Capsule Review: The Heretic in Darwin's Court:

[BurtWorm]

A Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, by Ross Slatten

:thumbsup:

The author is very sympathetic to Wallace, even to the point of accepting his spiritualist and other extraordinary claims (a bit too much for my taste), but he is excellent at explaining Wallace's important theories that complement Darwin's. And Wallace had an amazing life. I wound up liking him less than the author clearly does, but it's difficult not to admire Wallace's adventurous spirit and creative and analytical mind.

Don't believe anyone who tells you Wallace is the 'true discoverer' of natural selection, and Darwin is just a rich pretender who stole all the glory. Darwin and Wallace were correspondents throughout their lives. Darwin helped secure a royal pension for Wallace when he saw that Wallace was struggling financially, and Wallace was one of Darwin's undertakers. They weren't close friends, and they were often in disagreement--especially over sexual selection and Wallace's (in my opinion bizarre) belief in the specialness and teleological centrality of human beings in the universe. But they were not enemies by any stretch of the imagination.