Wallace was Darwin’s co-theorist, hastily shoved out of the way (he turned out to be a supporter of design in nature). Here’s what happened:
It came with Wallace’s review of Charles Lyell’s tenth revised edition of his Principles of Geology in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review. In this, Wallace proclaimed:
Let us fearlessly admit that the mind of man (itself the living proof of a supreme mind) is able to trace, and to a considerable extent has traced, the laws by means of which the organic no less than the inorganic world has been developed. But let us not shut our eyes to the evidence that an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.
Darwin received his copy and sent his objection to Wallace in a letter dated April 14, 1869. So I’d say let’s have a Wallace Day on April 14 to celebrate — Darwin’s objections notwithstanding — the historic reintroduction of the idea of intelligent design. This would be a fitting celebration of reuniting science with the time-honored tradition of seeing purpose in nature, and a statement opposing the straightjacket of methodological naturalism! – historian Michael Flannery,
More here.
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