In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace ...

Genesis and Revelation / xvii
would have sworn it had been inserted by some other hand.” The wording
was too similar to be a coincidence. We then went to Lyell’s Life and Letters
for the month of May 1869 and, sure enough, there it was, May 5: “I quite
agree with you that Wallace’s sketch of natural selection,” etc. And the handwriting?
Lyell’s was not typically very legible, but because his eyesight was
quite poor late in his life he frequently dictated letters to his wife or a secretary.
It was a trivial correction to a vast body of literature, but a proud
moment of original contribution for us. It is to Kim with good reason that I
dedicate this biography.
Schemata
In Darwin’s Shadow is a narrative biography that employs quantitative and
analytical techniques to get our minds around this complex man. To accomplish
this there are five schemata that roughly outline the work:
1. Wallace the Man. This is, first and foremost, a biography of Alfred
Russel Wallace, utilizing a number of never-before-used archival sources that
bring to bear new interpretations on a number of theoretical issues. In this
regard, much of this volume resembles the standard womb-to-tomb narrative
style of most biographies; nevertheless, I occasionally break the narrative flow
to consider some of the theoretical issues involved, particularly in the development
of Wallace’s scientific, quasi-scientific, and nonscientific ideas. On
this level In Darwin’s Shadow is an intellectual biography—a history of ideas,
particularly those of Wallace and his contemporaries.
2. Wallace and Darwin. Within the biography are the two major points of
intersection between Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin: (1) the question of
priority in the discovery of natural selection, presented and analyzed in light
of the archival evidence seen through a different theoretical model—though
the absence of hypothesis confirming evidence (a “smoking gun”) makes any
final resolution impossible, the dispute can be settled to almost everyone’s
satisfaction through a careful analysis of the extant data; (2) Wallace’s heresy
that Darwin found so shocking in the man who had become more Darwinian
than himself—Wallace’s belief that natural selection cannot account for the
full development of the human mind and that this was further evidence of the
existence of a higher intelligence (although not necessarily God in any traditional
sense).
3. Wallace the Heretic. Wallace’s specific heresy had much broader implications
than Darwin realized, and the term “heretic scientist” applies to a
great many eccentric and fringe causes championed by Wallace throughout
his career. One full chapter is devoted to Wallace as a scientist among the
spiritualists, and how and why these experiences became so important as