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

The Psychology of Biography /5
cial scientists are discovering, along with their colleagues in the physical and
biological sciences, unique pathways of history are more common and important
in the development of individuals than previously suspected. From
galaxies and planetary bodies to ecosystems and individual members of a
species, the particular histories of the subject play at least as important a role
as the governing laws of physical, biological, or social action. Alfred Kinsey
knew this all too well, as prior to his research foray into the sexual behavior
of men and women he was an entomologist, studying gall wasps for over two
decades, publishing a number of important and pioneering works. What he
discovered about wasps—a fairly homogeneous group compared to humans—
prepared him for his subsequent realization of the nearly incomprehensible
variation in human actions, as he explained in his first volume: “Modern
taxonomy is the product of an increasing awareness among biologists of the
uniqueness of individuals, and of the wide range of variation which may occur
in any population of individuals.” Extrapolating to humans, Kinsey noted:
“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual.
The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are
black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely
deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and
tries to force facts into separate pigeonholes. The living world is a continuum
in each and every one of its aspects.” 5 It is no different with historical personages.
Dependently linked events operating through time shape each and
every life in a unique pattern of contingencies that mold individual lives. We
cannot understand all human action outside of examining a human action.
The particular shapes the general. History counts.
In his classic 1943 study The Hero in History, Sidney Hook captured this
primary struggle between the players and forces of history—between the
individual and the collective, the freedom of choice and the determinism of
law, the contingent and the necessary—when he drew a distinction between
the eventful man, who was merely at the right place at the right time, and the
event-making man, who helped create the events himself: “The event-making
man finds a fork in the historical road, but he also helps...tocreate it. He
increases the odds of success for the alternative he chooses by virtue of the
extraordinary qualities he brings to bear to realize it.” 6 The hero is a great
individual who was at the right place and time. The hero is both a product
and producer of culture.
If only it were a simple task to know when and where a historical figure
affected change or was affected by change. Which historical variables are
cause, and which are effect? Arguments about whether heroes in history are
“great men” or products of their culture rest on a false dichotomy created, in
part, by both the participants themselves and the historians who write about