Darwin & Wallace: Life-long Friends With Room for Disagreement

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

Though they disagreed scientifically about the nature of human beings, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace maintained a lasting friendship. On this episode of ID The Future from the vault, we continue to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace. Host Mike Keas concludes his three-part discussion with Michael Flannery about Flannery’s book Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology. Here, Flannery describes the tolerance Darwin and Wallace maintained for each other, a quality crucial to the spirit of science and academic inquiry. He notes that some contemporaries of Darwin lacked this spirit of professional civility, including Darwin's "bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley. Flannery also relates his experiences at the 2nd Annual International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace. The paper he presented raised some eyebrows and inspired students and fellow Wallace scholars alike, some of which were entirely unaware of Wallace's natural theology. Both Keas and Flannery hold out hope that the same spirit of tolerance Darwin and Wallace demonstrated can be emulated today by Darwin's defenders and critics.

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the I.D. the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:15.0	I'm your host Mike Keys.
0:18.0	Today again we continue our conversation with Mike Flannery,
0:22.0	Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama at
0:26.2	Birmingham, and we've been talking about his new book with University of Alabama Press called Nature's Prophet Alfred Russell Wallace and his evolution
0:38.1	from natural selection to natural theology. At the end of our last conversation, Mike,
0:44.6	we were talking about how Wallace departed from Darwin,
0:49.1	even though he wrote a book called Darwinism
0:51.6	and even though he was on very good terms with Darwin personally and professionally
0:57.4	ideologically they went different directions and that's an interesting story that needs to be told.
1:05.0	Now suppose someone pushes back on this thesis of your book Mike and says something like,
1:11.0	wait a minute, Darwin went out of his way to promote Wallace.
1:16.2	He helped get a pension for him, right?
1:18.4	A government pension for 200 pounds a year.
1:20.7	Wallace praised Darwin publicly. It sounds like the two are in sync but you're
1:25.5	telling us there's more to the story behind this. What's going on here?
1:28.9	Well there is more to the story and you're absolutely right that Darwin actually it was shortly
1:35.0	after the publication of Wallace's book Island Life that Darwin really sang the
1:41.7	phrases of I was talking about Island Echo City Darwin really
1:45.0	launches of, I was talking about island ecosystems. And at any rate, at that point, he really launches a one-man campaign,
1:51.0	tries to get Hooker and some of his other colleagues involved
1:55.8	to get Wallace a 200 pound a year government pension and he is successful.
	...

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