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In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History by Shermer, Michael (2011) Paperback
Virtually unknown today, Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin and an eminent scientist who stood out among his Victorian peers as a man of formidable mind and equally outsized personality. Now Michael Shermer rescues Wallace from the shadow of Darwin in this landmark biography.Here we see Wallace as perhaps the greatest naturalist of his age--spending years in remote jungles, collecting astounding quantities of specimens, writing thoughtfully and with bemused detachment at his reception in places where no white man had ever gone. Here, too, is his supple and forceful intelligence at work, grappling with such arcane problems as the bright coloration of caterpillars, or shaping his 1858 paper on natural selection that prompted Darwin to publish (with Wallace) the first paper outlining the theory of evolution. Shermer also shows that Wallace's self-trained intellect, while powerful, also embraced surprisingly naive ideas, such as his deep interest in the study of spiritual manifestations and seances. Shermer shows that the same iconoclastic outlook that led him to overturn scientific orthodoxy as he worked in relative isolation also led him to embrace irrational beliefs, and thus tarnish his reputation.As author of Why People Believe Weird Things and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, Shermer is an authority on why people embrace the irrational. Now he turns his keen judgment and incisive analysis to Wallace's life and his contradictory beliefs, restoring a leading figure in the rise of modern science to his rightful place.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Michael Shermer
99 books1,153 followersMichael Brant Shermer (born September 8, 1954 in Glendale, California) is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating and debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members.
Shermer is also the producer and co-host of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown. Since April 2004, he has been a monthly columnist for Scientific American magazine with his Skeptic column. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Shermer now describes himself as an agnostic nontheist and an advocate for humanist philosophy.
more info:
http://us.macmillan.com/author/michae...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_...
Shermer is also the producer and co-host of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown. Since April 2004, he has been a monthly columnist for Scientific American magazine with his Skeptic column. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Shermer now describes himself as an agnostic nontheist and an advocate for humanist philosophy.
more info:
http://us.macmillan.com/author/michae...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 26, 2016
Shermer has written a fascinating book! He might seem a strange choice to write a biography of anyone, what with his background as a social scientist and investigator of scientific claims, but the result is quite absorbing, not least because in it he applies scientific approaches to biography and history. The book is an argument for making history and biography more scientific and is also an example of just that. I found his ideas convincing and worthwhile.
It was a pleasure to become better acquainted with Alfred Russell Wallace. Before, I knew him as a secondary figure in the story of the discovery of natural selection. Like most people, I knew Darwin a lot better. Russell was a great scientist in his own right and is a perfect choice for Shermer's treatment because he was an intellectual adventurer who wasn't at all averse to supporting "outrageous" claims, such as spiritualism.
Read this book.
It was a pleasure to become better acquainted with Alfred Russell Wallace. Before, I knew him as a secondary figure in the story of the discovery of natural selection. Like most people, I knew Darwin a lot better. Russell was a great scientist in his own right and is a perfect choice for Shermer's treatment because he was an intellectual adventurer who wasn't at all averse to supporting "outrageous" claims, such as spiritualism.
Read this book.
May 30, 2011
Jam-packed with information about Alfred Russel Wallace who also descovered 'Natural Selection' though seperatly and independently of Darwin. Though both men had differing points of view on different parts of the theory.
October 9, 2023
Amazone
The new phrenologists?
I bought this book rather in spite of than because of the other reviews.... and when it was over I closed it with a sigh of relief.
While Shermer is certainly at times an engaging writer here he indulges in a rather peculiar form of quantitative psycho-history mixed in with the equally peculiar allocation of behavioural traits to birth order.
There MAY be something in this somewhere, but at the same time it smacks of the 19th century Victorian fetish about cranial measurments that Shermer's evident hero-mentor Stephen Gould took to task in THE MISMEASURE OF MAN.
That Shermer is so obsessed with his methodologies (he devotes a substantial portion of the book to 'how he did it") is a shame because it lessens and weakens his focus on his putative topic, the fascinating Alfred Wallace.
Instead of really delving into Wallace's background and early experiences we get a few pages of quick gloss intertwined with what frankly struck me as mumbo-jumbo about what it means to be a Younger Child.
This may be all very new Age & Hip right now, but I strongly doubt it will prove to have much in the way of scholarly legs.
Then there is the tedious re-hashing of Gould's speculations which other reviewers have already re-hashed.
Yup, they are old, they are trite, and can we please now move on?
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of Wallace's involvement with various "Spiritualist" frauds during the second half of his career. Here the writing really picks up & one has the sense that "aha, now we are going to get somewhere".
Alas, the excitement soon fades & the book itself fades out to a gentle glow at the end.
i really don't know how to categorize this text. It is far too incomplete for someone unfamiliar with Wallace's life & work to get a real sense of the man and it offers such an odd view on Wallace's relationships with friends, family, colleagues & rivals that one is left wondering just what was intended.
A footnote to a more general study?
Maybe, but i agree with the reviewer who calls for the need of a REAL biography that puts Wallace AND his science in proper context.
John Anderson
The new phrenologists?
I bought this book rather in spite of than because of the other reviews.... and when it was over I closed it with a sigh of relief.
While Shermer is certainly at times an engaging writer here he indulges in a rather peculiar form of quantitative psycho-history mixed in with the equally peculiar allocation of behavioural traits to birth order.
There MAY be something in this somewhere, but at the same time it smacks of the 19th century Victorian fetish about cranial measurments that Shermer's evident hero-mentor Stephen Gould took to task in THE MISMEASURE OF MAN.
That Shermer is so obsessed with his methodologies (he devotes a substantial portion of the book to 'how he did it") is a shame because it lessens and weakens his focus on his putative topic, the fascinating Alfred Wallace.
Instead of really delving into Wallace's background and early experiences we get a few pages of quick gloss intertwined with what frankly struck me as mumbo-jumbo about what it means to be a Younger Child.
This may be all very new Age & Hip right now, but I strongly doubt it will prove to have much in the way of scholarly legs.
Then there is the tedious re-hashing of Gould's speculations which other reviewers have already re-hashed.
Yup, they are old, they are trite, and can we please now move on?
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of Wallace's involvement with various "Spiritualist" frauds during the second half of his career. Here the writing really picks up & one has the sense that "aha, now we are going to get somewhere".
Alas, the excitement soon fades & the book itself fades out to a gentle glow at the end.
i really don't know how to categorize this text. It is far too incomplete for someone unfamiliar with Wallace's life & work to get a real sense of the man and it offers such an odd view on Wallace's relationships with friends, family, colleagues & rivals that one is left wondering just what was intended.
A footnote to a more general study?
Maybe, but i agree with the reviewer who calls for the need of a REAL biography that puts Wallace AND his science in proper context.
John Anderson
May 15, 2019
Menunggu dibaca. Menyelesaikan The Heretic in Darwins Court dulu. :)
February 10, 2015
In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (Hardcover)
I cannot help but wonder what on Earth the founder of the Skeptics Society is up to in deploying utter flim-flam to dispose of the problem of Patrick Matthew's (1831) prior discovery of 'the natural process of selection'. Because, in this book, Michael Shermer presents a bogus argument against long-standing accusations that Darwin (in 1858 and 1859) plagiarized Patrick Matthew's (1831) unique and prior publication of the discovery of 'the natural process of selection'. To defend Darwin, Shermer relies upon the well known fact that in all fields of discovery a breakthrough is seldom a zero-sum game, because discoverers usually build upon the earlier work of their precursors. But this is complete flim-flam reasoning in the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace, simply because both Darwin and Wallace DID claim ZERO prior knowledge of Matthew's prior published discovery. In other words THEY claimed it was a zero sum game! Moreover, both Darwin and Wallace fallaciously created the self-serving myth that Matthew's ideas had been ignored until Matthew brought then to Darwin's attention in 1860.
Hi-tech research methods have newly detected the fact that seven naturalists (among many other writers) actually cited Matthew's (1831) book in the published literature. Moreover, three of those naturalists were associates of Darwin. Worse still, one of the three (Selby) actually edited and published Wallace's Sarawak paper in 1855, which famously laid his initial claim to the concept of Natural Selection. Another (Loudon) edited and published Blyth's most influential papers on organic evolution and a third (Chambers) wrote the highly influential Vestiges of Creation. Knowledge contamination is proven. Darwin and Wallace are proven not to have "independently discovered" natural selection. Contrary to what all the "Darwin industry" textbooks say, Patrick Matthew is the only independent discoverer of his own prior-discovery!
Moreover, a wealth of new evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that both Darwin and Wallace committed the World's greatest science fraud.
Despite Shermer's desperate Darwinian attempts to bury Matthew in obscurity, the ghost of Matthew just bit him in the very backside out of which he wrote the flim-flam portions in this book! With no malice, I sincerely hope the wound will turn Shermer genuinely skeptic. If so, as a promoter of Skepticism I think he needs to address a most telling question - perhaps in a second edition. Namely: Can a Darwinist skeptically judge the claim to scientific priority for the discovery of natural selection by anyone not named Darwin? Surely the conflict of interest is too great? What else would explain the desperate flim flam in this book?
Skepticism is a way of thinking, not a camouflage club for credulous toadies.
I cannot help but wonder what on Earth the founder of the Skeptics Society is up to in deploying utter flim-flam to dispose of the problem of Patrick Matthew's (1831) prior discovery of 'the natural process of selection'. Because, in this book, Michael Shermer presents a bogus argument against long-standing accusations that Darwin (in 1858 and 1859) plagiarized Patrick Matthew's (1831) unique and prior publication of the discovery of 'the natural process of selection'. To defend Darwin, Shermer relies upon the well known fact that in all fields of discovery a breakthrough is seldom a zero-sum game, because discoverers usually build upon the earlier work of their precursors. But this is complete flim-flam reasoning in the story of Matthew, Darwin and Wallace, simply because both Darwin and Wallace DID claim ZERO prior knowledge of Matthew's prior published discovery. In other words THEY claimed it was a zero sum game! Moreover, both Darwin and Wallace fallaciously created the self-serving myth that Matthew's ideas had been ignored until Matthew brought then to Darwin's attention in 1860.
Hi-tech research methods have newly detected the fact that seven naturalists (among many other writers) actually cited Matthew's (1831) book in the published literature. Moreover, three of those naturalists were associates of Darwin. Worse still, one of the three (Selby) actually edited and published Wallace's Sarawak paper in 1855, which famously laid his initial claim to the concept of Natural Selection. Another (Loudon) edited and published Blyth's most influential papers on organic evolution and a third (Chambers) wrote the highly influential Vestiges of Creation. Knowledge contamination is proven. Darwin and Wallace are proven not to have "independently discovered" natural selection. Contrary to what all the "Darwin industry" textbooks say, Patrick Matthew is the only independent discoverer of his own prior-discovery!
Moreover, a wealth of new evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that both Darwin and Wallace committed the World's greatest science fraud.
Despite Shermer's desperate Darwinian attempts to bury Matthew in obscurity, the ghost of Matthew just bit him in the very backside out of which he wrote the flim-flam portions in this book! With no malice, I sincerely hope the wound will turn Shermer genuinely skeptic. If so, as a promoter of Skepticism I think he needs to address a most telling question - perhaps in a second edition. Namely: Can a Darwinist skeptically judge the claim to scientific priority for the discovery of natural selection by anyone not named Darwin? Surely the conflict of interest is too great? What else would explain the desperate flim flam in this book?
Skepticism is a way of thinking, not a camouflage club for credulous toadies.
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September 19, 20079/16/07: I might not make it through this one... I didn't realize it was part biography, part psychological analysis of Wallace's personality. Not to mention that the prologue has statistical analysis in it... as if I didn't get enough of that on a regular basis. But I'll give it a shot and see how it goes.
9/19/07 Update: I'm moving this back to the "to-read" bookshelf... I just can't stand the pressure of having it say "currently reading" when I am so clearly NOT currently reading it. Maybe in a moment of dark inner speculation, I'll pick this up, wanting to understand the psychological motivations of one of evolutionary theory's greatest champions and greatest detractors. Then again, maybe not.
9/19/07 Update: I'm moving this back to the "to-read" bookshelf... I just can't stand the pressure of having it say "currently reading" when I am so clearly NOT currently reading it. Maybe in a moment of dark inner speculation, I'll pick this up, wanting to understand the psychological motivations of one of evolutionary theory's greatest champions and greatest detractors. Then again, maybe not.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews