Radical by Nature. The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, James T. Costa, Princeton University Press, 2023, pp. 552, $19.00 hardcover.
I begin with a little game of word association. Say “evolution” and the response will, with a likelihood converging on certainty, be some variant of “Darwin.” The same result would follow if the prompt and response were reversed. Yet for several decades following the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, natural selection was known as the “Darwin-Wallace theory.” Among our contemporaries, mentioning this will usually prompt another response: “who’s Wallace?”
To the extent that Alfred Russel Wallace is even known today, it is through a standard narrative, which I summarize:
When the young Alfred Russel Wallace was collecting birds and butterflies in the Malay Archipelago, the idea of natural selection came to him one night in a reverie of malarial fever. When he recovered, Wallace wrote down his thoughts and sent them off to Charles Darwin, along with a request that Darwin forward his paper to the Royal Society for publication. Wallace’s letter sent Darwin into a panic. Although he had come up with the idea of natural selection twenty years earlier, Darwin had not yet published. Now he had been scooped by the upstart Wallace, sending Darwin’s life’s work up in smoke! Darwin’s friends stepped in with a solution. Wallace’s manuscript would be bundled with a hastily drawn-up manuscript from Darwin, and both papers would be read jointly at the next meeting of the Royal Society, establishing natural selection as the Darwin-Wallace theory. Wallace later developed a weird fascination with spiritualism and seances, revealing himself as scientifically untrustworthy, and therefore not as deserving as Darwin of full credit for natural selection, which henceforth would be known as the Darwin theory.
Narratives are not history, of course, but instruments to advance an agenda, in this instance, to establish Darwin as the singular genius who ushered in our secular New Age. In his new book, Radical by Nature, James T. Costa provides a welcome reality check on this “Darwin-first” narrative. A professor of biology at Western Carolina University, and director of WCU’s Highlands Biological Station, Costa combines a biologist’s perspective on the saga of Wallace and Darwin, set against a vivid portrait of the world of Victorian science and society that both men inhabited.
The question that runs as an undercurrent through Radical by Nature is this: just how did the “Darwin-Wallace theory” become just the “Darwin theory”? Costa makes the case (perhaps inadvertently) that there is little scientific justification for Wallace’s marginalization. There is even a case to be made (although Costa is not making it) that natural selection should be named the “Wallace-Darwin theory.” While Darwin had been writing about natural selection in his notebooks and had been sharing his thoughts privately long before the arrival of Wallace’s letter, the question looms: just why did Darwin delay publishing his idea?
The conventional view on that is that Darwin feared that the wrath of religious authorities would be brought down upon his head. Darwin was no latter-day Copernicus, though, and there was little likelihood of a religious backlash in any event. Ever since Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus had toyed with the idea, “transformationism” had become a subject of titillating gossip in Victorian society, lending it a frisson of French degeneracy. Furthermore, others had had the idea of natural selection prior to Darwin, although more superficially than he. The truth was that Darwin had held off publication because he had simply not closed the deal. After twenty years of dithering experiments in his garden and greenhouse, despite years of hanging out with pigeon fanciers, dog breeders, and barnacles, Darwin lacked the crucial evidence he needed of the gradual change in form his idea demanded. Wallace upended Darwin’s world, not because he had independently come up with the idea of natural selection, but because his letter filled in that missing puzzle piece that Darwin had failed to craft. Furthermore, Wallace had not fashioned his idea from the mists of a fever dream, but from nearly a decade of painstaking collection and observation of birds, insects, and plants across the broad range of the southwestern Pacific’s Malay archipelago.
Costa devotes about half of Radical by Nature to a fascinating and detailed account of Wallace’s many years of fieldwork, first in South America and later in the Malay archipelago. It’s hard not to come away from Costa’s detailed account with the impression that, if anything, Wallace was the better field naturalist than Darwin. This only deepens the mystery: why did Wallace become “Darwin’s moon”?
One conventional explanation blames Wallace’s marginalization on his own excessive modesty. Costa’s depiction of the latter part of Wallace’s life undermines that glib explanation. Wallace certainly was a modest man, always eager to give credit to others, and he could carry this aspect of his character to self-abnegation. For example, Wallace gave the title Darwinism to his own magnum opus about natural selection. Costa’s description of the rest of Wallace’s life puts paid to the idea that self-abnegation was an ineradicable character flaw. Wallace was not at all deferential when it came to promoting his truly revolutionary scientific work, the founding of the still-thriving (but largely invisible to the public) discipline of biogeography. Nor was Wallace shy about touting his own ideas on a wide variety of social topics, including land reform, and surprisingly, a screed against government funding of science! Seemingly, it was only when self-promotion put him at odds with the Victorian scientific elite that Wallace doffed his cap.
This puts a different gloss on the other conventional explanation for Wallace’s marginalization: that Wallace discredited himself by going off his rocker with an obsession over spiritualism and séances. The class structure of Victorian Britain certainly played a role here. Darwin and Wallace came from very different social backgrounds. Where Darwin was the scion of the upwardly mobile yeomanry of the British midlands, Wallace came from a “happy but downwardly mobile” working class family. Where Darwin could count on a secure and comfortable life underwritten by the fortunes of his own family and of his wealthy father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, Wallace’s life was a never-ending financial scramble. Where Darwin attended the elite universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, Wallace was largely self-educated through the “mechanic’s institutes” that were the community colleges of their day. Darwin secured passage on HMS Beagle as a “gentleman’s companion” to its erratic captain, Robert FitzRoy. Wallace, by contrast, financed his own expeditions to South America and the Malay Archipelago by collecting rare birds and insects for the “curiosity cabinets” fashionable in Victorian drawing rooms.
More important, and often neglected, is the extent which both Wallace and Darwin were beneficiaries of British imperialism. Darwin’s voyage piggybacked on HMS Beagle’s mission to produce better navigation maps for both Royal Navy and commercial ships. In filling in the details of Wallace’s expeditions to South America and the Malay archipelago, Costa shows how Wallace also benefited from the infrastructure of empire. Not only were his skids greased by the global network of Victorian viceroys, colonial administrators, and native headmen, Wallace depended in crucial ways on the reliable worldwide postal and shipping services that enabled him to make money, to get around the innumerable isles of the Malay archipelago—and to deliver that fateful 1859 letter to Darwin, 10,000 miles away.
The roots of Wallace’s dust-up over spiritualism are better understood in light of Darwin’s and Wallace’s different views on human origins and evolution. Compared to Wallace, Darwin’s own exposure to different races and cultures was superficial and fleeting. Darwin’s comments on the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, for example, are eyebrow-raising, but in fairness, his exposure to the indigenous tribes of that region were determined by the Beagle’s passage. Wallace, in contrast, had developed close working relationships with native Malays who, if anything, were smarter and more capable than the British assistants he employed.
Wallace’s deep immersion in native Malay culture, and his close working relationship with native Malays, led him to a paradox that put him at odds with Darwin and his social circle. Wallace had been impressed that the mental capabilities of his Malay assistants were greater than were expressed in Malay culture. How then, Wallace asked himself, could natural selection produce what Wallace regarded as excess and largely unused mental capacity? Wouldn’t natural selection produce whatever mental capacity the culture and environment demanded? This paradox prompted Wallace to posit a limit to natural selection, specifically, the evolution of the human mind and brain. Something beyond natural selection, Wallace believed, must have driven human origins. His flirtation with spiritualism was an attempt to explore, in scientific terms, what that missing factor might be. The effort may have been naïve, but it was not the product of a mind gone off the rails. It did, however, set tongues wagging among the Victorian scientific elite, contributing to his eventual marginalization.
James Costa’s book offers one important step in the century-long rehabilitation of Alfred Russel Wallace as a long neglected and prominent Victorian scientist. Conventional narratives of the “Darwin first” agenda obscure the current controversies over evolutionism, and both its cultural and scientific significance.
Scott Turner is Director of the Intrusion of Diversity in the Sciences Project of the National Association of Scholars; turner@nas.org. Dr. Turner is a physiologist retired from the faculty of SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry, though still active in his research specialty, the study of termite colonies. His books include Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It (HarperOne, 2017). He last wrote for AQ in winter 2025/2026 with “Unreasonable Science,” a review of John Staddon’s Science in an Age of Unreason (2022).
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