found to exist in a sufficient number of species . . . It will be found that, throughout the work, I have frequently to appeal to these diagrams and the facts they illustrate, just as Darwin was accustomed to appeal to the facts of variation among dogs and pigeons" (emphasis added). Wallace certainly seems to regard himself as doing something very similar to what Darwin is doing. That would be surprising if he had thought Darwin to be making an analogical argument--given his earlier rejection of the argument. Wallace argues against the analogical argument by emphasizing the negative analogy between domestic breeding and nature. Unlike natural selection, artificial selection does not maintain fitness. Consequently, domestic varieties are unfit. Wallace makes this point in the 1858 Darwin-Wallace paper . . . --Richard A. Richards, March 1997. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 28(1): 81.
One reference point, however, must be marked if Wallace's future path--to the Malthusian moment and beyond--is to be mapped. He embarked on a scientific career less a naturalist than a surveyor, less a biologist than a biogeographer, less an evolutionist than an ethnographer. For seven formative years his job had been prescriptive economic geography. Parish upon parish, field upon field, he had set limits to human livelihoods, marking boundaries, drawing lines. In later years he would become an exemplary naturalist, but always boundaries and borders, habits and habitats, concerned him. Once he even likened the "System of Nature" to a "dissected map," the pieces of which could be assembled in a "mosaic." The picture is of a crowded tithe map, where field presses on field, niche upon niche, until "all gaps have been filled". Such was a surveyor's view of evolution . . . --James Moore, 1997. In Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (University of Chicago Press): 304.
To validate his inclusion of plants formerly excluded from bedded-out gardens, Robinson turned to the writings of the late nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace collaborated with Darwin on his theory of evolution and published his own Contribution to the Theory of Natural Selection in 1870. Robinson was intrigued by Wallace's 1869 account of his extensive travels in the Amazon region and the Malay Archipelago, especially Wallace's statement that "during the twelve years spent amidst tropical vegetation, I have nothing comparable to the effect produced on our landscapes by Gorse, Broom, Heather, Wild Hyacinths, Hawthorn, and Buttercups." Wallace's nationalistic preference for English scenery reportedly led Robinson to plant such flowers as asters and heather, formerly considered too coarse for fashionable gardens . . . --Anne L. Helmreich, 1997, in Nature and Ideology; Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection).
The principles regarding relations between organisms and their environment set forth by Wallace clearly informed Robinson's gardening practices. In an early essay, "On the Law which has regulated the introduction of new species," Wallace first developed his theory governing the distribution of organisms. His fourth stipulation--that "in countries of a similar climate, but separated by a wide sea of lofty mountains, the families, genera, and species of the one are often represented by closely allied families, genera and species peculiar to the other"--underlies Robinson's theory that plants from climates similar to England's could be naturalized in the wild garden . . . --Anne L. Helmreich, 1997, in Nature and Ideology; Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection).
It is evident that Conrad read and assimilated Wallace's observations of the Malay natural environment. Wallace as anthropologist seems to have had an equivalent influence. In terms of religious practices, Wallace describes how 'the old juragan repeated some prayers' just before one of his more successful voyages; on the Patna voyage, the leading Arab recites a prayer in similar fashion as they cast off. In The Rescue, Lingard's dead lacar is 'wrapped up decently in a white sheet, according to Mohammedan usage', in a way highly reminiscent of Wallace's response to the death of one of his Malay men: 'As my men were all Mohammedans, I let them bury him in their own fashion, giving them some new cotton cloth for a shroud" . . . --Amy Houston, 1997. In Gene M. Moore et al., eds., Conrad: Intertexts and Appropriations: Essays in Memory of Yves Hervouet (Rodopi): 37.
Bates, Wallace and Spruce belonged to a new breed of scientist. They were not sponsored directly by the government, like Huxley or Darwin, attached to Royal Naval survey ships; they were not salaried, like the plant-hunters employed by the nurserymen, or even promised a reward on their safe return, like Richard Lander. They were scientific entrepreneurs, trading in beetles and birds and monkeys and dried plants, who needed to collect extensively even to pay their expenses, let alone secure a possible income for the future, when they might hope to work up their private collections and live off a store of knowledge and fieldwork rich enough to last the rest of their lives. The British Museum assured them there would be a good market for their collections. They made arrangements with a London agent and dealer, Samuel Stevens, who had premises in Bedford Street, just round the corner from the British Museum--an excellent choice, as it turned out . . . --Peter Raby, 1997. In his Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers (Princeton University Press): 79.
Wallace's earlier suggestion that a connection may exist between the perennial woody habit of island species and reproductive strategy deserves closer inspection. He argued that the perennial insular woody growth form primarily reflects selection for longevity (rather than for woodiness per se) of insect-pollinated species in an environment where insects initially should be expected to be rare, noting that the resulting increase in size may have provided additional advantage in niche competition among initial colonizers. Bramwell's studies of breeding behavior are generally compatible with that view, since in Echium species studied, the woody island forms were found to be outbreeding, setting only 0-11% fertile seed in selfings, whereas their continental sisters as well as the herbaceous island inhabitant E. bonnetii were preferentially inbreeding . . . --Uta-Regina Böhle, Hartmut H. Hilger & William F. Martin, October 1996. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93(21): 11744.
. . . If outbreeding is the primary selective factor in island colonization, pollination pressure will subsequently favor rare, large, conspicuous inflorescences among outbreeders and, as a consequence, select perennial (and therefore woody) habits capable of producing them, in agreement with Wallace's salient arguments. Under this view, diversity of contemporary woody Echium forms reflects a multiplicity of selectable developmental pathways toward longevity, rather than selection for specifically environment-adapted variants of such woody perennial habits as schematically depicted in Fig. 3. In other words, insular woodiness in Echium might simply betray "survival of the founders," and many differences between perennial woody habits could be nonadaptive . . . --Uta-Regina Böhle, Hartmut H. Hilger & William F. Martin, October 1996. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93(21): 11744-11745.
Alfred Russel Wallace foreshadowed much of the current thinking on adaptive mate choice. To Wallace colour was merely a correlate of 'vigour', by which he implied health. A female should choose a mate adaptively by picking the most vigorous male, and it would just so happen that he would also be the most colourful. We too found colour to correlate with a variable, plasma proteins, that may be indicative of vigour. In addition, female kestrels in our colony in mate choice experiments have consistently preferred males with high display rates (vigour?), irrespective of the degree of genetic relatedness or experimentally induced parasite infection . . . --Gary R. Bortolotti et al., September 1996. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 263: 1175.
. . . The hypothesis that sexual dichromatism was nonfunctional and incidental to inherent 'physiological' differences between the sexes was proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace (1895) recognized that whereas males of many birds are more brightly coloured than their mates, the degree of dimorphism varied greatly, with the most common case being for males 'to have the same general hue as the females, but deeper and more intensified'. Although it may be difficult to discount the role of sexual selection for extreme cases, such as house finches, the common, subtle patterns of colour variation between the sexes may be more difficult to explain except as non-functional consequences of other biochemical processes. If such processes are fundamental to avian physiology, it may explain why sexual dichromatism is so common in birds, and why reds, yellows and oranges are so pervasive . . . --Gary R. Bortolotti et al., September 1996. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 263: 1175.
A final argument, "An Additional Argument Dependent on the Theory of Evolution," was added to the 1904 edition of Wallace's book. Especially interesting because Wallace was so closely involved with the evolution arguments of his day, it is independent of the three connected scientific arguments and may be seen as another aspect leading to the same conclusion. Wallace argued that since humanity is the result of a long chain of modifications in organic life, since these modifications occur only under certain circumstances, and since the chances of the same conditions and modifications occurring elsewhere in the universe were very small, the chances of beings in human form existing on other planets was very small. Moreover, since no other animal on Earth, despite the great variety of diversity of forms, approaches the intelligent or moral nature of humanity, Wallace concluded that intelligence in any other form was also highly improbable . . . --Steven J. Dick, 1996. In his The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge University Press): 48-49.
. . . In conjunction with Barrow and Tipler's use of the Anthropic Principle, at the end of the century one could therefore choose from the full spectrum of possibilities in the context of the extra-terrestrial life debate: a positive argument, a negative argument, and the extraterrestrially neutral argument from design. But it is remarkable that just when anthropocentrism seemed irretrievably banished from the repertoire of reputable worldviews, it returned in a more sophisticated but remarkably similar form to that of A. R. Wallace, who in arguing against the plurality of worlds at the beginning of the century concluded that "the supreme end and purpose of this vast universe was the production and development of the living soul in the perishable body of man." . . . --Steven J. Dick, 1996. In his The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge University Press): 535.
. . . male-male competition was obvious to those who watched animals behaving in the field, and it coincided with the Victorian notion of how animals should behave, thus never becoming controversial. Female choice, on the other hand, was far from obvious in the field, and Darwin's contemporary, A. R. Wallace (1891), in particular, was unconvinced by it. He felt that the power of discrimination by females was too weak to distinguish subtle differences between males, and he also doubted whether female choice could be sufficiently constant over time to select for male attributes. As Geddes and Thompson (1889) put it, consistency of female taste was "scarcely verifiable in human experience." Female choice continued to be contentious until relatively recently, and although there is now abundant evidence that females often choose their partners, the way that female choice has evolved still remains a controversial area of sexual selection theory . . . --T. R. Birkhead, 1996. Current Topics in Developmental Biology 33: 104.
The colors of the Amazon brought Wallace to investigate the sediment and substrata. He found the "almost perfect flatness" of the Amazon Valley its single most striking geological fact. No mountains or even slightly elevated plateaus rise from the plain until you reach the abrupt peaks of the Andes. Wallace's impression was that "here we see the last stage of a process that has been going on, during the whole period of the elevation of the Andes"--the gradual filling in of what was once the granite bottom of the sea with sediment brought down by rivers from the Andes Mountains . . . --Jonathan Maslow, 1996. In his Footsteps in the Jungle: Adventures in the Scientific Exploration of the American Tropics (Ivan R. Dee): 99-100.
In 1873, Alfred Russel Wallace posed a fundamental, and as yet unresolved, biogeographic puzzle: why should the tropics contain a disproportionately large amount of the Earth's biodiversity? Wallace (1873) suggested that the explanation for latitudinal variation of the diversity of plant species was directly related to climate. Wallace (1873) wrote "As we approach towards regions of polar cold and desert aridity the variety of groups and species [of plants] regularly diminishes; more and more are unable to sustain the extreme climatical conditions". However, in the case of animal distributions, Wallace (1873) believed that climatic change associated with glaciation was responsible for the impoverishment of the temperate faunas. In modern terms, Wallace proposed an 'equilibrium' hypothesis for vegetation, and an 'historical' hypothesis for faunal patterns. In the latter half of this century, these two schools of thought have diverged and undergone substantial specialisation, although no consensus has emerged . . . --D. M. J. S. Bowman, 1996. Australian Journal of Botany 44(5): 571.
Borrowing a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," there is "nor any drop to drink" anywhere today on the surface of Mars. Not so clear is whether there has ever been water, water everywhere. As was first demonstrated by Alfred Wallace (who concurrently with, but independently of, Charles Darwin proposed the idea of evolution by natural selection), the lifetime for liquid water under present Martian atmospheric conditions is measured in minutes. The former existence of Martian rivers or seas would then imply that the planet had a warmer, more Earth-like climate in its geologic past. Interest in Martian water also stems from the fact that we, like that famous canal enthusiast Percival Lowell, cannot envision any form of life existing without it. The red planet appears lifeless now, but evidence for a warmer, wetter planet in the past might make a search for Martian fossils plausible . . . --Harry Y. McSween Jr., December 1995. Sky & Telescope 90(6): 18.
. . . the nature of information conveyed by secondary sexual traits in mate selection has been hotly debated. Darwin (1871) believed that mate choice was solely based on arbitrarily chosen features that were aesthetically appealing to the members of opposite sex, although such chosen features did not confer any survival advantage to the animal. Wallace (1889), on the other hand, argued that natural selection would not allow the selection of merely ornamental features "unless the most ornamental always coincide with the 'fittest' in every other respect". The modern interpretation of the utilitarian view of Wallace, or the so-called good gene hypothesis, has commonly been invoked to explain human mate selection. Briefly, it is proposed that women, as a rule, can assess the "mate quality" of a man by attending to his resources or high status because these are usually achieved through competition with other members of the social and economical hierarchy . . . --Devendra Singh & Robert K. Young, November 1995. Ethology and Sociobiology 16(6): 483-484.
The theory of sexual selection by female choice, on the other hand, was greeted with interest mixed with skepticism (Wallace 1889; Huxley 1938). Wallace fully accepted intermale sexual selection but had serious doubts about the efficacy of female-choice sexual selection. His doubt concerned the adequacy of the proposed mechanism. Can female choice exert a selective pressure that is consistent and strong enough to produce secondary sexual characters of adornment and display in males? The status of sexual selection by female choice is still unsettled. Modern studies have confirmed the process for some types of male characters, but legitimate questions remain as regards other types of male characters . . . --Verne Grant, October-November-December 1995. Biologisches Zentralblatt 114(4): 320.
Wallace presented a very clear interbreeding species definition, then immediately dismissed it in his treatise on speciation of the Papilionidae of Indonesia. 'Species are merely those strongly marked races or local forms which, when in contact, do not intermix, and when inhabiting distinct areas are incapable of producing a fertile hybrid offspring. But as the test of hybridity cannot be applied in one case in ten thousand, and even if it could be applied, would prove nothing, since it is founded on an assumption of the very question to be decided . . . it will be evident that we have no means whatever of distinguishing so-called "true species" from the several modes of [subspecies] variation here pointed out, and into which they so often pass by an insensible gradation'. Wallace is first saying that it is practically impossible to make all the necessary crosses to test genetic compatibility. Second, since theories of speciation involve a reduction in ability or tendency to interbreed, species cannot themselves be defined by interbreeding without confusing cause and effect . . . --James Mallet, July 1995. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10(7): 295.
The adaptive significance of cryptic female coloration in birds is an old and hotly debated issue in animal behavior, being a source of great disagreement between A. R. Wallace and C. Darwin, the co-founders of Natural Selection Theory . . . Darwin (1871) believed that dull female coloration was a non-adaptive consequence of sex-limited inheritance. Wallace (1889) proposed the hypothesis that cryptic female coloration functions to reduce predation risk at the nest. Wallace's evidence included the observation that in many cavity-nesting species females are brightly colored, and males are more cryptic than females in species with sex role reversal. However, these results are also consistent with sexual selection theory. Field tests of the nest predation hypothesis are rare, perhaps because extensive color variation among females within a sexually dimorphic species is uncommon . . . --Bridget J. Stutchbury & Joan S. Howlett, May 1995. The Condor 97(2): 559.
Aging is notoriously hard to explain in evolutionary terms. An early insight is due to Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of evolutionary theory. The gist of his argument is contained in the following quotation (Wallace, 1865): "When one or more individuals have provided a sufficient number of successors, they themselves--as consumers of nourishment in a constantly increasing degree--are an injury to those successors. Natural selection therefore weeds them out." In the following it will be shown that this basic idea allows one to arrive at a quantitative prediction of species-specific aging. It also enables a qualitatively correct prediction of sex-specific differential aging in two species. The slower aging of human females becomes understandable in evolutionary terms . . . --Reimara Rossler, Peter E. Kloeden & Otto E. Rossler, May 1995. BioSystems 36(3): 179.
In Frank Tipler's newly published book (1994), The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, for example, the author claims "modern physics requires the God principle." By this Tipler means that the universe is structured in such a way that the laws of nature must give rise to intelligent life; and once formed, the resurrection of all intelligence--immortality--is inevitable. "Science now tells us," Tipler concludes, "how to go to heaven." While Tipler's science is modern, his argument is not. It is Wallace's argument for the necessity of a higher intelligence clothed in modern physics . . . --Michael Shermer, December 1994. Skeptic 3(1): 70.
. . . With the primary evidence missing in this historical mystery, we can only speculate on what really happened at Down. The extreme interpretation of a conspiratorial cover-up is not supported by the evidence. If Darwin were going to rig (or allow to be rigged) the editorial presentation of the papers to award him priority; or worse, plagiarize from Wallace certain needed ideas (such as the divergence of species, as Brooks suggests), why announce the arrival of Wallace's essay and submit it for publication in the first place? Why not either just take what was needed, or, if Wallace's essay added nothing new to the theory, just destroy the essay and letter and blame the loss on an inefficient postal service, or the mishandling of his mail at Down, or whatever? If one is going to accuse Darwin of such devious finagling as delicate arrangements or plagiarization, then would not the same guileful and scheming personality think of complete elimination of Wallace's essay as a successful strategy? . . . --Michael Shermer, March 1995. Skeptic 3(2): 83-84.
Several alternative explanations exist for the occurrence of symmetrical signals and symmetry preferences in nature. It has been suggested that some morphological symmetries arise inevitably from developmental processes. However, as Wallace (1889) observed, the symmetrical body markings of wild animals are often lost or degraded in their domesticated descendants. This suggests that certain symmetries are not inescapable consequences of development, but are maintained by other selection pressures in nature . . . --Magnus Enquist & Anthony Arak, 10 November 1994. Nature 372: 172.
The naturalists' concept of species as distinct reproductive units was carried over into the post-Darwin period. It was stated by Wallace (1889), Eimer (1889), and others. I will present Wallace's characterization of species in a paraphrased form. A species is an assemblage of individuals which: (1) are modified in structure, form, and constitution so as to be adapted to their particular conditions of life; (2) are differentiated from other allied assemblages; (3) reproduce their like: and (4) usually breed together (Wallace, 1889). Some students of species in the early post-Darwin period began to characterize species, not only as reproductive units, but as units of interbreeding. We see this in Wallace's fourth point above: species are individuals "which usually breed together" (Wallace, 1889). According to Poulton (1903) a species is "an interbreeding community". Karl Jordan (1905) stated that the individuals of a species occur together in an area and form an interbreeding community ("eine Paarungsgemeinschaft"). Wallace's first point listed above puts adaptation into the set of characteristics of species. This was an innovation at the time and one which did not become generally accepted until much later . . . --Verne Grant, October-November-December 1994. Biologisches Zentralblatt 113(4): 406.
In their recent TREE article, Polak and Trivers say that the study of symmetry and its fluctuations in biology was largely restricted to morphology and systematics until 1953. However, in 1889 A.R. Wallace remarked that coloration patterns of wild animals are more symmetrical than those of their domesticated descendants; he thought that symmetry would help specific recognition. In one respect Wallace's observation seems paradoxical. Domestic animals have less need to be cryptic than their wild counterparts, but, at least for humans, the presence of symmetry is a major failing of camouflage. Symmetrical patterning gives away animals that are otherwise superbly concealed. The few cryptic animals that are asymmetrically patterned maybe the exceptions that prove this rule, one example is the wryneck (Jynx torquilla), an unusual woodpecker . . . --D. Osorio, September 1994. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 9(9): 346.
. . . the Riverine Barrier Hypothesis was first advanced by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1849, when he argued that primate distributions were affected by river barriers and showed that the Basin was divisible into four major geographic areas bounded by the Amazon, Negro, and Madeira rivers. This hypothesis, although not mutually exclusive from others, has received recent attention and support. Ayres (1986) and Ayres and Clutton-Brock (1992) have confirmed Wallace's original observation by documenting the correlation between the degree of private community similarity on opposite banks of Amazonian rivers and river width, or flow rate. Additionally, Capparella has shown that the degree of genetic divergence among samples of understory bird species is related to river width. One explicit expectation of the Riverine Barrier Hypothesis is that increasing divergence should relate positively to river size (width, flow rate, etc.). Hence, differentiation should increase along both sides of a green river, from its headwaters to the mouth, as the barrier widens and the potential for cross-river gene flow diminishes. However, the expectation for any given taxon is likely to be complicated by the dynamic nature of floodplain rivers, because populations have the potential for passive transfer from one side to the other by river-bend cutoffs, or oxbow lake formation, through time . . . Consequently expectations of the potential force of riverine barriers are likely to vary among taxa that occur in the river floodplain (the seasonal flooded forest, or "várzea" of the Amazon Basin) as opposed to those that are limited to upland, nonflooded forest, or terra firme. The pattern and degree of divergence may also depend on other ecological characteristics . . . --James L. Patton et al., August 1994. Evolution 48(4): 1314.
. . . the argument has been made that aesthetic criteria in general are secondary and essentially in the service of a more fundamental process. Thus, Wallace has disputed Darwin's claim that female choices of maters reflect strictly aesthetic tastes, that is, beauty for beauty's sake (Wallace, 1889, 1892). Rather, Wallace insisted that beauty is likely to be associated with good health and vigor, which are deemed the primary bases for choice. The theoretical advantage that accrues to Wallace's position is that sexual and natural selection are parsimoniously working in unison. Within the classical Darwinian perspective, female choice of the most flamboyantly adorned or colored male can imply choice of a mate vulnerable to predators and likely to produce offspring with similar vulnerabilities. None of this is intended to imply that either Darwin or Wallace is right or wrong. After the passage of more than a century, the issue is still under debate, although new experimental studies testing predictions from the two theories offer hope of an eventual resolution of the issue . . . --Nathan Kogan, Spring 1994. Social Research 61(1): 143.
. . . in short, there are on every hand the most striking and conclusive evidences that the production and consumption of wealth have increased with even greater rapidity than the increase of population, and that, if any class obtains less, it is solely because of the greater inequality of distribution. What [Henry] George had done with this argument, Helfand argues, was to establish an economic equivalent of Wallace's theory that the human brain changed the nature of the evolutionary process by its ability to create tools and alter the environment. George had argued that labor is the source of wealth, on grounds that "the richest countries are not those where nature is the most prolific; but those where labor is the most efficient." . . . --Lamar B. Jones, April 1994. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 53(2): 252.
The earliest discovery of avian visual mimicry was Wallace's account of another case involving large aggressive models and smaller mimics that would otherwise have been expected to be among the models' victims. The models are friarbirds of the Philemon [moluccensis] superspecies which are among the largest members of a family (Meliphagidae or honey-eaters) notorious for pugnacious behavior; the models are orioles of the Oriolus [bouroensis] superspecies (family Oriolidae). Wallace was struck by parallel geographical variation in plumage between friarbirds and orioles on two Indonesian islands. Subsequent study expanded Wallace's observations in three respects . . . --Jared M. Diamond, 24 February 1994. Nature 367: 684.
The common idea that Darwin behaved like a perfect gentleman throughout the Wallace episode rests partly on the myth that he had some option other than those outlined above--that he could have rushed his theory to press without so much as mentioning Wallace. But unless Wallace was even more saintly than he seems to have been, this would have brought a scandal that left Darwin's name tainted, even to the point of endangering its connection to his theory. In other words: this option was not an option. The biographer who admiringly observes that Darwin "hated losing his priority, but he hated even more the chance of being suspected of ungentlemanly or nonsporting conduct" is creating a distinction where none existed; to have been thought unsporting would have threatened his priority . . . --Robert Wright, 1994. In his The Moral Animal (Pantheon Books): 306.
A major stumbling block for Darwinians was the absence of any fossil remains of humans in Europe during the Tertiary period. From this Wallace had argued a priori that the human species had not spread widely upon the earth and was of recent origin. Since fossil remains had been located only in the tropics, Wallace concluded that these warm climes had been the cradle of human evolution . . . --Nancy J. Christie, 1994. In Roy MacLeod & Philip J. Rehbock, eds., Darwin's Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (University of Hawai'i Press): 445.
Wallace is less well known for his lifelong insistence on the necessity for precise species distribution maps than he is for his much-disputed line. Detailed knowledge of species distribution was the basis for Wallace's efforts to formulate a general scheme of faunal regions. In one image, Wallace's map redefined and unified the various notions of biological regions current in the first half of the nineteenth century, embodied the evolutionary history of the diverse biota of the East Indian Archipelago, and participated in a genre of visual representation extending into the contemporary culture . . . Jane R. Camerini, December 1993. Isis 84(4): 727.
Fisher (1920) explains that the "essential difference" between plans such as those of Wallace and his own "is that between redeemability and irredeemability." But is there really an essential difference between always being able to "redeem" a gold certificate for a possibly varying quantity of gold, on the one hand, and always being able to purchase with irredeemable money a given quantity of gold at a possibly varying market price, on the other? So as an outsider to economics, Wallace was free from the attachment to gold and thus advocated a stabilization policy that was more in the spirit of the quantity theory. He was also explicit about what Fisher (in his definite-reserve system) left unspecified; namely, the role of the Treasury in injecting or withdrawing quantities of money from circulation. Here was a true anticipator of the Chicago School of the 1930s . . . --Don Patinkin, Summer 1993. Economic Quarterly 79(3): 18.
The second story is that the thin Martian atmosphere is but a remnant of a once much thicker atmosphere, most of which long ago escaped to space [cf., Wallace, 1907]. Other things being equal, because it is smaller, escape is easier from Mars than from Earth or Venus. Several escape mechanisms have been suggested, including some that could be operative today. A possibly important example of the latter is the nonthermal escape of nitrogen. Hydrodynamic escape and impact erosion of the atmosphere (a.k.a. atmospheric cratering) are two potentially much more effective escape mechanisms that should have been operative early . . . --Kevin J. Zahnle, 25 June 1993. Journal of Geophysical Research E 98(6): 10,889.
. . . the value of living organisms as an intellectual resource is another compelling reason for preserving biotic diversity. It provides the materials that allow us to understand the living world, whatever our reasons for doing so. Extinction is depriving us of much of the crucial evidence. Among the measures that Wallace advocated was the establishment of a system of strategically located forest reserves where a representative sample of the biota could be preserved and studied by naturalists . . . --Michael T. Ghiselin, Spring 1993. Pacific Discovery 46(2): 23.
Selection for genetic isolation has been called the Wallace Effect by Grant, in honor of A. R. Wallace who first suggested it (Wallace 1889). Control of a species' altitudinal boundary by a pathogen-environment interaction may provide an appropriate arena for the Wallace Effect. The scenario for speciation suggested above begins with a very unlikely event: establishment of a new disease-resistant population outside the normal habitat of the parent species. Though unlikely, such speciation across a "pathological barrier" requires no changes of climate, elevation of mountain chains, or other large scale phenomena. It suggests that the potential for the establishment of peripheral isolates in new ecological settings may exist at the margin of a great many species. This scenario is similar to the concept of the "upstart species" of Harper or of new species "budding off' from older species . . . --William Burger, December 1992. Biotropica 24(4): 569.
For both monochromatic and polychromatic species, pelage pigmentation would be helpful for identifying conspecifics, especially at distances where odor and vocalizations would be unreliable cues. In polychromatic species it would also narrow the range of choices within a herd when looking for the mother, particularly when her head cannot be seen clearly. Alfred Russel Wallace recognized the significance of body pigmentation when he wrote in 1889, under the subject of "Colour as a means of recognition": "If we consider the habits and life-histories of those animals which are more or less gregarious, comprising a large proportion of the herbivora, . . . we shall see that a means of ready recognition of its own kind, at a distance or during rapid motion, in dusk of twilight or in partial cover, must be of the greatest advantage and often lead to the preservation of life." Within a colour category, the young would have to rely on other cues, be they visual, auditory, or olfactory. For example, the length of pelage was one of the cues eliminated in this study by cutting the does' hair, because in a previous study I noticed that the offspring of long-haired females tended to solicit females with long hair like that of their mothers. Although cues present in the head are probably important for individual recognition, at a distance the fine detail of facial characteristics might not be as discernable as markings on parts of the body with more surface area. The specific visual cues used for recognition should depend on the characteristics of the group or species, the habitat in which the species is found, and the perceptual capabilities of the developing individuals . . . --Carlos R. Ruiz-Miranda, November 1992. Behaviour 123(1-2): 136-137.
For Paley, the epiglottis could not evolve in this manner; hence, some form of causality other than change origin is called for. Paley's answer was "an intelligent and designing Creator." Soon other thinkers followed Paley's lead concerning the impact of the argument from perfection. In one of the most amazing shifts in the history of ideas, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) employed what may be considered an indirect use of the argument from perfection on an a fortiori basis against the very theory of natural selection that he had founded with Charles Darwin . . . --John T. Baldwin, April 1992. Harvard Theological Review 85(1): 112.
. . . On the one hand, motivated by the biological evidence discussed, but restricting themselves to a one-dimensional model of world reality, Goldschmidt and Gould (themselves standing outside the argument from perfection tradition) of necessity turn for an alternative model of origins to a refined concept of the "hopeful monster" theory wholly explainable by empirical principles within a materialistic framework. On the other hand, Paley, Wallace, Mivart, Bergson, Taylor, Kenny, Plantinga, and Polkinghorne, prompted by similar biological evidence but remaining open to a wider model of reality (one that can include a trans-empirical dimension) and to a dynamic relationship between God and the world, conclude that the evidence points more convincingly to some kind of originating causality that in the final analysis lies beyond the reach of "methodological naturalism." . . . --John T. Baldwin, April 1992. Harvard Theological Review 85(1): 119.
Alfred Russel Wallace developed a theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time that Charles Darwin did. He applied his theory to one of the earliest scenarios of human evolution. He related the split between the first human beings and the apes to the habitats in which they lived. Wallace proposed that hominids, our bipedally walking ancestors, arose on the great plains and high plateaus of Eurasia, isolated there by shrinking forests. His deduction was based on the fact that apes today live in dense forested areas. Wallace thought, therefore, that bipedally striding humans must have evolved in open, flat areas. Darwin disagreed on the geography, believing that a tropical environment with abundant fruit was our ancestral hominids' environment. He preferred an African origin for the human lineage. The chimpanzee and gorilla, he pointed out, were both African and the closest living primate relatives to humans . . . --Noel T. Boaz, March 1992. Earth 1(2): 37.
These findings show that Wallace's hypothesis can be verified for a broad category of population genetic models and that, therefore, the Wallace effect indeed deserves a central position in speciation theory. By outlining the effects of gametic phase imbalance, the findings also point at the forces which could possibly set up barriers to speciation: asymmetric gene flow between parapatric populations, and asymmetric cross-incompatibility in both parapatric and sympatric (sub-)populations. Asymmetry in cross-incompatibility describes the situation where in one population the rejection of cross-matings is markedly stronger than in the other population. However, whether these conditions actually suffice to inhibit speciation must be proven in each special case . . . --Hans-Rolf Gregorius, February 1992. Journal of Theoretical Biology 154(3): 397.
. . . Wallace's narrative eye, like Darwin's, allows him to transcend time through visual analogy, but it is the European model of cultural progress rather than biological history that flashes before the reader. The narrative motion of the European mind searching backward through its own memory is obscured, and the narrative motion of the tropical landscape advancing into the European landscape is foregrounded. Wallace's representation suggests than in looking at the trees he is not simply experiencing perceptual confusion; he is perceiving future forms in present ones. The link between trees and pillars, between tropical and European, is thus seen as a historical inevitability rather than an optical illusion or perceptual accident. Where Darwin's illusions increase formal variety, however, Wallace's limit it. Rather than a single form blossoming into multiple analogous forms, Wallace's eye perceives several different species in terms of a single European form. The distinction between Darwin's and Wallace's representational strategies roughly correlates to the differences in their evolutionary theories. Darwin believed in random competitive evolution while Wallace believed in adaptive, environmental evolution . . . --James Krasner, 1992. In his The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (Oxford University Press): 114.
. . . In Wallace's nature all selection is purposeful and relatively precise; nature tends toward utility, and clears way all forms that are not useful. James's theory of vision can be seen as the perceptual corollary to Wallace's evolutionary theory. The Jamesian mind, like Wallace's evolutionary nature, establishes a formal standard that must be met, and all those forms that fail to meet that standard are eliminated; in Wallace's nature they die off, in James's vision they go unperceived. It is therefore appropriate that Wallace should use a Jamesian representational model. Where Darwin portrays visual forms mutating and multiplying as they compete for space in the reader's perceptual field, Wallace portrays the selection of forms according to an imageable standard of reference. Moreover, because this formal standard is European, the forms of nature are selected according to the standard of reference of European experience--the viewer perceives trees as pillars, and those trees that look less like pillars are ignored. Wallace's representation of evolution thus involves the reader in a more and more familiar world . . . --James Krasner, 1992. In his The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (Oxford University Press): 115.
Until just before 1880 Wallace had firmly believed "that vaccination was a scientific procedure, and that Jenner was one of the great benefactors of mankind." As a young man he had voluntarily undergone vaccination and subsequent revaccination, just before leaving for South America on a naturalistic trip. He had never questioned the effectiveness of the operation until reading several anti-vaccination texts and meeting William Tebb, the 1870 successor of John and Richard Gibbs as leader of the Anti-vaccination League and founder of the Anti-vaccination Society of America. Convinced by Tebb's arguments, Wallace joined him in the battle for the new cause. Aware of his ignorance on medical matters, Wallace always based his arguments on statistic figures rather than on strictly sanitary aspects. Harry Clements, his biographer, writes: "no one was apparently able seriously to challenge him on the figures." . . . --Giacomo Scarpelli, 1992. Nuncius (Italy) 7(1): 115-116.
. . . These moral principles were also applied to another field of study, that of the so-called "Psychical Research" which caught Wallace's interest very early, in fact earlier than we might possibly think. Spiritism, in Wallace's mind, had a eudaemonist socratic meaning: ghosts were seen as moral and spiritual guides to man. Wallace then developed the idea of man as center of a pre-ordained universe, in which the pain which man is subject to being the most sensitive creature, and the evil which he must fight since he is capable of discerning, are seen as necessary steps towards the completion of moral rather than organic developments, necessary to enter into a superior spiritual sphere. We can now truly understand this sentence: "the whole purpose, the only raison d'être of the world [ . . . ] was the development of human spirit in association with the human body" . . . This conception of a pre-existing order and a synchronicity can explain the logic which backed Wallace's opinions and attitudes . . . --Giacomo Scarpelli, 1992. Nuncius (Italy) 7(1): 120-121.
. . . Wallace . . . brought forth an alternative explanation which involved totally different powers. Man has the faculty of artificially selecting vegetable and animal species; similarly a Higher Intelligence could have controlled and directed Natural Selection in the human development process, in a particular and highly ethical aim . . . Effectively, Wallace, induced by the moral ideal earlier mentioned, was trying to find a solution that would not clash with his vision of harmonia naturae and undermine the theory of Natural Selection with whatsoever extension or correction. His was not a denial of the theory but, paradoxically, the result of his excessively rigourous attitude. Wallace, the hyperselectivist, preferred to involve a Superior Intellect, in other words a deus ex machina, rather than admit that his primary theory might possibly have been less absolute . . . --Giacomo Scarpelli, 1992. Nuncius (Italy) 7(1): 126.
. . . Wallace was driven in his crusade by ethical and social issues, as well as the intention of preventing the disruption of the biological balance. This was altogether a kind of civil protest aimed towards a general reform of society, freed from imposition. Wallace believed that an improvement of the population's economic conditions would have resulted in higher hygienic standards and a richer diet, and consequently, in a decreased spread of diseases, smallpox included. He also envisaged the creation of a Ministry of Health employing teams of Doctors. These purposes, which seem so obvious today, were in his time little less than revolutionary. It can be said that Wallace foresaw the creation of National Health Service . . . --Giacomo Scarpelli, 1992. Nuncius (Italy) 7(1): 128.
Man's Place in the Universe. A. R. Wallace (McClure, Phillips, New York, 1903). A famous coauthor of Darwin's discovery anticipated in the last chapter of his book almost all versions of modern AP [the Anthropic Principle] . . . --Yuri V. Balashov, December 1991. American Journal of Physics 59(12): 1072.
Wallace did not try to explain distribution patterns by invoking the occurrence of unique events but rather by recourse to general principles. For Wallace that general principle was geological change. There are numerous passages in Wallace (1880) that confirm his appreciation of the importance of geological change in understanding distribution patterns in Indonesia. His discussion of the faunal relationship between the Malay Peninsula and the islands of Borneo, Sumatra, and Java is detailed and provides a clear statement of his position. Having noted the overall similarity of this area's flora and fauna to that of India, he continued on the greater similarity of the mammals and birds of Borneo and Sumatra than those of Borneo and Java, and on the high degree of endemism of the Javan fauna . . . --B. Michaux, September 1991. Australian Systematic Botany 4(1): 26.
. . . Although this is a rather brief summary of the distribution patterns that Wallace recognised in Indonesia, it does, I believe, accurately reflect the major patterns he observed. His interpretations of these patterns, based as they were on an incomplete understanding of the dynamic nature of the earth's surface, are only really of historical interest. Wallace's attempt to understand distributional patterns in terms of geological change was doomed from the start because neither he nor anyone else at the time realised that land could move laterally as well as vertically . . . --B. Michaux, September 1991. Australian Systematic Botany 4(1): 27.
Discrimination involves recognition in the signal receiver that a stimulus, or configuration of stimuli, belongs to some discrete category. The importance of design for discriminability has been recognized since Wallace (1867) suggested that distasteful insect larvae '. . . required some distinctive mark, something by which they may be contrasted with and separated from the agreeable larvae, in order that they might be freed from the attacks of birds' and that 'Brilliant colouration would be such a distinction as was required'. Warning colours and patterns should therefore look different from those of the prey for which predators normally hunt . . . --Tim Guilford & Marian Stamp Dawkins, July 1991. Animal Behaviour 42(1): 5.
Successive generations of evolutionary biologists, beginning with August Weismann and Alfred R. Wallace, have refined our understanding of the evolution of senescence to the point where we now have pretty good reason to believe that in a species like our own aging occurs because natural selection places higher priority on turning out progeny to carry our genes forward than on keeping individuals going; in effect, late survival is sacrificed for reproduction. Extending through a more diverse range of reproductive patterns, the burgeoning discipline of evolutionary life-history theory provides us with the intellectual framework to approach questions like why some species get only a single shot at reproduction (semelparity) while other get more (iteroparity) and why species differ in their longevities . . . --Caleb E. Finch, 28 June 1991. Science 252(5014): 1864.
. . . In Wallace there was support for the nationalization of land and for the economic emancipation of women. The latter reform he actually justified in evolutionary terms, thereby giving rise to a form of social Wallaceism. His point was that women were currently prevented, by their social and economic disadvantages, from fully exercising their selective role in the choice of mate. Although he sometimes felt that Darwin attached too great an importance to sexual selection in the mechanics of evolution, Wallace was nevertheless convinced that female emancipation could only benefit posterity . . . --John Hedley Brooke, 1991. In his Science and Religion; Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press): 294-295.
. . . The sheer improbability of the emergence of man deeply impressed Alfred Russel Wallace. Contingency had piled upon contingency with each critical stage in evolutionary divergence. In a book written late in life, Man's Place in the Universe (1903), he turned the argument against physicists and astronomers who were scouring the heavens for planets having a physical environment comparable with that of the earth and on which intelligent life might be presumed to have evolved. Properly understood, Wallace argued, the theory of evolution told against such a possibility--certainly against the emergence of intelligence akin to human. However close the physico-chemical environment to that on earth, it was inconceivable that the evolutionary process on other worlds could have followed the same nuanced path as on earth. One minor deviation at an early stage and the whole process would take an entirely different course . . . --John Hedley Brooke, 1991. In his Science and Religion; Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press): 315.
Wallace's scientific case rested on his conclusion that the human brain, including that of the most primitive peoples, was more powerful than was necessary for survival. For a large part of his early life Wallace had lived among primitive peoples in South America and Southeast Asia, an experience that convinced him that these people, simple as they have appeared in mind and action, were equal in intelligence to Europeans. As the modern anthropologist Loren Eiseley remarked, Wallace displayed "scarcely a trace of the racial superiority so frequently manifested in nineteenth-century scientific circles," in which were included Darwin and Thomas Huxley. If human beings possessed brain capacities beyond what was needed for survival, Wallace reasoned, then how could natural selection bring about its evolution? Where was the "survival value" of that capacity if that capacity was not fully used? After all, natural selection improved an organ only through its adaptation to the pressure of environment. In the case of the human brain, however, the capacity was greater than human beings really required or that the pressure of environment could account for. Wallace logically concluded on those grounds that "some higher intelligence directed the process by which the human race was developed." . . . --Carl N. Degler, 1991. In his In Search of Human Nature; The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford University Press): 60.
. . . It will be recalled that Darwin could find no useful value in the physical (racial) differences among human groups. Thus he could not account for those differences through the operation of natural selection. He did, however, accept the common anthropological view of the time that the differences in levels of culture or civilization which occurred among the diverse peoples of the world derived from differences in their biological capacities. Some cultures were higher than others because the people in those societies were biologically superior. That was the opening in his theory of human evolution through which racism entered. It was that opening which Wallace closed with his conception of the intellectual equality and therefore the equal cultural capacity of all peoples. As things turned out, Wallace looked to other ways and matters in his effort to make evolution less competitive and threatening. He did not develop any further his assertion of the mental equality of all peoples, or at least few took notice of its relevance. Yet that was the precise argument, elaborated and tirelessly defended, that undermined in time the concept of racism in America. Its elaboration and defense underpinned the concept of culture, an idea that in the twentieth century became not only an alternative to a racial explanation for human behavioral differences but also a central concept in social science . . . --Carl N. Degler, 1991. In his In Search of Human Nature; The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford University Press): 61.
. . . Wallace's supernatural explanation gained few followers among social scientists in the second half of the twentieth century, but his assertion of the special, indeed unique, nature of man, because of his brain, continued to influence many, directly or indirectly. The eminent modern American anthropologist Loren Eiseley, for example was among them. His sympathetic response to Wallace reflects the views of many other American social scientists today. Eiseley did not doubt that Wallace has a better understanding of the roots of human nature than Darwin. In his book Darwin's Century, Eiseley contrasted Darwin's conception with that of Wallace. "The mind of man, by indetermination, by the power of choice and cultural communication," he wrote, "is on the verge of escape from the blind control of that deterministic world with which the Darwinists had unconsciously shackled man. The inborn characteristics laid upon him by the biological extremists have crumbled away," he was relieved to report. In Eiseley's judgement, Wallace stood out among evolutionists of his own time because he recognized even then that human beings had escaped from biological evolution. "Wallace saw and saw correctly, that with the rise of man the evolution of parts was to a marked degree outmoded, that mind was now the arbiter of human destiny." . . . --Carl N. Degler, 1991. In his In Search of Human Nature; The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford University Press): 330.
Wallace (1865) hypothesized that sex-limited mimicry, in which palatable females are the only sex to mimic unpalatable butterflies, arises because females fly more slowly than males and hence are more vulnerable to predation. Our results from the within-lineage analyses are in agreement with Wallace's hypothesis. Evolutionarily, palatable males have larger thoraces, maximizing flight muscle, and smaller abdomens, minimizing load on the wings, probably to maximize flight speed; whereas females have retained large abdomens, probably to maximize egg load. Counter-selection for fecundity may operate against faster flight speeds, and females may be reproductively constrained to evolve alternative means of avoiding predation, such as mimicry. If females fly more slowly, they may be predisposed to fly like an unpalatable model . . . --Robert Srygley & Peng Chai, 11 October 1990. Oecologia 84(4): 498.
. . . there simply weren't any lists of Darwinian tenets that would have been accepted by all the leading Darwinians and rejected by all the main non-Darwinians in the first decade or so following the publication of the Origin. Both the Darwinians Charles Lyell and Asa Gray and the non-Darwinians the Duke of Argyll and St. George Mivart, for example, thought that natural selection must be supplemented by some sort of "directing force" in order to account for the relevant phenomena, while Darwin consistently denied the need for such an additional mechanism (Argyll 1877; Gray 1884; Mivart 1871). Conversely, neither the Darwinians Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell nor the non-Darwinians St. George Mivart and William Whewell thought that human beings could be included under the same explanatory scheme (whatever this might be) that was used to account for the history and behavior of "lower" animals, while Darwin maintained that they could . . . --Doren Recker, September 1990. Philosophy of Science 57(3): 463.
The efforts to denigrate Darwin serve only to conceal the real differences between the two naturalists' approach to transmutation. Careful reading of Wallace's paper reveals that in several important respects his theory failed to duplicate the essence of Darwin's thinking. Wallace had no interest in artificial selection and refused to treat it as analogous to the natural process even in later years. His mechanism did not even address the basic question of how selection acts on individual differences to change a population, because he was interested in how one well-marked variety (what we now call a subspecies) could replace others. Once it is recognized that in writing of natural selection acting on varieties Wallace was thinking of subspecies rather than individual variations, it can be seen that his paper does not contain a description of what Darwin saw as the basic mechanism of change. Wallace simply assumed that species split into varieties--he did not seek to explain how this all-important first step occurs. It has also been suggested that Wallace failed to appreciate the full power of selection because he treated the varieties as struggling against nature, not struggling against each other . . . --Peter J. Bowler, 1990. In his Charles Darwin; The Man and His Influence (Basil Blackwell): 113.
. . . Wallace's Darwinism of 1889 provided a clear and comprehensive survey of the theory and of the relevant areas of biology. Except in the case of the origin of the human mind, Wallace was an extreme selectionist; unlike Darwin, he would have nothing to do with any other mechanism of evolution. This position soon became known as 'neo-Darwinism' to distinguish it from the more flexible form of the theory which Darwin himself had advocated and which had gained support precisely because it allowed selection to be relegated to the status of a secondary mechanism . . . --Peter J. Bowler, 1990. In his Charles Darwin; The Man and His Influence (Basil Blackwell): 210.
The good parent process is a mechanism for the evolution of epigamic traits that is distinct from the Fisherian process and the good genes process. In the good parent process, direct selection on females to discriminate among males on the basis of male parental quality leads to the evolution of a trait that provides female with honest (accurate and precise) information regarding the non-heritable component of parental quality in a potential mate. Wallace (1891, 1901) recognized the potential of such a mechanism, but he had no way to consider rigorously the effects of inheritance. The good parent process is also different from Darwinian sexual selection (Darwin 1871), because females are not necessarily attracted by a good parent trait. A trait that evolves via the good parent process only enhances the attractiveness of high-quality males . . . --Guy A. Hoelzer, December 1989. Animal Behaviour 38(6): 1075.
Since Wallace (1889), a number of authors have argued that isolating barriers could be positively selected for their isolating property to prevent the formation of hybrids and to actively promote divergence and speciation. However, being a second order effect, the selective forces are likely to be weak, and, as Levin points out, in practice it is going to be very difficult to distinguish this effect from other forms of competition and selection . . . --Mark R. Macnair, February 1989. Genome 31(1): 204-205.
Wallace, on the other hand, insisted on the validity of the "uniform and consistent testimony of our senses". It is complete fallacy, so he argued, that only propositions could be demonstrated and phenomena could not be. "The direct testimony of the educated senses guided by reason was of higher validity than any complex results of reason alone." According to Wallace, testimony was trustworthy if the witness was in full possession of the senses and in agreement with the reports of other witnesses. Was it really true, asked Wallace rhetorically, that a member of the House of Peers like Lord Lyndsay--who had recently converted to spiritualism--"can not be trusted as a faithful witness?" If the witness were insane or deluded, Wallace argued, they would also be unable to use Carpenter's mathematical reasoning . . . --Roy J. DeCarvalho, January 1989. Journal of Religion and Psychical Research 12(1): 22.
The modern Darwinian theory of evolution is defective in that it does not even recognize the extraordinary problem that is presented by living organisms acquiring mental experiences of a non-material kind that are in another world from the world of matter-energy, which formerly was globally comprehensive. The Cartesian solution is not generally acceptable, namely, that human beings have conscious experiences that are attributable to the Divine creation of souls, and that higher animals are merely machine-like automata devoid of mental experiences. Likewise the panpsychist evasion of the problem is not acceptable. It is disturbing that evolutionists have largely ignored the tremendous enigma that is presented to their materialistic theory by the emergence of mentality in the animal evolution . . . I believe that the emergence of consciousness is a skeleton in the cupboard of orthodox evolutionism. At the same time it is recognized that, although the holistic concept gives meaning to the emergence of consciousness, it provides no explanation of this emergence. It remains just as enigmatic as it is to an orthodox evolutionist as long as it is regarded as an exclusively natural process in an exclusively materialist world . . . --John C. Eccles, 1989. In his Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (Routledge): 176.
. . . Nature still presented a gory spectacle; and people of faith still had to wonder at the divine power that would use such means. Hence, Wallace comes to repeat the position Darwin flirted with above: denial of pain and suffering as a means of vindicating the goodness of nature. In his 1911 chapter "Is Nature Cruel?" he offers again the answer that nature is not cruel because most animals simply do not suffer. Wallace cautions that one must not read one's own sensations into the animal world: that "anything approaching to what we term 'pain' was unknown" to most animals. They "probably suffer nothing at all when being devoured." He goes further to assert (very strongly) that "birds, mice, squirrels, and the like, do not get limbs broken by falls, as we do," and that, in sum, "whatever pain exists is not long-continued" (Wallace 1911, 404-405) . . . --David Oates, December 1988. Zygon 23(4): 445.
Darwin's response is, on the face of it, rather puzzling. Why did he not protest Wallace's assertion that selection works principally through the elimination of unfavorable variants? Historians generally agree that the acknowledgment of selection as a negative force--removing inferior variants and thus maintaining the "type"--long predated Darwin. In this perspective, Darwin's achievement lay in his recognition that selection was "a creative process and not merely a sieve." But there is no evidence that his dissents from Wallace's essentially negative view. Perhaps historians' radical distinction between natural selection as a creative force and as executioner of the unfit--that is, as "nature's broom"--was not recognized by Darwin . . . --Diane B. Paul, Fall 1988. Journal of the History of Biology 21(3): 417-418.
The Great American Interchange was first recognized by Wallace (1876), but it has taken another hundred years of intense paleontological study by Ameghino, Matthew, Scott, Patterson, Simpson, Webb, and others to clarify patterns of dispersal. It is only during the last decade, moreover, that greater precision in dating the sediments containing interchange taxa has provided a firm time frame for various aspects of the event. It is now possible to assess the interchange in detail, and to analyze the tempo and mode of dispersal and the rates of extinction and origination in successive faunas through time. As a result, the Great American Interchange represents the best-documented example in the fossil record of the intermingling of two long-separated continental faunas . . . --Larry G. Marshall, July-August 1988. American Scientist 76(4): 380.
. . . "I should be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of general views in about a dozen pages or so; but I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably. Wallace says nothing about publication, and I enclose his letter. But as I had not intended to publish any sketch, can I do so honourably, because Wallace has sent me an outline of his doctrine? I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit. Do you not think his having sent me this sketch ties my hands? I do not in least believe that that [sic] he originated his views from anything which I wrote to him" [Darwin's words] . . . --Barbara G. Beddall, Spring 1988. Journal of the History of Biology 21(1): 52.
. . . In the narrow focus espoused both by the participants in the events leading up to and including the "joint papers," and by their successors, priority in this case has been treated as a "single event," a zero-sum game with winners and losers, an occasion when "editorial manipulation" and "delicate arrangements" could be invoked. But, as seen above, the matter is far more complex than this approach would indicate. It requires a broader perspective in which the enormous contributions made by both Darwin and Wallace can be recognized. In game theory this would be a non-zero-sum game, where both Darwin and Wallace benefited from the work of the other, thus becoming codiscoverers of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. If this interpretation of the events is rejected, the status of the matter reverts to a zero-sum game, which brings back with it not only its winners and losers, but also the problems of "editorial manipulation" and "delicate arrangements," as posed by Kohn and Nelson . . . --Barbara G. Beddall, Spring 1988. Journal of the History of Biology 21(1): 62.
Strangely enough, it was A. R. Wallace, not Darwin, who suggested an explicit associative hypothesis integrating learning theory with natural selection. In a paper entitled "On the Origin of Food Aversion Paradigms," Garcia and Hankins present the case for a Darwin-Wallace conditioning theory initiated in 1866 and experimentally verified by 1887. Their theory was actively generating research 2 decades before Pavlov began his studies in classical conditioning, and 3 decades before Thorndike presented his thesis on instrumental conditioning. This pioneer effort culminated in today's research area, narrowly labeled "conditioned taste aversion." More broadly considered, this paradigm is representative of homeostatic conditioning which Tolman (1949) called "cathexis"; when responding to survival needs, organisms come to cherish one particular type of food and drink, or one given type of mate, and to abhor others . . . --Robert C. Bolles & Michael D. Beecher, eds., 1988. In their Evolution and Learning (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 29.
. . . Wallace had traveled widely in South America and the South Pacific as a naturalist and collector of exotic specimens. His observations of native peoples had convinced him that the intellectual and moral faculties required by the aboriginal way of life were not markedly different from those needed by mammals generally to survive in their respective ecological situations. Yet aborigines brought to England and educated there had the capacity to acquire the behavioral sophistication of modern Europeans. Thus, aborigines had moral and intellectual capacities far exceeding the immediate requirements of the environments in which they had evolved. Therefore the intellectual capacities of primitive man, and by implication modern man, could not be the result of natural selection . . . --Robert C. Bolles & Michael D. Beecher, 1988. In their Evolution and Learning (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 41.
The adaptive nature of warning, or 'aposematic' colour patterns seemed clear a century ago (Wallace, 1867, 1878; Poulton, 1890), but recently it has been debated whether 'individual' natural selection may explain their initial evolution. Fisher (1930) had earlier suggested a similar problem with the evolution of unpalatability. Previous explanations depend purely on selection to explain the evolution of warning colours. Here we propose that drift, combined with natural selection, may also be important . . . --James Mallet & Michael C. Singer, December 1987. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 32(4): 338.
. . . Although mimicry strongly suggests that colour patterns are used as warning signals, there is only anecdotal evidence that warning colours are easier to learn than non-warning colours. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the bright colours of unpalatable insects are more efficient signals (Wallace, 1867, 1878). Birds seem to learn to avoid conspicuous prey more easily, and humans use bright colours in warning signs. However unpalatable insects could be brightly coloured for other reasons . . . --James Mallet & Michael C. Singer, December 1987. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 32(4): 338.
. . . In the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, over several editions, Alfred Russel Wallace argued the case for acclimatization. He was more careful than most, at that stage, in distinguishing between domestication, naturalization and acclimatization. And yet arguing from first evolutionary principles and from plant and animal biogeography, he urged that "numerous facts in the distribution of races show that man must, in remote ages at least, have been capable of constitutional adaptation to climate". In more recent times, the migrations of the Jews, and the settlement of the Dutch in South Africa, the English-speaking peoples in America and Australia, and the Spanish in South America all demonstrated that complete acclimatization was entirely possible . . . --David N. Livingstone, December 1987. History of Science 25(4): 381.
. . . But now that the monogenist thesis had triumphed, acclimatization followed as a natural consequence. Similar deductions were drawn by A.R. Wallace: "numerous facts in the distribution of races show that man must, in remote ages at least, have been capable of constitutional adaptation to climate" he urged. Hence, "if the human race constitutes a single species, then the mere fact that man now inhabits every region, and is in each case constitutionally adapted to the climate, proves that acclimatization has occurred." . . . --David N. Livingstone, December 1987. History of Science 25(4): 386.
Wallace's view was kindred in spirit to Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879), although Wallace had less regard for the market. Both saw man as needing land. Their mutual disapproval of Parnellism brought them together, and both submerged methodological differences to further their common concept. Wallace gave him a platform when George toured Britain. Wallace cast George as a theorist who confirmed Wallace's inductive argument, perhaps underrating George's journalistic background. For many years single tax and land nationalization were closely linked by friend and foe . . . --Mason Gaffney, 1987. In John Eatwell, Murray Milgate & Peter Newman, eds., The New Palgraves: A Dictionary of Economics (Macmillan), Volume 4: 850.
According to both Spencer and Wallace, a natural principle of evolution inexorably led to the moral perfection of man. Wallace, of course, had a different principle in mind than Spencer's device of adaptation through the inherited effects of habit. He nonetheless believed that the principle of natural selection would add further support to Spencer's primary vision, the view that man's moral character was not only a goal of evolution, but also a chief means of progress toward the perfection of human nature . . . --Robert J. Richards, 1987. In his Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (University of Chicago Press): 165-166.
. . . Evolutionary theory, as Darwin himself admitted in the Origin, remained mute concerning how life and consciousness first arose in the universe; it could only account for subsequent transformations. Just so, Wallace now proclaimed, natural selection brought no clear perception of the origins of specifically human intellect and moral feeling. He was persuaded that these distinctive capacities must have originated under the influence of higher powers, intelligences who shepherded the progressive development of mind through the ages . . . --Robert J. Richards, 1987. In his Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (University of Chicago Press): 178.
. . . Contemporary primitives and our ancestors thus had latent mental qualities that could not be explained by natural selection, which demanded that selected traits confer immediate advantage, not simply promise it. Wallace's contacts with the spirit world convinced him that higher intelligences rather than natural selection controlled human evolution. Wallace forthrightly claimed that a conversion to spiritualism proximately caused his rejection of natural selection as an adequate principle to explain human evolution; and virtually all historians have taken him at his word. But we need not. For after all, Wallace might well have chosen to regard natural selection as the disposing instrument of higher spiritual powers and to have held survival of the fittest as a secondary cause . . . --Robert J. Richards, 1987. In his Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (University of Chicago Press): 181.
. . . Huxley tarried only a short while over Wallace's demur about natural selection in the case of man. He derived from Wallace's own writings about savage life descriptions of the extraordinary mental feats such life actually required--knowledge of a vast territory, reading signs of game or enemies, discovery of properties of plants and habits of animals, and so forth. "In complexity and difficulty," Huxley estimated, "the intellectual labour of a 'good hunter or warrior' considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman." Wallace had simply miscalculated the brain power the savage actually needed for survival; thus neither primitive man nor modern native likely had in excess what could be delivered by natural selection or augmented by entering into civilized life. On the question of the moral sense, Huxley could "find nothing in Mr. Wallace's reasonings which has not already been met by Mr. Mill, Mr. Spencer, or Mr. Darwin." . . . --Robert J. Richards, 1987. In his Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (University of Chicago Press): 227.
And in The Growth of Biological Thought Ernst Mayr comments: "In his letter, Wallace said that if Darwin thought his paper sufficiently novel and interesting, he should send it to Lyell and, presumably, submit it for publication (the original Wallace letter is no longer in existence)." But it is clear that Wallace did not ask Darwin to arrange for publication. Unfortunately, as Mayr notes, the letter that accompanied Wallace'1s paper is lost. However, we have Darwin's word for it that there was no such instruction. On the same day that Wallace's paper arrived, Darwin wrote an anguished letter to Lyell, in which he refers to Wallace's "MS, which he does not say he wishes me to publish". Then, a week later, he wrote to Lyell again, to express his misgivings about Lyell's and Hooker's plan. One of his reasons for worrying was that "Wallace says nothing about publication". Why should such distinguished writers as Ruse and Mayr make this particular mistake? This is the kind of error that might perhaps follow from a moral presumption. It seems wrong to publish someone's work, without consulting him, in a forum he has not approved. Thus, if we are assuming that Darwin and his friends acted properly, it will be natural to assume that Wallace must have asked that his paper be published. But in fact he did not . . . --James Rachels, Summer 1986. National Forum 66(3): 24.
The concept of r- and K-selection is intuitively reasonable and indeed there is much circumstantial evidence from both macroecology and microbial ecology that it exists. The seminal ideas were contributed largely by Dobzhansky (1950), who compared evolution in the tropics and temperate latitudes. Actually, it is usually overlooked that the great naturalist Wallace (1878), in his remarks on tropical plant and animal life, anticipated many of Dobzhansky's conclusions. Dobzhansky surmised that adaptation in the species-rich tropics is primarily to a harsh biological environment, while the fewer species in colder realms have to contend mainly with the physical environment. Put simplistically, the outcome of different evolutionary pressures between the two regions is competitiveness (high K) or productivity (high r), respectively . . . --John H. Andrews & Robin F. Harris, 1986. Advances in Microbial Ecology 9: 104.
. . . there even continued to be one or two plebeians who became recognised leaders in a field. Most famously, though A. R. Wallace . . . was of impoverished gentle family, he had something of a craftsmanly formation, during which he became a life-long Owenite (he died in 1913). Had his fellow-FRSs borne this in mind, they might have been less puzzled by his left-wing politics, his anti-vaccinationism and his plebeian-type spiritualism. A recent historian has plausibly treated him as an import into the later nineteenth century from the 1840s, and we might also see him as an import into prestigious scientific circles from the world of self-taught scientists. His particular route to eminence involved much specimen-hunting but no diploma-hunting, much jungle-fever but no exam-fever . . . --Logie Barrow, 1986. In his Independent Spirits; Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850-1910 (Routledge & Kegan Paul): 153.
. . . Darwin and Wallace defended a programme of theoretical research by appeal to the superior coherence and fecundity of their programme. The appeal to superior coherence took place on two levels. At a substantive level they argued that their programme promised the discovery of relevantly similar natural forces for the explanation of relevantly similar natural phenomena. At an epistemic level they claimed coherence in their use of biogeographical and geological evidence and coherence in the application of the epistemic desideratum of scrutability. As Wallace had suggested, the appeal to coherence at substantive and epistemic levels is justified by the overall aim of science to construe its subject matter as maximally accessible to investigation and as maximally decidable by acceptable argument. The appeal to superior fecundity can also be justified as instrumental to the achievement of these aims . . . --Scott A. Kleiner, December 1985. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36(4): 391.
The allopatric model of speciation proposes that populations diverge genetically during a period of isolation either by drift, differential selection or different responses to similar selection pressures. When the barrier to dispersal is removed, this divergence may have led to premating reproductive isolation, post-mating isolation or both. Only if there is complete assortative mating, hybrid inviability or hybrid infertility will the two new taxa be able to coexist without exchanging genes and only if there is at least some premating reproductive isolation will they be able to invade on another's territory. Otherwise a hybrid zone is expected to form. Premating isolation may evolve, or be strengthened, in the hybrid zone because heterogametic matings produce unfit offspring--as first proposed by Wallace (1889) and subsequently incorporated into speciation theory by Dobzhansky (1940). However, this 'reinforcement' of premating isolating mechanisms is a contentious idea . . . --R. K. Butlin & G. M. Hewitt, November 1985. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 26(3): 269-270.
In contrast, Alfred Russel Wallace (1864), the co-discoverer of natural selection, stressed that group selection (i.e. selection not between individuals, but between groups) played an important role, at least among human beings. Describing the process of human evolution, he wrote: "In proportion as physical characteristics become of less importance, mental and moral qualities will have increasing importance to the well-being of a race. Capacity for acting in concern for the protection of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredation upon our fellows . . . are all qualities that from earliest appearance must have been for the benefit of each community, and would therefore have become objects of natural selection." . . . --Umberto Melotti, Summer 1985. The Mankind Quarterly 25(4): 324.
This is not meant to demean Darwin. In addition to his genius, Darwin was a warm, liberal man for his times: opposed to slavery, in favor of electoral reform, and concerned for the oppressed. But he was, in some areas, of his times and not very far ahead of them. For many scientists of the day, the existent native peoples were virtual "missing links." It was only through work in Wallace's tradition that "the Negro's skull is no longer placed on the lecturer's table between that of the gorilla and the Caucasian". At the time, Wallace's belief in the ultimate intellectual potential of native peoples must have seemed bizarre beyond reason . . . --Stephen E. Glickman, 1985/1992. In Sigmund Koch & David E. Leary, eds., A Century of Psychology as Science (American Psychological Association): 750.
. . . Less than a year later he wrote the first of two papers that together presented, in brief but complete form, a theory of evolution by natural selection. While the second paper, written three years later, postulated natural selection in variable populations as the mechanism by which species originated, the first paper (Wallace 1855) analyzed the significance of extinction within evolving lineages in producing all of the known patterns of organic distribution in time and space. It must be emphasized that this paper was the first published statement to appreciate the importance of the extinction of intermediates in a species lineage in creating the oft-observed gaps in taxonomic affinities, as well as those in distribution in both space and time. This meant that the observed placement of organisms in the regions of the globe was not the result of supernatural forces and divine objectives, but of the natural phenomena of extinction and species transmutation (or evolution.) . . . --John L. Brooks, 1985. Earth Sciences History 4(2): 115.
In his discussion of the debate between Darwin and Wallace, Mayr has claimed, "they used the term 'sterility' where we would use the term 'isolating mechanisms'." If this were the case, then Darwin advocated the incidental origin of reproductive isolation mechanisms, Wallace their origin by natural selection. Grant has gone on to suggest that it would be "fitting and desirable" to call the selective origin of reproductive isolation mechanisms the "Wallace effect". There can be no question that some late nineteenth-century naturalists did use the word "sterility" where evolutionists now use "reproductive isolation mechanisms". But I would argue that in their debate Darwin and Wallace meant what we do by "sterility". The distinction Wallace drew in point 6 of his 1 March 1868 letter between "disinclination to cross-unions" and "sterility" certainly supports his view. Consequently Wallace was not proposing the selective origin of reproductive isolation mechanisms in general, but rather the selective origin of the particular post-mating mechanisms of cross- and hybrid sterility. Since, according to current theory, these forms of sterility are precisely the types of reproductive isolation that cannot be produced by selection, the Darwin-Wallace debate provides little historical justification for the term "Wallace effect". The present view on the origin of sterility is essentially Darwin's view of an incidental origin. Furthermore, during the debate it was Darwin not Wallace who recognized the possibility of the selective origin of pre-mating reproductive isolation ("disinclination to cross"), while rejecting the selective origin of cross- and hybrid sterility . . . --Malcolm Jay Kottler, 1985. In David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton University Press): 416-417.
Our idea--and the support for it we have found thus far--points to the need for renewed examination of the effects of avian parasites and diseases on their hosts. If females are indeed choosing males that appear to be advertising their freedom from parasites, and if showy plumes and melodious voices have evolved from such a prosaic and down-to-earth cause, perhaps even Alfred Wallace might be mollified . . . --Marlene Zuk, April 1984. Natural History 93(4): 34.
"That excellent results may be obtained from a consideration of the habits and characters of the living bird is, we think, shown in Mr. Wallace's arrangement of the order Passeres. His remarks were published in 1856; but, if we mistake not, many of his suggestions have been more or less adopted in that part of Professor Owen's classification which relates to the same group. His conclusions, moreover, generally harmonize with the improvements proposed by Eyton and Nitzsch before him, and Blanchard and others after him, on anatomical groups; as also with what we consider to be the best features in Bonaparte's scheme" [passage quoted from an anonymous author] . . . --John L. Brooks, 1984. In his Before the Origin (Columbia University Press): 124.
. . .The explanation of the virtual faunal identity was revealed by the discovery of clear physiographic evidence that the sea between Aru and New Guinea had been created by recent subsidence--recent in geological time. This discovery provided Wallace with a geographic situation of the kind he had sought since his Amazonian days. According to his theory, only a slight change in the organic world should be manifest following a recent physiographic change. The species of birds, mammals, and insects he found in Aru were identical to those described for New Guinea, with the sole exception of the Ornithoptera. The Aru form was distinct, but minimally so, from O. poseidon, described from New Guinea. Observation thus confirmed the theory . . . --John L. Brooks, 1984. In his Before the Origin (Columbia University Press): 172.
Wallace's demonstration that man's tools (including language) removed his body from the realm of evolutionary specialization that operates inexorably elsewhere was recognized immediately as a turning point in the scientific study of man. His paper was intended as a vehicle for applying natural selection to a wide range of concerns--the antiquity of man, racial superiority, man's taxonomic rank--with the clear implication that human mental and moral attributes would also be subsumed under a strict evolutionary naturalism . . . --Martin Fichman, 1984. In Everett Mendelsohn, ed., Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences; Essays in Honor of I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge University Press): 475.
A final, important difference separates Wallace from Dyson and most modern supporters of the anthropic principle. Our contemporary advocates develop their arguments and then present their conclusion--that mind designed the universe, in part so that intelligent life might evolve within it--as a necessary and logical inference. Wallace was far too good a historical scientist to indulge in such fatuous certainty; he understood only too well that ordered and complex outcomes can arise from accumulated improbabilities . . . --Stephen Jay Gould, May 1983. Natural History 92(5): 38.
Avian selection on females might be stronger than that on males for a variety of reasons. First, birds might preferentially select females if they were larger, more valuable (e.g. because they contain eggs or embryos), or more easily captured than males. Wallace originally proposed a version of this hypothesis to account for female-biased polymorphisms in butterflies. He suggested that female butterflies might be more vulnerable to predators because they are laden with eggs and fly more slowly. Recently, it has been shown that birds do preferentially select female cicadas, which are less vagile and more nutritious than males. Even if birds did not discriminate between the sexes in prey species, selection on females might still be more intense if avian predators encountered or noticed more females than males. Female-biased encounter rates could result if the sex ratios of adult prey were heavily skewed towards females, if females occurred more often in microhabitats frequented by predators, or if females engaged in behaviors that made them more conspicuous than males. The differential predation hypothesis would be supported if birds ate females more frequently than males; it can be refuted if males completely lack protective patterns but are still eaten by birds . . . --J. A. Stamps & S. M. Gon III, 1983. Annual Review of Ecology & Systematics 14: 233-234.
After collecting briefly near Singapore, Wallace went to Sarawak to meet its celebrated White Rajah, Sir James Brooke. St. John, Brooke's secretary and biographer, has written: "We had at this time the famous naturalist, traveller and philosopher, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was then elaborating in his mind the theory that was simultaneously worked out by Darwin--the theory of the origin of species; if he could not convince us that our ugly neighbours, the orang-utans, were our ancestors, he pleased, instructed and delighted us by his clever and inexhaustible flow of talk--really good talk" (Life of Sir James Brooke, 1890). So much for the quiet, shy man . . . --Ralph E. Bernstein, 3 June 1982. New Scientist 94: 653.
I believe that study of specimens and field observations in New Guinea presently warrant two conclusions. First, orioles are indeed mimics of friarbirds, as Wallace postulated over a century ago. The case for mimicry is much stronger than Wallace realized: he had seen only two of the eight sets of populations that we now know . . . --Jared M. Diamond, April 1982. The Auk 99(2): 193.
. . . Spencer, wrote Wallace, was misconceiving natural selection. It does not work by favouring 'any special bone, or muscle, or limb . . . but by the selection of the capacities or qualities.' By 'capacities or qualities' Wallace meant things like strength or speed. Wallace maintained that artificial selection works in the same way. The breeder selects for qualities such as quickness, not for particular variations of bones. 'The two modes of selection are thus strictly analogous and strictly comparable.' He further insisted that natural selection is not limited by the supply of variation because 'as a matter of fact, there is a sufficiency of useful variation always present in each succeeding generation to increase any required life-preserving quality, all theoretical objections to the contrary notwithstanding.' Artificial selection is not the 'point after point' improvement of organs; both modes of selection transform structures as a whole, by selecting for a capacity. Each step in the selection of a capacity would produce an improvement so Romanes' and Spencer's criticism would not apply . . . --Mark Ridley, March 1982. British Journal for the History of Science 15(1): 61.
Careful consideration of both theories shows quite readily their differences in emphasis. Darwin was theorizing as to why males were brightly coloured. All Wallace (1891) could offer that pertained directly to this point was the vitalistic argument that male colour was due to "great vigour and health and generally higher vitality". Wallace in his Theory of Bird's Nests, had a perfectly reasonable hypothesis as to why females are dull--not the same question Darwin was trying to answer . . . --R. B. Aiken, 1982. Quaestiones Entomologicae 18(1-4): 8.
. . . But what of Wallace? He was not as involved in the question of aesthetic taste of females as he was in the question of animal colouration. Interestingly enough, criticisms from Wallace focused on ambiguity in the argument about female aesthetic sense. The process by which female choice was effected was not made clear. Most discussion revolved around the issue of whether females were exercising some conscious choice or were being excited by and yielding to a male. Was it selecting or succumbing? Darwin (1871) originally thought it was selection. He states: "No doubt this implies powers of discrimination and taste on the part of the female . . ." Wallace (1891, 1901) objected to this notion of conscious choice, returning again and again to the admonition that female choice could not be shown in nature. Wallace stated that while female birds may be excited by a display of decorative plumage, there was no reason to suppose that this conferred a mating advantage. It is difficult to understand Wallace's reasoning in the light of his own ideas. He stated that colour and ornament are concomitant with vigour and general health and that it is the most healthy, persistent males that will mate. Differences between Darwin and Wallace seem to be a matter of mechanism rather than basic principles . . . --R. B. Aiken, 1982. Quaestiones Entomologicae 18(1-4): 10.
To Wallace, Victorian scientists' failure to consider the implications their work held for moral behavior indicated severely misplaced priorities. In Spiritualism's demonstration of the reality of the soul, he himself found a basis for belief in moral as well as material evolution. Scientists' refusal to address so important a matter, Wallace believed, revealed an amoral materialism and, as such, outright dereliction of scientific duty . . . --John J. Cerullo, 1982. In his The Secularization of the Soul; Psychical Research in Modern Britain (Institute for the Study of Human Issues): 28.
Wallace states his thesis with extraordinary clarity: "There is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations, departing further and further from the original type. The language in which this observation is presented is rather typological; Wallace's conclusion, however, clearly contradicts Lyell's claim that "varieties have strict limits, and can never vary more than a small amount away from the original type." The most important aspect of Wallace's analysis is that he carefully stayed away from the quagmire of the morphological controversy on species and varieties but based his conclusion on a rather strictly ecological argument. He concluded that population size of a species is not at all determined by fertility but by natural checks on potential population increase. An enormous number of animals must die each year to keep the number constant, and "those that die must be the weakest--the very young, the aged, and the diseased--while those that prolong their existence can only be the most perfect in health and vigour--those who are best able to obtain food regularly and avoid their numerous enemies." . . . --Ernst Mayr, 1982. In his The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press): 495.
Wallace couched his new argument about evolution and man in 1869 not in terms of spiritualism, in which he was unable to interest seriously the majority of his fellow evolutionists, but in terms of utility. He used the essential principle of evolution to deny the evolution of man. To recapitulate, natural selection is a theory of usefulness--traits are selected in individuals because they confer some use to the individual in the struggle for survival. Wallace rejected sexual selection in the name of this principle. But applying now the same principle to man, Wallace argued that many of the traits characteristic of man were in fact of no use when they first arose, and therefore could not have been developed by natural selection . . . --Nancy Stepan, 1982. In her The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (Archon Books): 71.
Interestingly, issues like these must have been a preoccupation of Alfred Russel Wallace a century ago. Wallace, the coauthor of the theory of evolution, reneged on the theory in excluding man from his rightful place on the evolutionary tree. He did so because he could not reconcile (see especially Wallace 1891) the incredible capacity for humans to process information (as evidenced by the accomplishments of a learned man of society in Victorian times) with the fact that such capacity went largely unused throughout the entire period of human evolution (extrapolation based on his observations of "primitive" peoples in what is today Eastern Indonesia.) Wallace's dilemma has never been completely resolved. . . --David F. Lancy & Andrew J. Strathern, December 1981. American Anthropologist 83(4): 790.
Lowell's books about life on Mars provoked Alfred R. Wallace, with Darwin the discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, into analysing the likelihood of the evolution of an intelligent species elsewhere in the Universe. He concluded that it was essentially zero, and thus we are alone in the Universe. His arguments are worth repeating in detail, because although published in 1905 they are exactly the same as those given by modern evolutionists such as Dobzhansky, Simpson, and Mayr. Thus the biological arguments against the evolution of intelligence have not changed in 75 years. The great evolutionists have always been united against ETI. The biologists who have supported ETI have generally been biologists with the viewpoint of a physicist, and lacking the historical sense of the evolutionist. Such men often err in questions about evolutionary biology; in particular they err about questions concerning the probability of the evolution of a species with specified properties, as the recent recombinant DNA debate shows . . . --Frank J. Tipler, June 1981. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 22(2): 140.
Wallace does not show a concern for Darwin's problem with the 'swamping effect', i.e., the dilution and loss of variants from crossing back into the unvaried population. Accordingly we don't find in Wallace's writings Darwin's attempt to explain speciation by isolation. Possibly Wallace concluded swamping could be ignored because by observation permanent varieties/species exist in nature. Thus he might have concluded backcrossing is in fact not significant in nature. Also, as he viewed the line between species as something other than a barrier preventing intermixing, he would not have felt the need to explain how such barriers are effective. Another consideration that subsequently supports Wallace's attitude is implicit in his approach to the theory of natural selection. Unlike Darwin, Wallace used the knowledge of domestic animals against the claim that species are permanent and not to support evolution, as did Darwin. In domestic animals, natural selection tends to favor reversion to original unvaried forms . . . --Scott A. Kleiner, April 1981. Synthese 47(1): 146-147.
. . . To consider now the main problem of concern to Darwin and Wallace, the origin problem, not only is there lacking a decision procedure for determining whether the goal state is reached, but also, as we have argued above, the goal state for why-questions cannot be fully described in advance without actually answering the question. Although Darwin cannot and does not specify in advance the kind of explanatory mechanism he is seeking he is able to say what kind of causal process he does not want, viz., the agent--teleological process of the creationist theories. His goal state can be described only in terms of a few desiderata, viz., a theory consisting of universal laws applicable to all organisms including humans and bringing together a wide variety of previously unconnected facts, and one in which the process of evolution is "gradual" in the sense that it is in conformity with Lyellian uniformitarianism applied to living organisms. Specifically, all large evolutionary changes are to be explained in terms of persistant small incremental changes occurring over a long time, and the law governing these changes are the same throughout geological time even though varying local conditions may produce happenings in the past that are not presently occurring or rather sudden and calamitous effects on local biota . . . --Scott A. Kleiner, April 1981. Synthese 47(1): 154.
A key process in speciation among sexual organisms is the evolution of reproductive isolation. There are essentially two views on the origin of isolating mechanisms . . . The first view, championed by Darwin (1872), holds that isolating mechanisms originate as an incidental by-product of genetic divergence in geographically isolated populations. The second view, argued by Wallace (1889), holds that isolating mechanisms are established by means of natural selection in zones of overlap between incipient species . . . The contemporary view, which holds that premating reproductive barriers (often behavioral) are built up by natural selection in areas of sympatry in order to supercede postmating barriers that arose allopatrically, has come to be known as the Wallace effect. The plausibility of the Wallace effect has been demonstrated by Knight et al. (1956) and by Kessler (1966), who showed that artificial selection could be successful in enhancing premating reproductive isolation in Drosophila. In light of the important role of the Wallace effect in modern speciation theory, it is surprising that the phenomenon has not been studied quantitatively . . . --Stanley Sawyer & Daniel Hartl, April 1981. Theoretical Population Biology 19(2): 261-262.
Some zoologists, like Raven in 1935, considered the validity of Wallace's line on the basis of the proportion of mammals that had crossed the line going east compared with those that had not and came to the conclusion that Wallace's line marked a boundary which was the eastern limit of the great majority of East Indian mammals, like rhinoceroses and elephants. Others made their assessment on the proportion of western and eastern elements to be found on each island in Wallacea. Thus, Rensch in 1935, following Mertens (1934), calculated that 88 per cent of the butterflies were of western origin which was a similar proportion to that found on Lombok and more than twice as high as for the Kai Islands. Following the same line of argument for Austral-Malayan birds, Ernst Mayr calculated that 67.6 per cent of the passerines were from the west and decided that 'there is no doubt, Celebes must be included with the Oriental region' (Mayr, 1944) . . . --Wilma George, 1981. In T. C. Whitmore, ed., Wallace's Line and Plate Tectonics (Oxford University Press): 5.
The notion that islands are somehow different stems from the concerns of naturalists. The observations by Darwin and others that the existence of islands permitted the development of significant variations in plant and animal life formed an important part of the intellectual underpinning of theories of evolution. Thus Wallace, in his study of island life (1880), points out that 'some of the most remarkable and interesting facts in the distribution and affinities of organic forms are presented by islands in relation to each other and to the surrounding continents'. He refers to 'the unexpected relations or singular anomalies which are so often found to characterize the fauna and flora of islands'. More recently, there has been a growing interest in the total ecological balance of islands (already hinted at in Wallace's work) . . . --Percy Selwyn, December 1980. World Development 8(12): 945.
. . . it is interesting to note that in this disagreement there are faint echoes of the other matter which separated Darwin and Wallace at this time: sexual selection through female choice. Darwin wanted to argue that the beauty of, say, the peacock as opposed to the peahen, is a function of the females choosing beautiful males. Wallace argued that the difference is essentially a function of the females being more drab than the males, this drabness coming through the female's need for camouflage from predators as they incubate their eggs and care for their young. In arguing this way, Wallace was certainly not invoking group selection. However, unlike Darwin, who was emphasizing the individual nature of selection by seeing the main competition (at this point) as coming from within the species, Wallace was deemphasizing competition within the group by seeing the threat coming from without . . . --Michael Ruse, November 1980. Annals of Science 37(6): 625.
. . . let us offer solace to the opponents of human sociobiology. If one uncomfortable with a rather extreme individual selectionism, particularly as applied to man, and if one yet wants historical precedent to legitimize one's yearnings, then no less than the sociobiologists can one find the most respectable of intellectual ancestors. One may not be able to claim one of the fathers of evolutionism, but one can claim the other: Alfred Russel Wallace. He was a group selectionist, and moreover he was not prepared to see man treated on a par with other organisms. I certainly do not want to pretend that today's biologists would find convincing the details of Wallace's doubts about the all-sufficiency of individual selection, or that those who criticize human sociobiology grind the same metaphysical axe as did Wallace (although interestingly, politically Wallace was fairly left-wing, as are many of today's critics). But, given Wallace's conclusions, it does seem true to say that the critics of human sociobiology are no less part of the evolutionary tradition than those they criticize! . . . --Michael Ruse, November 1980. Annals of Science 37(6): 630.
. . . this letter . . . reveals in clearer outline the professional relationship between Spruce and Wallace and their mutual but competitive interests in the Palmae: their meeting in the Amazon, the discovery that they had made similar collections in this important family, Spruce's offer to collaborate on the book and Wallace's subsequent refusal. It appears that Spruce was discouraged on learning that Wallace had discovered and intended to name and describe the same palms, primarily those along the Rio Negro, that he had studied. He writes of "relaxing" his study of the palms, in view of the fact that Wallace would return to England and publish his results before Spruce left South America. Clearly, in this instance, Spruce felt botanically somewhat overshadowed by Wallace, whom he considered a distinguished zoologist and friend . . . --Michael J. Balick, September 1980. Botanical Museum Leaflets 28(3): 265.
A major misconception about this debate has become fairly widespread. According to this misconception, Darwin was for sexual selection, while Wallace was against it and for natural selection instead. It is true that from 1876 on, Wallace gave up sexual selection--he rejected female choice completely and interpreted male combat as just a form of natural selection. But the debate between Darwin and Wallace took place in 1867 and 1868, with a brief resumption in 1871 after publication of the Descent of Man. During this earlier period, Wallace fully accepted female choice and male choice, at least in birds. Wherever Darwin invoked female choice or male choice in birds, Wallace invoked it too. In other words, Darwin and Wallace agreed that, in birds, sexual selection was the cause of the coloration of the more brilliantly colored sex. Thus the debate did not come down to all sexual selection on one side and all natural selection on the other. The disagreement with respect to birds centered on the cause of the coloration of the less conspicuous sex . . . --Malcolm Jay Kottler, June 1980. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124(3): 203-204.
. . . The basic reason for their divergence was Darwin's belief that, although the most common form of inheritance was equal inheritance by both sexes, variations first appearing in one sex were fairly often sex-limited in inheritance from the first. Thus female choice alone, in conjunction with sex-limited inheritance from the first of the variations sexually selected in the male, would produce a conspicuous male and an inconspicuous female; in such cases, natural selection for the sake of protection of the sex in greater danger was unnecessary . . . --Malcolm Jay Kottler, June 1980. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124(3): 204.
I cannot analyze Wallace's psyche and will not comment on his deeper motives for hewing to the unbridgeable gap between human intellect and the behavior of mere animals. But I can assess the logic of his argument and recognize that the traditional account is not only incorrect, but precisely backward. Wallace did not abandon natural selection at the human threshold. Rather, it was his peculiarly rigid view of natural selection that led him, quite consistently, to reject it for the human mind. His position never varied--natural selection is the only cause of major evolutionary change. His two major debates with Darwin--sexual selection and the origin of human intellect--represent the same argument, not an inconsistent Wallace championing selection in one case and running from it in the other . . . --Stephen Jay Gould, January 1980. Natural History 89(1): 35-36.
. . . Wallace's anthropology closely paralleled his interest in natural ecology. He asked very similar questions about the peoples he encountered to those he asked about other organic forms. These were questions on how well a region could support a population; what were the natural checks on its expansion; the relationship between subsistence and size of population. His other preoccupation was with the geographical distribution of peoples. He put much greater emphasis than Darwin upon the role of geographical isolation in the evolution of species and varieties. Similarly he attributed many of the human racial differences in the Malay area to geographical isolation. Wallace was also interested in the effect on human evolution of that other major plank of natural ecology--migration. He spent some time in the classification of the languages of the Malay region partly for the clues they might reveal about the migration patterns of the peoples in the area . . . --Greta Jones, 1980. In her Social Darwinism and English Thought; The Interaction Between Biological and Social Theory (Humanities Press): 26-27.
[William] James first anticipated some of his mature opinions on race and nationality in an 1865 review of A. R. Wallace's article, "The Origins of the Human Race." Agreeing with Wallace, James held that the races of humanity developed from a common ancestor through natural selection. Race differentiation antedated all but the most rudimentary forms of social organization. But soon every race evolved more elaborate social systems. Natural selection then became more complicated. The environment supported whichever groups acted together; each group protected whichever individuals it valued. Such social selection allowed physically weak people to survive and reproduce so long as they served community ideals. Survival of the weak checked physical evolution. Further progress then had to be mental and moral . . . --Larry C. Miller, Fall 1979. American Quarterly 31(4): 539.
A widely held generalization about tropical tree species is that most occur at very low adult densities and are of relatively uniform dispersion, such that adult individuals of the tree species are thinly and evenly distributed in space. If true, this generalization has potentially profound consequences for the reproductive biology, population structure, and evolution of tropical tree species. In this article the adequacy of this generalization is judged with respect to a particular tropical forest, a large tract of which has been mapped in detail. The origins of this generalization can be traced back at least to Wallace . . . --Stephen P. Hubbell, 30 March 1979. Science 203(4387): 1299.
This distinction reflected a general tendency of Spencer and his contemporaries to distinguish higher and lower stages in all development: barbarism and civilization, status and contract, militarism and industrialism. In this instance, he also joined the controversy that developed in the late sixties between Darwin and A. Russel Wallace as to whether natural selection altered bodily structure at all stages of evolution. Darwin believed it did. Wallace maintained that, with the attainment of a certain level of intelligence, mental changes superceded physical ones. Spencer preferred the thrust of Wallace's view. He himself had earlier identified the importance of cerebral development among the races of man. But he rejected Wallace's view that such cerebral development within societies resulted from the natural selection of spontaneous variations in the brain . . . --Robert C. Bannister, 1979. In his Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Temple University Press): 47.
. . . Fiske's philosophy was inherently conservative in that he stressed the slowness of change, which he neither wanted nor urged. However, the context was also usually religious. His system would bring no religious revolution, no attacks on existing churches, he assured readers in the conclusion of the Cosmic Philosophy. In the one section in which he discussed social evolution--published earlier in the North American Review under the title "From Brute to Man"--Fiske differed little from the speculations of A. R. Wallace, whose work he described as "one of the most brilliant contributions ever yet made to the Doctrine of Evolution." Like Wallace, he believed that natural selection ceased operating on bodily factors with the appearance of the human brain. "And hence in the future as in the recent past," he told readers of the North American Review, "the dominant fact in the career of humanity is not physical modification but civilization." . . . --Robert C. Bannister, 1979. In his Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Temple University Press): 65.
. . . Darwinism upset such happy assumptions. Throughout his career [Henry] George harbored suspicion of the theory, a suspicion that colored his thought no less than Carey's and Bowen's. In Progress and Poverty he attempted to evade the issue. How men had originated was not his concern: "all we know of him is as man." But his hostility was plain. During the 1880s he mellowed somewhat, comforted by the views of the British biologist A. R. Wallace (who early preached the "limits of evolution as applied to man," and who also befriended George during his English crusade), and of St. George Mivart, a leading Christian evolutionist who, more firmly than Wallace, denied that natural selection has shaped human faculties. By the 1890s George could manage grudging acceptance . . . --Robert C. Bannister, 1979. In his Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Temple University Press): 120.
. . . His view of "mental and moral progress" (which sociologists would later call cultural evolution) also led to the conclusion "that the higher--the more intellectual and moral--must displace the lower and degraded races." But his process was again not analogous to struggle and selection in nature. Certain that improvement would come, Wallace would not attribute it to survival of the fittest. Following a popular usage of the day, he equated such survival with the success of "the mediocre, if not the low, both as regards morality and intelligence." Rather, as with mind itself, mysterious forces were at work. The "glorious qualities" of men were the "surest proof" of "higher existences than ourselves." The goal was not racial imperialism but the brotherhood of man: "a single nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity." . . . --Robert C. Bannister, 1979. In his Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Temple University Press): 185-186.
But, of course, it does matter who starts the trend. If it had been Wallace instead of Darwin, we would have had a very different theory of evolution today. The whole cybernetics movement might have occurred 100 years earlier as a result of Wallace's comparison between the steam engine with a governor and the process of natural selection . . . --Gregory Bateson, 1979. In his Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (E. P. Dutton): 43.
. . . It was Alfred Russel Wallace who remarked in 1866 that the principle of natural selection is like that of the steam engine with a governor. I shall assume that this is indeed so and that both the process of individual learning and the process of population shift under natural selection can exhibit the pathologies of all cybernetic circuits: excessive oscillation and runaway. In sum, I shall assume that evolutionary change and somatic change (including learning and thought) are fundamentally similar, that both are stochastic in nature, although surely the ideas (injunctions, descriptive propositions, and so on) on which each process works are of totally different logical typing from the typing of ideas in the other process . . . --Gregory Bateson, 1979. In his Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (E. P. Dutton): 148.
. . . [W. R.] Greg represented those who saw competitive individualism as the logical outcome of the operation in society of the law of natural selection; for him, naturalism in sociology was equivalent to the Hobbesian vision of a continual 'war of all against all'. But equally, Wallace was representative of a considerable number of people who claimed that man was unique in nature precisely because of his ability to transcend this state of affairs; by stressing the biological advantages of intelligent cooperation, he attempted to reconcile Darwinian principles with a very different moral and political vision. Thus, the dispute involved a fundamental conflict of ideologies, even though it was fought out almost wholly within a naturalistic framework. This conflict was to be a recurrent feature of Wallace's thought; and indeed it is still with us today in 'sociobiological' discussions of the legitimacy of the theory of 'group selection.' . . . --John R. Durant, 1979. British Journal for the History of Science 12(40): 45.
Wallace, who unfortunately never wrote a book on the subject, probed deeper into the nature of man than any of the circle immediately around Darwin. Because in the end science has so thoroughly accepted them, we have not only forgotten their source but also forgotten how heretical some of his views were at the time they were uttered. First Wallace postulated an erect, small-brained bipedal stage of human development, followed by a second phase in which the human brain and cranium assumed their present size and form. Only with the present-day discovery of the Australopithecine man-apes is the early stage beginning to be documented. Second, he quickly saw that the complete fossil history of man might well be prolonged far beyond Pleistocene times, and that the big-brained men of the upper Pleistocene, who were at that time troubling the evolutionists, need not be regarded as an effective argument against the reality of the human transformation. Rather, the scientists must cease confusing living races with grades or levels on the evolutionary scale of the past--something which was at that time exceedingly common . . . --Loren Eiseley, 1979. In his Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X; New Light on the Evolutionists (E. P. Dutton): 197.
Wallace and many later biogeographers have proposed that tropical areas support more species than temperate zones simply because they have not been glaciated and are thus ecologically older. Although evidence is very scant, under this interpretation the observed high tropical diversity is a result of long-term undisturbed speciation. If so, the latitudinal trend in species numbers is partially attributable to a strictly geographic factor (latitude) . . . --Joseph J. Schall & Eric R. Pianka, 25 August 1978. Science 201 (4357): 681.
It is likely, for instance, that Wilde would have sympathized with Grant Allen's and A. R. Wallace's eugenic plans. Allen argued in his essays for free love as part of a eugenic proposal which encouraged women to choose for child-bearing purposes temporary mates from among the finest, healthiest, and most intelligent men. Wallace, in an essay which appeared in The Fortnightly Review, four months before "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," also outlined a nonauthoritarian socialist scheme for human improvement through sexual selection. Stating that education could not lead to permanent cultural improvement, Wallace suggested that once removed from economic competition, and totally free to choose a mate, women would be attracted to men who embodied what Victorians called "the higher qualities," and the cumulative hereditary impact of that sexual selection would therefore improve the culture of the race. In February 1891, when Wilde published "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," in The Fortnightly Review, he argued that marriage and family should be abolished in favor of a freer and more beautiful love relationship between man and woman. His suggestion can be understood as one of his proposals for a socialist utopia and, indeed, as his contribution to the debate among socialists and cultural critics over the eugenic role of sexual selection in cultural improvement . . . --Michael S. Helfand & Philip E. Smith II, Summer 1978. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20(2): 211.
Must fantasy inevitably accompany speculation on the plurality of worlds? Fortunately not, for even the history of the question contains a few indications of sober deliberation. In this respect, two nineteenth-century dissenters on plurality, William Whewell and Alfred Russel Wallace, stand out as the first post-Copernican thinkers to rein in imagination by proposing sensible rules for thinking about such a provocative but thorny issue. When Whewell's Of the Plurality of Worlds was published in 1853, it challenged what had become, since the sixteenth century, a traditional belief in the existence of life elsewhere. Fifty years later, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection and later Percival Lowell's most tenacious opponent, extended the dissenting tradition by writing the first study that successfully synthesized biological and astronomical perspectives on life in a plurality of worlds . . . --William C. Heffernan, January-March 1978. Journal of the History of Ideas 39(1): 82-83.
. . . However unkind it became, most criticism of Man's Place in the Universe was kept within the confines of the dissenters' strictures on reasoning. There was a gratifying irony in this, for while most of Wallace's peers found fault with the book, they unwittingly based their comments on the rules which Whewell and Wallace considered necessary for careful speculation on plurality. For instance, H. H. Turner, the Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford, captured the thrust of the many unfavorable reviews of Man's Place when he insisted that the universe is probably not bounded in the sense of having an edge; that even if it were, there would be no center; and that even if the sun were at the center, such a position would not be uniquely stable. Like other critics, Turner was able to seize on the flaws in the argument of life beyond the solar system and thus ignore the strengths of Wallace's overall position--the banishment of theology when considerations of probability were at stake, the introduction of an explicitly evolutionary perspective, and the low likelihood of life within the solar system. Wallace had created a grand and only somewhat flawed synthesis, although few people remarked on this . . . --William C. Heffernan, January-March 1978. Journal of the History of Ideas 39(1): 92-93.
. . . And what about the climate itself? Lowell had claimed that although Mars receives only half the earth's heat, the absence of an atmosphere would actually mean that the sun's radiation would have a more direct effect on it than on the earth. Wallace was appalled that a respected scientist could be responsible for such an hypothesis. The opposite would have to be the case, as Wallace showed: because of its lack of sufficient atmosphere, Mars must retain heat more poorly than the earth. There would also have to be greater variations in temperature between the ground and the air a few feet above it, and Wallace pointed out that these would impede the development of advanced organisms . . . --William C. Heffernan, January-March 1978. Journal of the History of Ideas 39(1): 95.
. . . Since both the dissenters and their "majoritarian" opponents were moved by extra-scientific convictions, could it be said that the two traditions were methodologically indistinguishable? Certainly not. Precisely because they were dissenters, Whewell and Wallace had been forced to articulate their position with a degree of care that no pluralist had ever shown. Because they were inspired by different and unusual convictions about man's status, the dissenters had to take the scientific road to plurality; for their case would not otherwise have been heard. In this way, discussion of the possibility of life in other worlds was transformed; for in later years, the metaphysical context of the debate would fall away, leaving a core of scientifically grounded speculation for which Whewell and Wallace had prepared the way . . . --William C. Heffernan, January-March 1978. Journal of the History of Ideas 39(1): 100.
The idea of surplusage seems most directly traceable to Alfred Russel Wallace (1870). His belief that savages possessed brains far in excess of their requirements was the germinal idea of surplusage; consider, he would argue, that civilized humans use the same brain as that of savages to accomplish higher mental feats such as mathematical reasoning, a kind of reasoning never required of our primitive ancestors. If the potential for higher mental processes appeared before it was evolutionarily adaptive, what caused its presence? This is the dilemma posed by the notion of surplusage. As naive as the arguments about savages might seem today, surplusage remains an interesting consideration for psychologists studying animal intelligence in the laboratory . . . --Robert Boice, June 1977. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 9(6): 452.
Crolls' work played a critical role in the biologists' attempts to obviate the threats posed to evolutionary theory by Kelvin's argument for a shortened history of the earth. But Croll's ideas had an even broader significance for Wallace: they functioned as a catalyst for his magisterial formulation of zoogeography. The explanatory potential of glacial theory with respect to the question of the migration and distribution of animals and plants was considerably enhanced by Croll's speculations, and Wallace was alert to their implications for his work on geographical distribution . . . --Martin Fichman, Spring 1977. Journal of the History of Biology 10(1): 60-61.
. . . Wallace and Huxley disagreed about how humans evolved because they had different perceptions of non-western people and the working class. Those perceptions were informed by different social experiences. Wallace's was an unusual experience in the nineteenth century, and it led him to an interpretation of human development with which modern anthropologists generally agree, that the artifice of culture informs our perceptions. How our opinions and experiences can remain unaffected or uninvolved in a holistic theory like human evolution remains a mystery. Yet that is the working assumption of most scientists and bureaucrats of science . . . --Michael S. Helfand, Winter 1977. Victorian Studies, 20(2): 176-177.
A. R. Wallace's hypothesis that visual stimuli provided by the insect become a conditioned signal for predatory animals through association with its noxious taste was formulated 24 years before I. P. Pavlov was elected Professor of Pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy of St. Petersburg. Several years later, Pavlov was to begin his studies there on "psychic" reflexes, employing visual and auditory stimuli to signal the taste of acid or meat powder in the mouth of dogs. Poulton's summary of two decades of comparative animal research upon the positive effects of satisfying foods and the negative effects of annoying tastes was presented eleven years before E. L. Thorndike's (1897) doctoral thesis on animal intelligence and the law of effect. Pavlov and Thorndike went on to investigate conditioned responses more rigorously, and ultimately their students operationally defined a series of methodological "laws" . . . --John Garcia & Walter G. Hankins, 1977. In Lewis M. Barker et al., eds., Learning Mechanisms in Food Selection (Baylor University Press): 6.
. . . I want to suggest that the first step in any study of his contribution must be a careful analysis of how he actually presented his idea in the 1858 paper, concentrating especially on the kind of variation that was the basis of natural selection. Strangely enough, such a detailed analysis is provided neither by Beddall nor McKinney, both of whom simply assume that what Wallace eventually discovered was a straightforward equivalent of the Darwinian theory. This assumption is common to most general accounts of the history of evolutionism, and was shared by Darwin himself. But there are good reasons for suggesting that Wallace's initial concept of selection differed considerably from Darwin's, or at least was expressed in very different terms . . . --Peter J. Bowler, January 1976. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31(1): 18.
. . . It was only at a later stage in his thought--after he had discovered the principle of divergence--that Darwin actually came to realize that varieties would at some stage have to compete with one another. The essence of Wallace's mechanism was for Darwin a secondary insight gained some time after he had worked out the primary mechanism of selection acting on individual differences. Furthermore, when Darwin discussed varieties coming into conflict, he pictured this as a geographical effect caused by one form's invading and conquering the territory of the other. Wallace on the other hand, simply wrote of species splitting into varieties as though this occurred across the whole geographical range, with members of each variety in face-to-face conflict at all points. Wallace's failure to appreciate the role of geographical factors in the formation of varieties again suggests that he may not at first have recognized natural selection as the agency that created the varieties out of individual differences. Or, if he did recognize the action of natural selection on individual differences, he had certainly failed to work out its full implications for his own theory of selection acting among the varieties . . . --Peter J. Bowler, January 1976. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31(1): 22-23.
. . . It is clear that in the later stages of his career Wallace was fully aware of the importance of individual variation to selection. He was able to exploit both modes of representation employed by Darwin, using especially the range concept to make a notable contribution to the measurement of variation among wild populations. But all of this occurred after he had read the Origin of Species, with its clear descriptions of Darwin's primary conception of selection's acting on the individual differences first to form varieties and then species. His own first paper on natural selection had side-stepped this level of the mechanism and developed a theory of competition among the varieties after they had been formed. This was a valid Darwinian mechanism, but one which to Darwin himself represented a second level of selection which utilized the varieties formed from the selection of individual variations. It may be that from the beginning Wallace also recognized the primary action of selection upon individual differences, and simply preferred to describe the mechanism acting at the second level because he was more familiar with what he called permanent varieties. But even if this were so, there are certain points in the 1858 paper which suggest that he had at least failed to work out the consequences of the first level of selection for his own theory . . . --Peter J. Bowler, January 1976. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31(1): 28.
At one point Wallace reasoned logically and with telling effect that even if martians existed they could not have the high intelligence with which Lowell credited them. For the "canals" they were supposed to have built in many instances ran for thousands of miles across arid deserts and beneath clear cloudless skies, thus "losing enormously from evaporation, if we assume them to contain water. The mere attempt to use open canals for irrigation purposes would argue ignorance and stupidity. Long before half of them were completed, their failure to be of any use would have led any rational being to cease constructing them." . . . --William Graves Hoyt, 1976. In his Lowell and Mars (University of Arizona Press): 215.
Many suggestions have been formulated over the years to explain the evolution of vertebrate color vision. Most have dealt with possible modifications of photoreceptors and neuronal layers of the retina (see especially Edridge-Green, 1920; Ladd-Franklin, 1929; Willmer, 1949; Pickford, 1951) and have hardly considered function. Only Wallace (1891, p. 411) and Walls (1942, p. 463) appear to have seriously asked the question, "Why color vision?" Each suggested that color detection originated to provide for the strongest contrast and, therefore, to enhance the visibility of objects against the background. We believe that this simple and prescient suggestion is correct . . . --W. N. McFarland & F. W. Munz, October 1975. Vision Research 15: 1071.
. . . a major aim of Vestiges is to show that as good Newtonians we much accept a biological evolutionary theory. Wallace, I think, whilst rejecting as inadequate Chambers' own evolutionary theory, entirely accepted Chambers' research programme, to find the biological analogue of Newtonian astronomy. Thus I would suggest that Wallace like Darwin, may have reacted favourably to Malthus' ideas because he could then start to see his way towards a biological equivalent of Newtonian astronomy. Hence, I think that Darwin and Wallace quite possibly started from similar philosophical positions, although I have no reason to believe that they drew on exactly the same immediate sources for the philosophies . . . --Michael Ruse, June 1975. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6(2): 172-173.
. . . By combining what he considered to be the reliable features of both the calculations, the more recent date for the ice age and a consequently accelerated rate of species change, Wallace arrived at a figure of 24 million years for the time since the beginning of the Cambrian. This estimate, he concluded happily, would fit easily within Kelvin's limits and still leave a period three times as long for the slow operation of natural selection during the Precambrian. Wallace was not finished, however, for it was in the application of Croll's hypothesis to biology that he showed the true measure of his ingenuity. Neither he nor Darwin had ever completely escaped from the Lamarckian dependence upon environment as a causal factor in species change. And now he saw in the radical changes of climate a mechanism whereby the continuously "altered physical conditions would induce variation." Furthermore, in alternating from one hemisphere to the other, the successive cycles of glaciation would stimulate a constant migration of plant and animal types, thus continually bringing allied species into competition and accelerating the process of extinction . . . --Joe D. Burchfield, September 1974. Isis 65(228): 317.
. . . As early as 1876, the naturalist and zoogeographer Alfred Wallace noted that "we live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all of the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared." He remarked especially on the "sudden dying out of so many large Mammalia, not in only one place but over half the land surface of the globe" (Wallace 1876). At the end of the Pleistocene in North America, there was a loss of 33 genera of large mammals (>50 kg), while only 13 genera had become extinct in the preceding 1 or 2 million years. Smaller mammals (<50 kg) were not similarly affected, nor were marine mammals, which we might also expect to show high extinction rates if the cause were environmental catastrophes. Wallace (1911) observed that these sudden extinctions were not correlated with major environmental changes, such as those responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, but seemed to coincide with the arrival, on different continents at different times, of Stone Age man . . . --Richard S. Miller & Daniel B. Botkin, March-April 1974. American Scientist 62(2): 172.
This concept of the separation of the human personality from the human body meant that Wallace considered man and the relation of science to man in a context wholly different from that of the advocates of scientific naturalism. As William Irvine once described the evolution of Huxley's mind, "He became interested in man as a physical mechanism, as an anthropoid ape, as a social unit and a citizen, as a delicate machine for the discovery of scientific truth, but never to any appreciable extent in man as a personality and a human being." Wallace's development was exactly the reverse. He was originally interested in the physical mechanism of man for the sake of the moral personality encased therein. He studied the anthropoid ape because it resembled man. He wrote on social questions in the hope that society might be so organized as to allow the moral faculties to flourish. Throughout his long and varied scientific career, Wallace was primarily concerned with what Koestler has dubbed "the ghost in the machine" rather than with the machine itself . . . --Frank M. Turner, 1974. In his Between Science and Religion; The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale University Press): 82.
. . . In the London Anthropological Society address of March 1864, Wallace continued to discuss, though in a very different kind of forum, matters that had weighted upon his mind for over twenty years. He brought into the professional scientific sphere the scientific concepts and goals that he had learned in the provincial mechanics institutes. The address was his single most important comment on man and contained the latent seeds for all his later departures from scientific naturalism. The American evolutionist John Fiske recalled that the address "seemed to open up an entirely new world of speculation." Such speculation was indeed new to men who had known little or nothing of "physical puritanism" or the "belated rationalism" of the working-class culture in which Wallace had come to maturity. For Wallace the paper was simply a continuation of his earlier thought . . . --Frank M. Turner, 1974. In his Between Science and Religion; The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale University Press): 83-84.
. . . Spiritualism furnished Wallace with a scientific explanation for the development of man's moral nature and brought man's total being under the rule of rational cosmic law. In a curious manner, the theory of spiritualism provided a law for the moral world analogous to that provided by natural selection for the organic world. Natural selection removed the necessity for an arbitrary and interfering God of Special Creation. Spiritualism banished the arbitrary God of predestination and replaced Him with a uniform law of individual moral progress and of personal moral responsibility. . . --Frank M. Turner, 1974. In his Between Science and Religion; The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale University Press): 88.
. . . "Consistency," the tract by Robert Dale Owen, Robert Owen's son, particularly interested Wallace. The younger Owen, who himself also later converted to spiritualism, argued that the doctrine of predestination led to immoral living because it rendered one's eternal reward a matter of chance rather than a function of the virtue of one's life. Concurring in these arguments, Wallace moved very quietly and painlessly from faith to skepticism. His loss of faith grew directly out of a situation succinctly described by a writer later in the century: "God, and immortality, and the Bible have been so taught as to make scepticism the only refuge for morality to flee to." Wallace later identified this rational skepticism with agnosticism. His skepticism, however, more nearly resembled deism. He did not deny the possibility of religious knowledge or of pure religion but rather the validity and morality of the Christian religion. Most important, Wallace and the Owenites did not dismiss the moral significance of the questions that Christianity had addressed. The questions of religion remained valid even if the Christian answers were false. The Owenite criticism of Christianity made Wallace, as well as genuine Owenites, highly susceptible to a rational religion, such as spiritualism, that was based on empirical evidence and that emphasized social cooperation and benevolent individualism . . . --Frank M. Turner, 1974. In his Between Science and Religion; The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale University Press): 89-90.
The notion that man's first language was primarily gestural, carried on with hand and arm signals rather than vocal sounds, has been supported by a distinguished line of scholars: Condillac (1746), Tylor (1868, 1871), Morgan (1877), Wallace (1881, 1895), Romanes (1888), Wundt (1912), Paget (1944, 1963), and Johannesson (1949, 1950). The gestural theory seems to be the most attractive of the many glottogonic hypotheses advanced so far, and receives support from recent studies of chimpanzees and other primates, such as Gardner and Gardner (1969, 1971), Premack (1970a, b, 1971), and Menzel (1971), as well as from other sources. The fact that this evidence was unavailable to earlier proponents of the gestural theory explains some of the weaknesses in its former formulations . . . --Gordon W. Hewes, February-April 1973. Current Anthropology 14(1-2): 5.
Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-founder of the theory of natural selection and one of its most tenacious defenders. It is therefore of great interest that Wallace emphatically opposed a demarcation between ethical and scientific ideas and that he also resisted the breakdown of the common intellectual milieu with his own unified world-view. He endeavoured to combine notions of value with his scientific theory of evolution, particularly in relation to man. British biologists in the first half of the nineteenth century characteristically analysed their data in terms of the teleological framework of Natural Theology. Evolutionary theory supposedly demolished this framework. Nevertheless, Wallace incorporated a fundamental teleology into all his theories. He considered that he had thereby reconciled the tensions of scientific and ethical demands in his contribution to the evolutionary debate on man's place in nature . . . --Roger Smith, December 1972. British Journal for the History of Science 6(22): 177-178.
. . . Wallace traced the 'action of some unknown higher law' in the evolution of man and also in the origin of consciousness. As he commented, 'no physiologist or philosopher has yet ventured to propound an intelligible theory of how sensation may possibly be a product of organization; while many have declared the passage from matter to mind to be inconceivable'. While other biologists tended to avoid this question, Wallace believed in a spiritual purpose behind the phenomenon of consciousness. It was not clear to him that conscious actions could have any biological utility if they were merely parallel, or epiphenomenal, to automatic physiological actions. In particular, he believed that it was not possible to assign utility to the consciousness of volition if this consciousness was deceptive . . . --Roger Smith, December 1972. British Journal for the History of Science 6(22): 183.
For Lyell the challenge was to develop the continuous process, the gradual extinction and creation of species. The intermittent process was available in the fortuitous nature of the circumstances favorable for the preservation of fossil remains. Wallace on the other hand had for some years been attempting to validate the hypothesis of gradual species transformation. Although he had been examining the relationships between geographical distribution and affinity within affinity groups (general, families), there is no evidence that he had given any thought to the question of the origin of discontinuities within such groups until a few months before he wrote the 1855 essay. During that brief period several quite unexpected patterns of distribution and affinity came to his attention. Soon thereafter grew the appreciation that extinction, interacting with species transformation, could give rise to all known patterns of organic discontinuities . . . --John L. Brooks, December 1972. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 44: 26.
. . . A contemporary reader of Wallace's "Attempts at a natural arrangement of birds", should he be unaware of its date of publication, would probably find little to criticize in its presentation of the role of extinction in the genesis of observed patterns of diversity. So completely do we share Wallace's faith that "all gaps between species, genera, or larger groups are the result of extinctions of species during former epochs of the world's history" that this statement seems nothing unusual. It is only when it is clearly understood that this statement was published in 1856, three years before Darwin published the Origin of Species, that we appreciate that this essay carries the proclamation of a prophet's faith . . . --John L. Brooks, December 1972. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 44: 45.
"What think you of Wallace's paper in the Ann. N. Hist.? Good! Upon the whole! But how about such forms as the Giraffe, which has typical representatives in the Siwalik tertiary deposits? Or the true Elk (= Moose)? Can we suppose a lost series of gradations connecting these general with the Deer type, & ramifying off to them paulatim [gradually]? Wallace has, I think, put the matter well; and according to his theory, the various domestic races of animals have been fairly developed into species" [quotation from Edward Blyth letter to Darwin] . . . --Barbara G. Beddall, Spring 1972. Journal of the History of Biology 5(1): 155.
Wallace, in fact, proposed the first cybernetic model. Nowadays cybernetics deals with much more complex systems of the general kind; and we know that when we talk about the processes of civilization, or evaluate human behavior, human organization, or any biological system, we are concerned with self-corrective systems. Basically these systems are always conservative of something. As in the engine with a governor, the fuel supply is changed to conserve--to keep constant--the speed of the flywheel, so always in such systems changes occur to conserve the truth of some descriptive statement, some component of the status quo. Wallace saw the matter correctly, and natural selection acts primarily to keep the species unvarying; but it may act at higher levels to keep constant that complex variable which we call "survival." . . . --Gregory Bateson, 1972. In his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chandler Publishing Company): 435.
The importance of larval dispersal was already recognized by Alfred Russel Wallace in his work on The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876). Wallace knew that the univalve and bivalve Mollusca have free-swimming larval stages and recognized that "they thus have a powerful means of dispersal, and are carried by tides and currents so as ultimately to spread over every shore and shoal that offers conditions favorable for development." . . . --Rudolf S. Scheltema, April 1971. Biological Bulletin 140: 285.
. . . Darwin (1859) and later evolutionists (especially Muller 1940, 1942) proposed that reproductive isolating mechanisms develop as by-products of divergent evolution and are purely incidental features of adaptive differentiation which confer no advantage to populations at the time they develop. Conversely, Wallace (1889), Fisher (1930), and Dobzhansky (1941, 1951) contended that isolating mechanisms could arise from selection against hybrids and hybridizers. Selection for reproductive isolation in areas of sympatry would reinforce previously existing barriers and thereby reduce gametic wastage, hybridization, and disruptive gene flow. Grant (1966) has suggested the term "Wallace effect" for this process . . . --Donald A. Levin, November-December 1970. The American Naturalist 104(940): 571.
The basic answer to the question--"Why does man occupy this worldwide and universally dominant niche?"--also given by Wallace, is that by the use of his greatly superior mind, man has continually modified the environment to meet his needs, so that "he would cease to be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and structure." As Dobzhansky (1962, 1967) has pointed out, this statement is an exaggeration. Nevertheless, the general conclusion of Wallace, that in early man the action of natural selection was largely transferred from the bodily structure to the mind, is still valid . . . --George Ledyard Stebbins, March-April 1970. The American Naturalist 104(936): 112.
The next questioner said the lecturer had termed Mr. [Henry] George a poet. He then called attention to the fact that Mr. George advocated nationalisation of the land as a remedy for poverty, and asked how it was that Mr. A. Wallace, an able man, came to the same conclusion. Professor Marshall said that Mr. Wallace's proposal was much more reasonable than that of Mr. George. He did not call Mr. George a poet because he said erroneous things. He was a poet because he was poetic, and he was not a man of science because he said erroneous things [report on a lecture by Alfred Marshall] . . . --Ronald H. Coase, April 1969. Journal of Law and Economics 12(1): 199.
. . . We next come to Mr. Wallace's plan. It proposed that the inherent value of the soil should become the property of the State, but that the buildings and other improvements on it should remain private property. He would give to the landowner an annuity equal to that part of the rent which corresponds to its present inherent value, for his life and the life of any descendants born in his lifetime, or in failure of such, for the life of anyone nominated by the landlord. He calls this full compensation, but of course it is only partial compensation; the State would confiscate, independently of any rise in its inherent value, the reversion of this inherent value some years hence. If we put the probable duration of the lives at forty years, this is equal to an immediate confiscation of 30 per cent of the inherent value, if we take interest at 3 per cent, or a confiscation of 20 percent if we take interest at 4 per cent. The question whether this is just or not must be looked at straight in the face [from the words of Alfred Marshall] . . . --Ronald H. Coase, April 1969. Journal of Law and Economics 12(1): 206.
. . . The principle may be extended to the generalization that a proportionately small percentage of any fauna will be fit as invaders, since any intervening barrier, however slight, will act as a kind of "filter" to at least some of them. Simpson has developed and supplemented this argument, demonstrating that Wallace's interpretation was essentially correct. The precise differences in approach between Darwin and Wallace need some additional study, but it would seem that Darwin tended to concentrate on the effects of different dispersal mechanisms on patterns of distribution, Wallace more on the influence of barriers in restricting faunas conceived of as units. Thus, Wallace was more orientated toward historical explanation for classes of phenomena, Darwin toward reasoning from the effects of the properties of individuals upon the overall pattern of distribution . . . --Michael T. Ghiselin, 1969. In his The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (University of California Press): 41.
. . . Darwin and Wallace merit particular respect for having developed the theory of natural selection through a process of "retroduction": that is, they were aware of a phenomenon, and successfully sought out an explanation in superficially unconnected processes. The method through which this insight was obtained would seem to have been orderly and rational . . . --Michael T. Ghiselin, 1969. In his The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (University of California Press): 77.
In a modification of the quinarian system of William Sharpe Macleay, Swainson divided the earth into five regions according to what he believed to be the five major races of mankind; animal groups were likewise divided into fives. The divisions were mathematical, the reasons not only unknown but unknowable. But Wallace questioned Swainson from the first, noting that "there appears not to be the slightest reason for believing a priori that all groups of animals are divided into the same number of types of forms or divisions" . . . --Barbara G. Beddall, September 1968. Journal of the History of Biology 1(2): 270.
. . . Lamarck had interpreted them in his own light, believing them to be the result of "the permanent disuse of an organ, arising from a change of habits, [which caused] a gradual shrinkage of ultimately the disappearance and even extinction of that organ." Wallace, like Chambers, thought that rudimentary organs showed relationships, but he misinterpreted them, confusing vestigial with nascent organs. He did, however, ask the right question: "If each species has been created independently, and without any necessary relations with pre-existing species, what do these rudiments, these apparent imperfections mean?" . . . --Barbara G. Beddall, September 1968. Journal of the History of Biology 1(2): 280.
. . . The argument from design was teleological, presuming that a contrivance existed in accordance with a preconceived plan. Adaptation between structure and function was recognized, but it was thought that a structure was provided simply because a function required it. Wallace wondered, however, how an animal could have necessities before it came into existence? And how could it "continue to exist unless its structure enabled it to obtain food? He thought that the arguments brought forward as proofs of design were absurd; not only were they insulting to the intelligence of a Supreme Being, but they also placed narrow limits on His power . . .Barbara G. Beddall, September 1968. Journal of the History of Biology 1(2): 282.
. . . Looking back, it is interesting that Wallace, in 1880, thought that enough information was already at hand to make further expeditions and collecting redundant. What was needed, he said, was intensive study of selected islands, and since Britain owned most of the world's islands, the government should post naturalists on some of them to make such studies. Wallace's suggestion was good, though naturally nothing came of it, but his major premise was wrong. We still need to know a great deal more than we do about the species that make up island biotas, not merely for the sake of naming and cataloguing them, but because knowledge of the identities, relationships, distribution, behavior, and ecological roles and requirements of the species is essential for understanding both the evolution of the island biotas and the evolution and functioning of the island ecosystems . . . --Theodore H. Hubbell, May 1968. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 60(1): 22.
The hypothesis of a secondary and supplementary process of selection for reproductive isolation, considered as an advantageous situation in its own right for the species concerned, was advanced in the early period of evolutionary biology by Wallace (1889), who tried unsuccessfully to convince Darwin. It seems fitting and desirable to designate the process of selection for reproductive isolation as the Wallace effect. The Wallace hypothesis was proposed again in the modern period by Fisher (1930), Dobzhansky (1941; 1951), and Huxley (1943). The subject has been reviewed recently by Mayr (1963) and Grant (1963). It is argued that the individuals of two sympatric species populations which produce inviable or sterile hybrids will contribute fewer offspring to future generations than will sister individuals in the same parental populations which do not hybridize. Consequently the genetic factors determining some block or aversion to hybridization will tend to increase in frequency within each species over the course of generations. This process of selection is expected to lead to a reinforcement of the reproductive isolation which had developed as a by-product of divergence . . . --Verne Grant, March-April 1966. American Naturalist 100(911): 99.
Species of animals living on islands may have morphological characteristics not possessed by their mainland counterparts, a fact which was recognized by Wallace (1881). He remarked that in the Celebes: "Nearly thirty species of butterflies, belonging to three different families, have a common modification in the shape of their wings by which they can be distinguished at a glance from their allies in any other island or country whatever, and all these are larger than the representative forms inhabiting most of the adjacent islands." . . . --P. R. Grant, September 1965. Evolution 19: 355.
Wallace was one of the first to suggest that birds might build their nests on the basis of their previous experience. Although it now seems that nest building in birds is not solely a function of memory, the extent to which experience plays a role has not been determined . . . --Theodore D. Sargent, January 1965. The Auk 82(1): 48.
Wallace (1889), after summarizing the findings of Bates and Müller, proposed AN EXTENSION OF MÜLLERIAN MIMICRY WHEREBY SEVERAL MEMBERS OF THE SAME UNPALATABLE GENUS LOOK ALIKE IN THE SAME LOCALITY (e.g., 4 or 5 Heliconius having a yellow-banded forewing and radiating red stripes on the hindwing.) This really is somewhat different from Müller's case of convergence of widely unrelated species. Modern speciation theory predicts that closely related species when sympatric will diverge in appearance, habits, and season due to rigorous selection for the two main speciation sequelae: anti-hybridization mechanisms and niche diversification (anti-competition). Wallace's Müllerian extension explains an important deviant. He also suggested the possibility of a still different sort of mimicry, in which A SCARCE EDIBLE SPECIES CAN MINGLE WITH AND CLOSELY RESEMBLE AN ABUNDANT EDIBLE SPECIES AND THUS GAIN SOME FREEDOM FROM PREDATION . . . --Charles L. Remington, 1963. In Proceedings of the XVI International Congress of Zoology (The Congress), Volume 4: 148.
The general patterns of the distribution of mollusks in the Pacific, particularly those of the terrestrial forms, aroused attention because of the difficulties involved in transporting such forms to small and widely scattered islands. Suggested dispersal agents have included land connections, drifting vegetation, typhoons and migratory birds. The use of islands as stepping stones, including those now buried beneath the sea, was suggested by Wallace in 1881. In Wallace's time there was little geological evidence to support the idea of submerged islands. As late as 1950 it was pointed out that complete proof for island distribution was "hopelessly buried in the geological past." . . . --Harry S. Ladd, 1960. American Journal of Science 258-A: 140.
The occurrence of a number of river-like channels running across the group and dividing it into islands is beyond doubt the most remarkable geomorphic phenomenon of the Aru Islands. Numerous branch channels are also encountered. There are several theories concerning the genesis of these channels. Wallace (1857, 1869) tried to explain them as the remainders of the Pleistocene lower courses of New Guinea rivers preserved here by subsequent uparching of the Aru region, whereas elsewhere the river courses gradually disappeared during the transgression of the shelf associated with the postglacial rise in sea level . . . --Herman Verstappen, Summer 1959. American Journal of Science 257(7): 493.
The difficulty inherent in attempting to rid biology of normative concepts incapable of definition in purely biological terms became even more evident when Darwin and others tried to find a substitute for the term natural selection. Asa Gray and Alfred Russel Wallace objected to the expression because it seemed to imply an intelligent agent selecting according to pre-established standards . . . --John C. Greene, 1959. In his The Death of Adam (Iowa State University Press): 300.
Alfred Russel Wallace had lived for many years in tropical regions, first in the Amazon basin and later in the East Indies, where he had been especially impressed by the phenomena of animal distribution. He thus had a broader and more direct and intimate acquaintance with the subject than any other naturalist traveller of his century. He was continually at work on this subject from 1860 until 1876, the date of publication of his two volumes on The Geographical Distribution of Animals. He somewhat modestly refers to this work as an extension and amplification of the two chapters on the subject in the Origin of Species, comparing it with Darwin's own two-volume expansion of the chapters on animals and plants under domestication. The two principal sections of Wallace's work on contrasted as "zoological geography," a descriptive discussion of the land animals of the different zoogeographic regions, and "geographical zoology," a review of the distribution of vertebrates and certain invertebrates, group by group. Whatever their fate in a reclassification of regions and subregions, Wallace's scheme and nomenclature are the ones that appear most widely in zoological literature . . . --Karl Patterson Schmidt, December 1954. The Quarterly Review of Biology 29(4): 323.
After Dr J. Rae, the most notable contribution to the Gesture Theory came from Charles Darwin's rival, Dr Alfred Russel Wallace, who in 1895 pointed out, in Fortnightly Review, that, in English speech, it is common to produce words by an appropriate gesture of the tongue, lips or jaw, so as 'to bring sense and sound into unison'. Thus, in UP, the jaw makes an upward movement, while in DOWN, the jaw moves down. Continuing consonants, such as F, L, M, N, etc., symbolize continuing motions, such as fly, run, swim, move. On the other hand, words for abrupt motions end with a stopped consonant--e.g., B, D, G, K, P, T, in stop, hop, pat, stab, kick, etc. Dr Wallace considered it in the highest degree probable that the pantomimic use of the various parts of the mouth constitute 'a fundamental principle which has always been at work, both in the origin and in the successive modifications of human speech'. Dr Wallace did not recognize Dickens' observation of hand and mouth as exemplified by Sam Weller; but he was, I believe, the first to point out that the pantomimic principle may be still active in man's unconscious development of his spoken language, and that modern languages may be just as gestural as the older ones . . . --R. A. S. Paget, 1951. Science News (England) 20: 87.
"He [Conrad] loved old memoirs and travels--and I think Wallace's Malay Archipelago was his favorite bedside book." Again Mr. Curle wrote that Conrad read The Malay Archipelago "over and over again . . . It was his favorite bedside companion. He had an intense admiration for those pioneer explorers--'profoundly inspired men' as he called them--who have left us a record of their work; and of Wallace, above all, he never ceased to speak in terms of enthusiasm. Even in conversation he would amplify some remark by observing, 'Wallace says so-and-so,' and The Malay Archipelago had been his intimate friend for many years." [comments by Richard Curle] . . . --Florence Clemens, July 1939. South Atlantic Quarterly 38: 305.
Though born and bred in England, no snobbishness had ever touched him, he felt that the peasant's life, being richer in experience, was more interesting than the lord's. Yet he was of the finest courtesy, kindness and generosity; he loved to relieve any want or alleviate any misery; he said once: "The sole value of riches is the joy of giving." I knew him for more than a quarter of a century and can recall no fault in him--no flaw even. His temper was as patient and quiet and fair as his mind, and his health was almost perfect even in extreme age. In writing thus of him, I feel as if I were ladling out treacle to my readers; but I can't help it; I can't go outside the Truth. Looking back, I'm inclined to think he was the wisest and best man I've ever known. Fortunately this word may be added, I've met dozens of bad men who were incomparably more interesting . . . --Frank Harris, 1920. In his Contemporary Portraits (Third Series) (published by the author): 105.
. . . The illustrious names of Myers, Sidgwick, Gurney, Wallace, Crookes, Zoellner and many other prominent men, are associated with the rebirth and the rehabilitation of the ancient belief in spirits. Even if the real nature of the observed facts be disputed, even if the explorers may be accused of errors, and sometimes of self-deception, there still belongs to them the immortal merit of having thrown the whole of their authority on to the side of non-material facts, regardlesss of public disapproval. They faced academic prejudices, and did not shrink from the cheap derision of their contemporaries; even at a time when the intellect of the educated classes was spellbound by the new dogma of materialism, they drew public attention to phenomena of an irrational nature, contrary to accepted convictions. These men typify the reaction of the human mind against the senseless and desolating materialistic view . . . --Carl Jung, May 1920. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 31(79): 76.
* * * * *
Return to Home