Alfred Russel Wallace on man: A famous ‘change of mind’ - or not?

Abstract

For well over a hundred years, most observers have adopted the view that Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) underwent a 'change of mind' in the 1860s regarding the applicability of the theory of natural selection to the evolution of humankind's mental processes and capacities. This surmise, however, has never been carried on more than weakly inferential grounds, especially: (1) the fact that Wallace became an increasingly vocal spiritualist and socialist; (2) his lack of referral to humankind as an exception in the evolutionary process in his famous 'Ternate' natural selection essay of 1858 (Wallace 1858); and (3) the otherwise apparent great similarity of his views with those of Darwin. But negative evidence and correlations in time do not necessarily make an accurate model and, it should be noted, Wallace himself once reported in print, in the Preface to his book On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (Wallace 1875), that he felt he had undergone no such 'change of mind'. In recent years, a re-examination of Wallace's place in history has been underway that has entered into the task of testing the reliability