British Explorer and Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace - Research Paper Example

Introduction Alfred Russell Wallace was a British explorer, naturalist, and one of the most stupendous 19th Century’s evolutionary intellectuals. He was born in the year 1823 to Thomas Vere Wallace, a trained lawyer who did not practice law, preferring a quiet country life of literally pursuits and gardening; and Mary Anne Greenell, about whom Wallace says almost nothing in his autobiography. His father lost his modest inheritance in two perilous investments and with the growth in the size of his family, they severally moved to places where food and rent was reasonably priced (Wallace, 6). Wallace was the eighth of nine siblings and his parents could barely afford them the six years of formal education they received at the one-roomed Hertford Grammar School. However, only Wallace and other two of his nine siblings (Fanny and John) survived past early adulthood. The deteriorating financial condition of Wallace’s family interrupted his education. However, his home was a rich source of maps, books as well as gardening activities, which Wallace recalled later with pleasure. He notes in his autobiography that he devoted far more time to the games that he played as a child than to the lessons that he received at school, and he found this to be boring and painful. Nevertheless, Wallace was a realistically good student since in his last year of school; he assisted in teaching the younger pupils. This anomalous position of being both a teacher and a pupil was especially repugnant to the tall young man, and he suffered from recurring dreams of colossal torment at school for two decades (Wallace & Camerini, 4). As discussed earlier, Wallace grew up in an underprivileged background, what may be designated as rural middleclass in rural Wales and then in Hertford, England. This upbringing was very different from that of other Victorian scientific counterparts (Wallace & Camerini, 4). His real introduction to social injustices as well as the economics of his time came when he was working in rural South Wales as a surveyor at the beginning of 1840. During that period, South Wales was in a condition of virtual open rebellion as the cash demands of the government on farmers had mounted and as prices on agricultural products plummeted. He also had the opportunity of travelling abroad, which gave him exposure and respect for ‘savages’ (persons from non-European cultures) and to the colonial exploitation systems that they were exposed to. Therefore, that his enduring identification with the underdog eventually resulted in his becoming a socialist is not astounding (Wallace & Berry, 1). Wallace explains in his autobiography that in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Britain’s economic base revolutioniz d from agriculture to manufacturing and the British Empire grew in power as well as in size. This was a period of new opportunities as well as mounting dissent. The traditional values of Britain’s agricultural society were based on the status and wealth of the family where one came from. Industrialization and expansion into colonial lands subverted the staid social structure, and there resulted a substantial wealth and power re-distribution out of the need for expertise as well as scientific knowledge in the change to a manufacturing society. This wide context shaped the life of Wallace while he was young, a context charged with difficulties to traditional forms of authority, particularly the Church of England along with political power based on heritage. The fact that Wallace’s interests ranged so broadly makes it very hard to apply a single label to him. Depicting him as a natural scientist would do for the early part of his life, but so would travel writer and geographer; one would have to add spiritualist, intellectual and social critic for the second half of his life. Equally difficult to pin down is his status within the scientific community. To some historians, Wallace was a loner, an outsider or the ‘other’ man who discovered evolution. These terms however are a reflection of historians’ inclination more than they depict him. One of the reason as to why it is not easy to categorize Wallace is because his concerns were so extensive and encompassing – Wallace wrote for the specialist as well as for the lay person, he wrote about religion, evolution, morality, education, biology, spiritualism, social values, vaccination, political systems, and eugenics (Wallace & Camerini, 2). Wallace was also one of Victorian era’s most inventive and controversial icons. The political, scientific, social, philosophical, religious, economic and ethical currents, which flowed through the Victorian cultural milieu in such profusion, interwove his career and thought. Alfred Russell Wallace was a prism by which an immeasurable assortment of cultural forces and intellectual concepts was refracted. He was receptive to varied ideas, which has obscured the persistence and existence of certain key themes that directed him through the vicissitudes of a life that spanned ninety years. Wallace defied many of the consoling boundaries that were being formed in an endeavor to maintain a sense of order in Victorian culture in the midst of powerful and confusing transformations. While some of these transformations resulted from the mid and late 19th century’s changes, others resulted from science as well as the scientific community. Wallace was an indefinable Victorian in the sense that pigeonholing him into any neat category was exigent. Numerous tags have been applied to him, which include socialist, philosopher, biological theorist, theist, land nationalizationist, field naturalist, ethicist and spiritualist. All these labels are fitting to him. Wallace, however, was beyond the sum of his parts. Diverse areas of interest appeared larger at diverse stages of his life. Wallace’s main goal of putting these varied concerns together acted as an anchor for his advancing activist and intellectual undertakings. His expedition resulted in an overarching worldview – a teleological evolutionary cosmology. It was in the later phase of his life that the diverse components of Wallace’s synthesis got together most evidently (Fichman, 1). To date, most of the controversies and issues that engaged Wallace remain as vital as they were 150 years back. For instance, as Barrow explains, he gave a warning regarding the fate of animal species as well as tropical plants, which he foretold that if scientific institutions as well as governments would fail to take care of them, by taking immediate steps to make full collections, they would ‘perish irrevocably.’ Wallace’s major themes in his work included the importance of evolution in social, moral and political thought, the significance of land and how it is supposed to be managed, among others. These in conjunction with specific thought elements, his disagreements with Darwin or his support of women’s rights; demonstrate an unparalleled amount of wisdom and the aptitude of focusing on things that matter. Yet his opinions provoked many individuals. His hearty antagonism to vaccination, his blending of theological and spiritual beliefs into his evolutionary theories, and his support of socialism as he grew older all paved way to people criticizing him both during his time and today and to some extent, they have contributed to certain abandonment by scientists and historians (Wallace & Camerini, 3). According to Shermer, Wallace was hardly exceptional in trying to create a meaningful evolutionary cosmology but what made him unique was his status as a practicing scientist. Actually, the focus of most of his existing scholarly literature is on science and either fails to scrutinize in depth or in context his philosophical, political, theistic, and social concerns or omits his other interests. Wallace’s endeavors to put his extensive interests together have eluded historical accord for a long time. Some studies exhibit the seriously flawed nature of the conventional historiographic image of him as a brilliant scientist who unfortunately tumbled into spiritualism, theism or socialism. Wallace was a sage to most of his contemporaries. His ethical, political, and social pronouncements struck receptive chords in Victorian society’s groups and individuals. Wallace was therefore a formidable Victorian academic activist whose scientific expertise, together with a maturing theistic stance, resulted in a holistic and powerful philosophy of society and nature. He had a commitment to science and its methodology as one of the most striking accomplishments of humanity (Fichman, 4). Wallace was indeed predestined for scientific eminence. Shermer explains the way in which in the nineteenth century, he is said to have worked parallel with Charles Darwin and came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection, one of the most prominent theories of that time and one of his best-known claim to fame. On June 18 of the year 1858, Charles Darwin received a manuscript from Darwin that panicked him into dashing out the Origin of species. Darwin realized that Wallace had by himself stumbled on the very idea to which he had had been incubating for about two decades of his life. Soon after returning to England from the Beagle voyage in the year 1836, Darwin had first set out on thinking about the question of ‘Transmutation of Species’ and at the time of his discovery of Wallace’s manuscript, he was actively working on his ‘big species book’ on the subject. Wallace made Darwin to experience loss of priority, the ultimate scientific nightmare and Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell, his confidant and trusted, friend saying that whatever it may amount to, all his originality would be smashed (Tiwari, 6). Nevertheless, Darwin did not lose all as together with Lyell, another lieutenant of Darwin called Joseph Hooker brokered a ‘delicate arrangement’ in the attempt of rescuing Darwin’s precedence. They came to the solution of making a joint presentation of Darwin’s previously unpublished manuscripts and Wallace’s paper to the pre-eminent biological forum of that time, the Linnean Society. These two presented the two on July 1 1858 on behalf of the Wallace and Darwin, the two ‘indefatigable naturalists’ in their absence. At that time, Darwin was mourning his baby son, Charles Waring, who had died of scarlet fever on June 23 at night. Wallace on the other hand was half a world away in South-east Asia and he had no idea of what was going on (Stepan, 58 & Jurmain, et al., 38). This standard account of events has been questioned by Wallace scholarship – Arnold Brackman and John Langdon Brooks have presented revised accounts in which in order to protect his claims to precedence, Darwin is ready to bend, or even ignore, the scientific conduct rules. Examination of schedules of mailing between England and the far East has indicated that Darwin may have received the letter from Wallace as much as a month earlier than the date that he admitted publicly to have gotten hold of it. It is said that perhaps, during those missing weeks, he was laying strategies (Wallace & Berry, 62). In the year 1908, there was a meeting at the Linnean Society marking the Darwin-Wallace publication’s 50th anniversary and while Darwin had been dead for 26 years, Wallace was present to assess his as well as Darwin’s contributions (Wallace & Berry, 1). In the year 1910, The world of Life, Wallace’s final major work presented a handy summary of Darwin-Wallace theory, breaking it down into three fundamental axioms namely variation, hereditary and a rate of population increase that surpasses the availability of resources (Wallace & Berry, 69). Wallace, however, was much more than just Darwin’s goad. He, in his own right, was an autonomous scientist and is reasonably deemed the father of evolutionary biogeography (the study of plants and animals’ geographical distribution), to which the identification of what came to be known as ‘Wallace Line’ was his most renowned contribution. ‘Wallace Line’ had to do with the boundary between the faunas of Oriental and Australasian biogeographic regions. He had worked in the field in the South-east Asia and Amazon for twelve years, which contributed to his being the greatest tropical biologist of his time. He also made a significant contribution to what is currently referred to as ‘ecology’ although during his time, it did not have a name. To date, Wallace’s speciation and adaptation studies remain prominent. The scientific interests that Wallace had varied across disciplinary borders, and, over and above being a biologist, he may rightfully be termed as a geologist and anthropologist (Wallace & Berry, 1, Barrow, 72). Conclusion Apparently, Wallace was an enigmatic and idiosyncratic figure whose long and rich life is difficult to understand in a single glance. As Wallace & Camerini point out, Wallace never held a title or a salaried position – he kept on researching and writing, following his own convictions while continuing being an astute observer of human and natural events. People who are curious enough to research on this remarkable figure have so much available literature for their perusal. Wallace’s writing discloses an independence of thought, which although not shaped by his time and place, carries the stamp of his open-mindedness, curiosity and thoughtfulness, in conjunction with his inclination to being outspoken and opinionated. To appreciate his clear writing, intelligence and perceptiveness, one does not have to read his entire literally legacy. The voluminous published record discloses little of Wallace’s personal life, regarding which he chose to be private. Wallace & Camerini point out that through his escapades and honors; his disappointments and failures; Wallace upheld an enormous compassion, a lack of pretension and optimism until his death in 1913 at the age of ninety. These are evident in his writing and they seize the heart of many of his readers. He published some seven hundred essays, letters and articles in periodicals and newspapers as well as 21 books (3). Works Cited Barrow, Mark V. Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Print. Fichman, Martin. An elusive Victorian: the evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Print. Jurmain, Robert et al. Essentials of Physical Anthropology. Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning. 2010. Print. Shermer, Michael. In Darwin’s Shadow. London: Oxford University Press. 2001. Print. Stepan, Nancy L. Picturing Tropical Nature. London: Reaktion Books. 2006. Print. Tiwari, S.K. Animal Kingdom of the World. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons. 1999. Print. Wallace, Alfred R. & Camerini, Jane R. The Alfred Russel Wallace reader: a selection of writings from the field. Baltimore, Maryland: JHU Press. 2002. Print. Wallace, Alfred R. My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Print. Wallace, Alfred R. The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Print. Read More