Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Michael Flannery’s book on Alfred Russel Wallace has been revised and updated

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Paul Mikos, editor at Influence Press, writes to say:

We are excited to announce a new release of the book, Intelligent Evolution, edited by Michael Flannery. This book is an update of the previous edition, Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution.m2 While the centerpiece remains Wallace’s World of Life, Flannery has updated the introduction and added a new appendix titled, “Wallace v. Darwin on Religion and Humanity: What We Now Know about the Kingdom of Faith.” And, the foreword by design theorist William Dembski has been updated as well.

At Amazon from the publisher:

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer of natural selection, was second only to Charles Darwin as the 19th century’s most noted English naturalist. Yet his belief in spiritualism caused him to be ridiculed and dismissed by many, leaving him a comparatively obscure and misunderstood figure. In this volume Wallace is finally allowed to speak in his own defense through his grand evolutionary synthesis The World of Life published over a century ago in 1910. More than just a reprinting of a near-forgotten work, Michael A. Flannery places Wallace in historical context and includes the very latest historiography relating to both Darwin and Wallace in his detailed introduction. Flannery exposes Charles Darwin’s now-famous theory of evolution as little more than a naturalistic cover for an extreme philosophical materialism borrowed as a youth from Edinburgh radicals. This is juxtaposed by his sympathetic account of what he calls Wallace’s intelligent evolution, a thoroughly teleological alternative to Darwin’s stochastic processes. Though based upon very different formulations of natural selection, the Wallace/Darwin dispute as presented by Flannery shows a metaphysical clash of worldviews

Wallace, as Darwin’s co-theorist, disappeared because he was not useful to the cause of naturalism:

What, indeed, do Professor James T. Costa, Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, BioLogos president Deborah Haarsma, and evolution historian Peter J. Bowler all have in common? Answer: they all want to obscure the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin, solved the problem of evolution by redefining it as “directed, detectably designed, and purposeful common descent.” These Darwin devotees and Darwinian theists would have you believe that, as the source of biological invention, purely stochastic and mindless processes were “proven” with the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), and that these are the only ones worthy of serious discussion today. For them only chance and necessity count as scientific explanations.

But more than a century ago Wallace challenged such reductionism with The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose, his magnum opus devoted to genuine teleology in nature.

Evolution News, “Biology’s “Best-Kept Secret” — Alfred Wallace’s Classic Is Out Now in a New Edition” at Evolution News and Science Today:


We’ll try to help make sure he doesn’t disappear again.

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