I didn't know much about Alfred Russel Wallace, the contemporary and ally of Charles Darwin who independently realised that natural selection was a thing. But a book review of a new biography of him at the Wall Street Journal fills in some gaps. (I found this via Arts and Letters Daily, and I'm not sure if this link will get you there.)
I didn't know that he into socialism, and spiritualism; but he certainly put the hard work in when it came to studying the natural world. Some extracts:
In 1844, a 21-year-old Wallace met Henry Walter Bates, a young man from a
similar background, at the mechanics’ institute in Leicester. Bates had
accumulated a sizable collection of beetles, and Wallace joined him in
the field and in spirited scientific debates, notably over
transmutation, the controversial idea that species changed over time.
Transmutation clashed with prevailing notions of a micromanaging creator
who designed each organism to fit a specific niche and instead
suggested a hands-off deity or perhaps none at all. Beetles could help
answer these questions, Wallace thought, if he studied them thoroughly
enough.
Wallace
and Bates hatched an ambitious plan to travel to South America. They
would send beetles back to museums and private collections to fund their
travels. The two young men were utterly determined, Mr. Costa writes,
“to contribute to the grand scientific issues of the day,” particularly
that mystery of mysteries, the origin of species.
In
Brazil, Wallace accidently shot himself in the hand and suffered
multiple bouts of malaria, yet he collected assiduously and kept moving
even in the worst of conditions. During his second year there, after he
and Bates had gone their separate ways, and Wallace’s younger brother
Edward had joined him, Wallace began his Amazon investigations in
earnest. As he lurched his way into Brazil’s interior, he became as
studied in palms and birds as in plants and beetles. He sketched the
fish he ate for lunch, and surveyed and mapped almost compulsively.
It was during Wallace’s rare moments of downtime, usually forced by
injury or illness, that the theorizing and synthesizing occurred. He
began to note patterns—why blue macaws are abundant along one part of a
river but not another, for example—that seeded his later ideas about
speciation and geography. His four years in Brazil ended in double
tragedy: the death of Edward from yellow fever and the loss of his
collections and notebooks when his departing ship caught fire. Wallace
survived in a lifeboat for 10 days before a passing cargo ship rescued
him. He was well aware that his scientific future in England, which had
been all but guaranteed after such a productive voyage, was now
precarious.
He then headed off to Asia for many more years of observation and collecting specimens.
As for his more esoteric ideas:
Wallace’s
early devotion to the utopian Robert Owen, Mr. Costa thinks,
predisposed him to a “Rousseauian well of discontent with the state of
so-called civilized society,” leading him to view indigenous models of
living more favorably than most of his European contemporaries. The same
tendencies also predisposed Wallace, Mr. Costa posits, to
anti-establishment attitudes when it came to science: Why should one
person’s observations count more than another’s? This set him up for
trouble upon his return to England.
After
a total of 12 years in South America and Asia, Wallace was “admitted to
the full and admiring embrace of London’s scientific scene,” Mr. Costa
writes. Darwin became his champion and colleague, and Wallace generously
promoted all things Darwin and Darwinism. But his embrace of some
incongruous positions strained the relationship. Wallace had from a
young age rejected a conventional Christian worldview and any attempt to
reconcile the Bible with scientific facts. But he couldn’t resist the
desire to communicate with a parallel world of spirits. Moreover, he
came to argue that the human brain was simply too extraordinary an organ
to have been shaped by forces of natural selection, making it a sort of
exception. All this was anathema to Darwin.
Mr.
Costa points out that spiritualism was wildly popular in the 19th
century and that Wallace, like many of his contemporaries, had lost
beloved siblings young to disease. In the author’s view, Wallace’s
spiritualism was not such a departure from his long-held ideas and
principles. The ethical teachings of spiritualism, Mr. Costa contends,
fit alongside his ideals of equality and social justice.
Sounds like this book could be a good read.
Jumping over to Wikipedia, it would seem that many of his social views were very progressive, and surprisingly sensible, for his time:
Wallace opposed eugenics,
an idea supported by other prominent 19th-century evolutionary
thinkers, on the grounds that contemporary society was too corrupt and
unjust to allow any reasonable determination of who was fit or unfit.
In his 1890 article "Human Selection" he wrote, "Those who succeed in
the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most
intelligent ..."[73]
He said, "The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight,"
"Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all
will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome
interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft."[74]
In 1898, Wallace wrote a paper advocating a pure paper money system, not backed by silver or gold, which impressed the economist Irving Fisher so much that he dedicated his 1920 book Stabilizing the Dollar to Wallace.[75]
Wallace wrote on other social and political topics, including in support of women's suffrage and repeatedly on the dangers and wastefulness of militarism.
In an 1899 essay, he called for popular opinion to be rallied against
warfare by showing people "that all modern wars are dynastic; that they
are caused by the ambition, the interests, the jealousies, and the
insatiable greed of power of their rulers, or of the great mercantile
and financial classes which have power and influence over their rulers;
and that the results of war are never good for the people, who yet bear
all its burthens (burdens)".[78] In a letter published by the Daily Mail
in 1909, with aviation in its infancy, he advocated an international
treaty to ban the military use of aircraft, arguing against the idea
"that this new horror is 'inevitable', and that all we can do is to be
sure and be in the front rank of the aerial assassins—for surely no
other term can so fitly describe the dropping of, say, ten thousand
bombs at midnight into an enemy's capital from an invisible flight of
airships."[79]
On the other hand, he was an early vaccination sceptic, and wrote a pamphlet against it.
Still, a more interesting character than I knew...
