Every naturalist who has directed his attention to the subject of the geographical distribution of animals and plants, must have been interested in the singular facts which it presents. Many of these facts are quite different from what would have been anticipated, and have hitherto been considered as highly curious, but quite inexplicable. None of the explanations attempted from the time of Linnaeus are now considered at all satisfactory; none of them have given a cause sufficient to account for the (...) facts known at the time, or comprehensive enough to include all the new facts which have since been, and are daily being added. Of late years, however, a great light has been thrown upon the subject by geological investigations, which have shown that the present state of the earth and of the organisms now inhabiting it, is but the last stage of a long and uninterrupted series of changes which it has undergone, and consequently, that to endeavour to explain and account for its present condition without any reference to those changes (as has frequently been done) must lead to very imperfect and erroneous conclusions. (shrink)

La figura de Alfred Russel Wallace dentro de la antropología ha sido escasamente reconocida dentro de la historia de la disciplina. Un punto importante es ubicar al autor dentro de las discusiones antropológicas de la época victoriana, desde su interés temprano como naturalista por historizar a los seres humanos, hasta su labor institucional como el primer presidente de un departamento de antropología en Inglaterra. En ese contexto, el objetivo del trabajo es presentar la visión de Wallace (...) respecto a la antropología física, a partir de su obra antropológica, que incluye referencias al origen de las razas humanas en términos naturalistas, al desarrollo de características físicas distintivas de los seres humanos o a la relación evolutiva entre primates. Con esto, se amplía la perspectiva sobre el desarrollo de la antropología física en el siglo XIX, al abrir el abanico a autores que contribuyeron de manera importante a su desarrollo. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has had it that the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his colleague Henry Walter Bates journeyed to the Amazon in 1848 with two intentions in mind: to collect natural history specimens, and to consider evidential materials that might reveal the causal basis of organic evolution. This understanding has been questioned recently by the historian John van Wyhe, who points out that with regard to the second matter, at least, there appears to be no evidence of (...) a “smoking gun” variety proving it so. In the present essay the circumstances of Wallace’s interest in the matter are reviewed, and van Wyhe is taken to task with alternate explanations for the facts he introduces in his argument. The conclusion is that Wallace almost certainly did have the second objective in mind when he left for both the Amazon, and the Far East. Keywords: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, evolution, natural selection. (shrink)

Historians of the Victorian period have begun to re-evaluate the general background and impact of Darwin's theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection. An emerging picture suggests that the Darwinian theory of evolution was only one aspect of a more general change in intellectual positions. It is possible to summarize two correlated developments in the second half of the nineteenth century: the seculariszation of majors areas of thought, and the increasing breakdown of a common intellectual milieu. (...) Studies in linguistics, historical criticism, socio-political theory, theologys, and anthropology, besides evolutionary theory, contributed to these developments. It has also been argued that the background of evolutionary thought lay within a relatively unified early Victorian intellectual context with shared religious, moral, and scientific concepts. Evolutionary theory contributed to the disintegration of this shared context, but it did not intrinsically assume a clear demarcation between value-laden ideas and scientific ideas. On the one hand, in the later Victorian period, religious and scientific intellectuals found it increasingly hard to share common ground. On the other hand, they did sometimes share an enthusiasm for applying biological models to social and ethical theory. It is necessary to look closely before ascribing any increased differentiation of positions to the impact of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Wallace became a full-time naturalist in 1848, the year when he and Bates set out on their journey to South America. Wallace was twenty-five at the time and over half of his life had been spent in various parts of Wales, the land of his birth. Commentators have tended to gloss over or ignore any formative influences from this early period of his life or even to dismiss them as non-existent. This is surprising as it was during the (...) eight or so years in Wales leading up to 1848 that Wallace's interest in natural history emerged. ‘The importance of this early period in Wallace's life can scarcely be over-emphasized’ wrote Durant in his account of the development of the Wallace personality, but he omitted any specific reference to the significance of the early period in Wales. Those seeking a simple unitary cause for Wallace's conversion to natural history usually locate this in his visit to Leicester in 1844 and his meeting there with H. W. Bates. ‘The odyssey began … in 1844, in Leicester’ wrote Brooks, adding that ‘the more remote parts of … southern Wales had offered little reading material…’ This, and similar claims, are presumably founded primarily on Wallace's belief—expressed sixty years later—that it was at Leicester that he first familiarized himself with Malthus'Essay on the Principles of Populationand Humboldt'sPersonal Narrative of Travels in South America.There is, however, evidence that Wallace was probably familiar with at least one of these books some time before his visit to Leicester and that it was during his period in southern Wales that his interest in natural history emerged and developed. (shrink)

In his Preface to Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, James Costa confesses, “My style is conventional, intimate, as told over a pint or two (or three). Or is that w...