Michael Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life , sent this note re the latter book:
John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of it more coherent.
Nonetheless, this reductionist thinking whereby Darwin’s theory becomes a mere derivative of Wallace’s actually winds up doing violence to Wallace’s ideas. For example, Landon writes, “I am not sure why the Intelligent Design and Creationist critics of Darwin are reluctant to see this aspect of the paradigm’s history. We need to face the fact that Wallace most probably created the Darwinism we know, and that he is therefore responsible for its side effects and un-glorious history.”
Fact is the Darwin and Wallace theories had fundamental differences built into them from the very beginning as a thorough reading of the Ternate Letter will reveal. Jean Gayon has written on this most persuasively in Darwinism’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection.
Most importantly, Wallace NEVER thought Darwin’s breeding examples were appropriate to natural selection, and this is an important aspect I think captured the attention of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton as he developed eugenics. There are other difference too that needn’t be gone into here. So maybe the ID community is reluctant to “see this aspect” for two reasons: 1) it fails to comport with Wallace’s theory as he proposed and developed it; and 2) it impugns to Wallace a responsibility and guilt he doesn’t deserve. Wallace, for example, was a vocal opponent of eugenics and social Darwinism in general.
Well, if Wallace immediately saw that selective breeding (guided selection) is not equivalent to natural (unguided) selection, he knew more than 99% of the New York Times readers who swallowed ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’s claim that it is (when Dawkins was attacking ID theorist Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution.) And Wallace was not the one who thought that black people were closer to gorillas than white people were.