In the world into which Wallace was born few people looked to their environment and history in "progressive development" terms. Nevertheless, it is well known that Wallace had become disenchanted with the rather static positions offered by both conventional theism and then-existing natural science well before 1858--certainly back to 1845, the time of his reading Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and probably even as early as the late- or mid-1830s. His enthusiasm over Chambers's Vestiges foreshadowed many of his later writings, as that author had argued that progressive development was the underlying theme of existence. Several investigators¹ have considered the origins of this enthusiasm, especially in its relation to Wallace's social views at that point. By the time he read the book, Wallace had long since adopted progressive ideas on societal evolution; as a disciple of the idealist reformer Robert Owen even as a teenager he believed that most of the wrongs of society could be eliminated through consciously (and, especially, conscientiously) applied programs of social reform. It was Chambers's view that evolution proceeded toward the development of "godly" beings, an idea that implicitly accepted the notion of progressive societal advance. His position on organic change, however, was primarily based on a Lyellian, uniformitarian, model of geological processes. Through this juxtaposition of approaches it was possible to imagine that generally acting physical laws inherently gave rise to progressive biological change--otherwise put, that the "general design" of nature depended on the operation of uniformitarian laws that sustained (and maybe even directed) what have more recently been termed "deviation-amplifying" processes.²

    In Chambers's perspective, in fact, were most of the seeds of Wallace's future synthesis, and it is thus not surprising to discover that the younger man continued to defend Vestiges into his later years.³ If we believe his reference to the subject in 1855,⁴ Wallace quickly settled on a means of transforming Chambers's "progressive development" leanings into the set of ideas expressed ten years later in that paper. His initial focus became the investigation of divergence of species lines, probably because the causal sequences involved seemed relatively straightforward (at least, as end results). But this emphasis--on large scale, deterministic spatial/historical relations--turned out to be something of a mistake. In his effort to avoid a first causes-based viewpoint, Wallace would very nearly throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. It was one thing to recognize a historical sequence in terms of its resulting species population-level patterns, but quite another to demonstrate how such a dynamic operated at the level of the lives of individual organisms. Two quite distinct ways of approaching the matter were apparent to Wallace as of 1845.

    The first was to imagine that evolution proceeded as a function of changes originating with the individuals themselves. Such was the approach taken by Lamarck, who had suggested that individual creatures might change over the span of their own lifetimes (in response to environmental pressures), and pass this change along to their progeny: this is the notion of the inheritance of acquired characters. This model had the virtue of logical simplicity; if the adaptational suite of each creature changed in such a fashion, then so too, of course, would the species population in sum. Unfortunately, there was not a shred of convincing evidence that nature operated in this fashion, either at the level of individuals, or as populations. Wallace was aware of Lamarck's theory, but apparently rejected it from the outset.⁵

    Conversely, the regulation of change might be mediated at the population level itself, with the results being evident only secondarily in the characteristics of its component individuals. Some earlier workers--most notably, Buffon--had espoused this approach (in Buffon's case, the initiating force imagined was a general environmental one), but no one had been able to suggest anything resembling a mechanism. That is, no one outside of the realm of theism. Creationists argued that the Creator had specially provided all the earth's creatures with precisely what they needed to survive. This was, in its own way, a theory of evolution (at least, of initiation), and it had the advantage of linking the state of the adaptational suite of both individual creatures and entire populations to a direct, utilitarian function: simply, organisms were created to fill a pre-ordained environmental role. Nevertheless, Wallace rejected this notion outright, agreeing with Chambers that the natural progression had to be self-regulating to conserve an intelligible relation of cause to effect.

    Given the guiding influence of Vestiges and the limitations of the choices available to him, Wallace opted for the secular version of the second of the two models. This immediately left him with the difficulty of conceiving of an action that worked primarily at the population level, yet left its imprints on the state of the individual organism at any given time. Eventually he would invoke the principle of natural selection to accomplish this; in that model, an environmental driving force selects those adaptational characteristics that ultimately serve a utilitarian function. But as just noted, in these early years Wallace was not impressed by the utility-based arguments offered up by either Creationists or Lamarckists. This raises an interesting question. Is there, in fact, evidence that at this point he had adopted--or was even entertaining--any arguments based on the assumption of the necessary utility of adaptational characteristics?

    There can be no doubt that Wallace would later become a very strong proponent of the "necessary utility" hypothesis; among other implications, this is the source of the "hyperselectionist" criticism often raised against him by detractors.⁶ Wallace himself freely acknowledged his position. In My Life, for example, he commented that "The principle of 'utility,' which is one of [natural selection's] chief foundation stones, I have always advocated unreservedly...."⁷ But he does not specifically say (either here or in any other writing, so far as I am aware) what his exact thoughts on the subject of utility were before the principle of natural selection occurred to him. This critical issue has apparently never been looked into in just these terms. Writers such as Beddall, Brooks, Kottler, and McKinney⁸ have put considerable effort into examining Wallace's views on populations and divergence; the general consensus is that Wallace looked upon the process of selection in terms of the replacement of varieties by one another, whereas Darwin envisioned competition as taking place primarily at the level of individuals. While I fully agree with their conclusions in this regard, I believe it is ultimately more enlightening to probe Wallace's position on utility, since it is this matter that more directly ties historical record to process in a way that he would have been able to appreciate as a practicing field biologist.

    Much has been made of the many years it took for Wallace to arrive at the notion of natural selection, but it may not actually be so difficult to understand why this delay took place. The most fundamental problem was not so much that he was having trouble identifying a specific mechanism of change, but instead that prior to 1858 he had sidetracked himself by flatly rejecting the "necessary functional utility to adaptation" argument. Directly to the point, in these early years he had been unable even to conceive of the notion that there could be a mechanism of evolutionary change that affected all populations in the same fashion, yet produced the result of individually and uniquely adapted organisms. The importance of this point cannot be overstated: he was at first unable to appreciate that an assumption of utility would be necessary to establish a generalization regarding the immediate causes of biological change; i.e., to explain how population change (though not necessarily the long term "accumulations" of change) was "self-regulating."

    To substantiate the view expressed in Vestiges that evolution consisted of a "progressive" succession of animal forms, Wallace needed to come up with three kinds of proof. First, he had to prove that evolution in fact took place. Nontrivial as this problem was, it was the easiest one to deal with--assuming, of course, that it was true. Second, he had to provide a model of how it took place in proximate terms; that is, he had to demonstrate those conditions immediate to the station and activities of living things that led to irreversible forms of change in their populations. Third, and most difficult, he had to identify not only these immediate causes, but the way his assumed final cause operated on them to produce change that was "progress." Again, he very quickly saw how to approach the first problem--through careful study of the spatial-temporal links between the present distribution of organisms and their fossil record. This model is admirably summarized in the "On the Law..." essay.⁹

    Before 1858, however, he had made no progress whatsoever on the second problem; indeed, given his peculiar point of view, he was probably not even giving much thought to it. Ostensibly, he thought an answer--of whatever kind--would be implicit in the solution to the third problem; i.e., he was approaching the matter from the "top-down." Once he had examined enough "facts" and had confirmed the spatial-temporal relations of geography and geology suggesting that evolution really took place, he set his sights on solving the final cause issue, in so doing avoiding for the moment the matter of immediate causation at the biological level--whose individual components, he believed at that time, were "unconceivable." At least this was the remembrance recorded many years later in My Life: "My paper written at Sarawak [i.e., "On the Law..."] rendered it certain in my mind that the change had taken place by natural succession and descent--one species becoming changed either slowly or rapidly into another. But the exact process of the change and the causes which led to it were absolutely unknown and appeared almost unconceivable."¹⁰

    In a perceptive study Scott Kleiner offers related remarks that should be noted here:

...Darwin's theory of evolution by adaptive variation is proposed to solve two problems taken more seriously by Darwin than Wallace in the initial stages of their respective searches. There are the problems of explaining apparent mass extinction and of explaining continued adaptation in the face of continual changes in Lyell's biogeographical world. We already know that Wallace was hardly concerned with the first of these problems. Wallace mentions adaptation only in conjunction with his first presentation of the theory of natural selection, viz., in his 1858 paper 'On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type'. There the problem's solution appears as a by-product of his efforts toward explaining the biogeographical anomalies and the replacement of extinct species. Before that time he may have found it expedient to ignore the problem in favor of other more tractable problems in biogeography, especially in light of his decision to reject Lyell's agent-teleological account of the replacement of extinct species... If several independent problems are approached at once, one has the option to temporarily shelve one in favor of seemingly more tractable problems. Thus Wallace could have excused attention to the problem of adaptation... One...has an option to pursue problems for which he thinks he has no satisfactory solution in favor others for which he thinks--even tentatively--that he has solved. Thus Wallace chose the replacement problem and Darwin the problem of mass extinction in the course of their search and neither choice appears to have put either person at a disadvantage..."¹¹

Kleiner's essay pertains mostly to the various logics employed in problem solving and discovery, and he makes an important point in this section of his work bearing on Wallace in particular, but he pursues it no further. Although evolutionary replacement may well have been on Wallace's mind, there is nothing to suggest that he had connected the mechanics of replacement to adaptive structures per se; to the contrary, in fact, it appears that for the moment Wallace's labors had locked him into a mode of thought in which utility was entirely a side-issue. The first good indication that he was not swayed by the logic of necessary utility appears in his 1853 book A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, in which he implies that it is futile to pursue the "red herring" of adaptation-based causality any further:

...In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found. But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life...¹²

Wallace goes on:

It must strike every one, that the numbers of birds and insects of different groups, having scarcely any resemblance to each other, which yet feed on the same food and inhabit the same localities, cannot have been so differently constructed and adorned for that purpose alone. Thus the goat-suckers, the swallows, the tyrant flycatchers, and the jacamars, all use the same kind of food, and procure it in the same manner: they all capture insects on the wing, yet how entirely different is the structure and the whole appearance of these birds! The swallows, with their powerful wings, are almost entirely inhabitants of the air; the goat-suckers, nearly allied to them, but of a much weaker structure, and with largely developed eyes, are semi-nocturnal birds, sometimes flying in the evening in company with the swallows, but most frequently settling on the ground, seizing their prey by short flights from it, and then returning to the same spot. The fly-catchers are strong-legged, but short-winged birds, which can perch, but cannot fly with the ease of the swallows: they generally seat themselves on a bare tree, and from it watch for any insects which may come within reach of a short swoop, and which their broad bills and wide gape enable them to seize. But with the jacamars this is not the case: their bills are long and pointed--in fact, a weak kingfisher's bill--yet they have similar habits to the preceding: they sit on branches in open parts of the forest, from thence flying after insects, which they catch on the wing, and then return to their former station to devour them.. Then there are the trogons, with a strong serrated bill, which have similar habits; and the little humming-birds, though they generally procure insects from the flowers, often take them on the wing, like any other fissirostral bird.

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron? Yet they may be seen side by side, picking up the same food from the shallow water on the beach; and on opening their stomachs, we find the same little crustacea and shell-fish in them all. Then among the fruit-eating birds, there are pigeons, parrots, toucans, and chatterers,--families as distinct and widely separated as possible,--which yet may be often seen feeding all together on the same tree; for in the forests of South America, certain fruits are favourites with almost every kind of fruit-eating bird. It has been assumed by some writers on Natural History, that every wild fruit is the food of some bird or animal, and that the varied forms and structure of their mouths may be necessitated by the peculiar character of the fruits they are to feed on; but there is more of imagination than fact in this statement: the number of wild fruits furnishing food for birds is very limited, and the birds of the most varied structure and of every size will be found visiting the same tree.¹³

    This is a very suggestive discussion. It can only be interpreted as disapproving of the notion of there being one-to-one cause and effect between particular adaptations and particular evolutionary lineages and, secondarily, between particular environmental influences and particular adaptations. He was thus avoiding any understanding that would force him into accepting predestination--a reasonable precaution actually, were it not for the problem that it also prevented him from recognizing how reality might be self-organizing in a manner superseding simple causal sequences.

    Note that the "principle" to which Wallace alludes in the passage reproduced above was most probably envisioned as extending beyond the concepts set out in "On the Law..." Surely, he realized even then that the "law" later expressed in that paper was incapable of doing more than stating the essential results of the species divergence process in time and space. Here, only, was a description of continuity of effects. This distinction was recognized even in Wallace's own time: Consider the following comments from a period review of On the Origin of Species by William Hopkins:

"We may instance another case, which has more the character of a geometrical generalization than of a physical theory. We allude to Mr. Wallace's views respecting the law which has regulated the introduction of new species... Mr. Wallace has put forth this view in a clear and striking manner, so far as it is represented as a generalization of observed facts, which show a juxtaposition in time and space of allied species; but to convert it into a physical theory in the proper sense of the expression, some physical cause should be assigned, from the action of which this law of the phenomena would result. But there is no allusion to such cause. And therefore it is that we cannot approve of the assertions that the most singular peculiarities of anatomical structure are explained by it, and that many of the most important facts of nature are almost as necessary deductions from it, as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation..."¹⁴

    Browne (1983)¹⁵ discusses this matter in some detail in the context of Wallace's developing thoughts on the relationship between species and varieties. She emphasizes how Wallace's uniformitarian approach took the geologist Charles Lyell by surprise (wedding as it did transmutationist ideas to gradual environmental changes), and how Wallace had engaged himself in a study of species and varieties which would so interest Darwin. But she doesn't recognize how much these studies were working at cross-purposes to one another; again, it is one matter to demonstrate the fact of evolution, and quite another to explain how it produces the details of adaptation that contribute to its own unfolding. Note Wallace's statement to this effect in My Life:

[The] title [of the paper] was "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species," which law was briefly stated (at the end) as follows: "Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely-allied species." This clearly pointed to some kind of evolution. It suggested the when and the where of its occurrence, and that it could only be through natural generation, as was also suggested in the Vestiges; but the how was still a secret only to be penetrated some years later.¹⁶

My interpretation of Wallace's basic strategy during this period is thus that he was making an effort to identify a kind of global regulation that engendered such continuities of effects: those evident both in the emergence of species from varieties, and as species lines whose trace through time could be viewed in the fossil record. The several facets of this effort are best viewed in discussion appearing in one of his least-noticed writings from this period.

    It had always been one of Wallace's priorities in travelling to the Malay Archipelago to conduct field studies of the orangutan. In 1855, while collecting in Sarawak, he got his chance.¹⁷ During this period he sent in several reports that commented on the systematics and behavior of the species. One of these was the early 1856 essay "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan of Borneo," which includes the following interesting remarks:

Naturalists are too apt to imagine, when they cannot discover, a use for everything in nature: they are not even content to let "beauty" be a sufficient use, but hunt after some purpose to which even that can be applied by the animal itself, as if one of the noblest and most refining parts of man's nature, the love of beauty for its own sake, would not be perceptible also in the works of a Supreme Creator.

The separate species of which the organic world consists being parts of a whole, we must suppose some dependence of each upon all; some general design which has determined the details, quite independently of individual necessities. We look upon the anomalies, the eccentricities, the exaggerated or diminished development of certain parts, as indications of a general system of nature, by a careful study of which we may learn much that is at present hidden from us...¹⁸

Expressed in these words are thoughts that would be fully mature in Wallace's mind only by the mid-1860s. The first and more straightforward concept, that there exists a "general design which has determined the details, quite independently of individual necessities," reflects, simultaneously, (1) Wallace's rejection of the idea that first causes exist "for any and every special effect in the universe," and (2) his acceptance that there yet existed a confining "general design." At that point, however, he seemingly anticipated that the "general design" could be understood to account for all specifics of diversification and adaptation in a manner similar to the way Newtonian physics accounted for all individual gravitational relationships in the heavens; i.e., by specifying antecedent relationships, but not specific outcomes. Wallace might have been adverse to first causes, but he had no such qualms over accepting the possibility, or likelihood, of final causes.

    Also contained in the passage presented above is the germ of the idea that man's love of beauty should itself be perceptible as a work of the "Supreme Creator." The "Supreme Creator" is thereby viewed as being both: (1) further removed from the proximate cause of each modification than was assumed by Creationists; and (2) more encompassing in its operation than were it merely subservient to the immediate material needs and/or conscious desires of each individual organism--i.e., both the material structure of lower organisms and the conscious/emotional faculties of higher ones fell within its influence, whether such influence could be perceived as operating or not. Wallace may merely be trying to dramatize a point here in his deliberate reference to a "Supreme Creator," but the implication, allegorical or not, is that there are causes further removed from the immediate results of nature than those that can be expressed in proximate terms alone.

    At least as early as 1856, therefore, Wallace was arguing that the "general design" of observable nature called for a model of its productions recognizing not merely the place of material things within it, but: (1) man's emotional and intellectual response to material things, and (2) the possibility of higher causes altogether. And, although he was ready to accept that we might be ignorant of the greater forces that were at work, he was not willing to grant that such forces were necessarily unsystematic in their enaction (in particular, as the product of unpredictable Godly "first causes").

    By now, Wallace was so sure that the necessary utility argument was an explanatory dead-end that he incorporated the following comments into the essay:

...Do you mean to assert, then, some of my readers will indignantly ask, that this animal, or any animal, is provided with organs which are of no use to it? Yes, we reply, we do mean to assert that many animals are provided with organs and appendages which serve no material or physical purpose. The extraordinary excrescences of many insects, the fantastic and many-coloured plumes which adorn certain birds, the excessively developed horns in some of the antelopes, the colours and infinitely modified forms of many flower-petals, are all cases for an explanation of which we must look to some general principle far more recondite than a simple relation to the necessities of the individual. We conceive it to be a most erroneous, a most contracted view of the organic world, to believe that every part of an animal or of a plant exists solely for some material and physical use to the individual--to believe that all the beauty, all the infinite combinations and changes of form and structure should have the sole purpose and end of enabling each animal to support its existence--to believe, in fact, that we know the one sole end and purpose of every modification that exists in organic change, and to refuse to recognize the possibility of there being any other. Naturalists are too apt to imagine, when they cannot discover, a use for everything in nature...

...we believe that the constant practice of imputing, right or wrong, some use to the individual, of every part of its structure, and even of inculcating the doctrine that every modification exists solely for some such use, is an error fatal to our complete appreciation of all the variety, the beauty, and the harmony of the organic world...¹⁹

In these words we witness in a rather direct fashion Wallace's desire to convey the notion that adaptations are neither necessarily of use to organisms, nor present for reasons of fulfilling some prior purpose. This comes at a point only two years before he authored the Ternate essay.

    Wallace counts the existence of rudimentary (vestigial) organs as a point in favor of the "nonuse" argument. In a note at this point in the commentary he refers approvingly to "the talented author of the Plurality of Worlds" (William Whewell), quoting the following passage from that work:

In the structure of animals, especially that large class best known to us, vertebrate animals, there is a general plan, which, so far as we can see, goes beyond the circuit of the special adaptation of each animal to its mode of living; and is a rule of creative action, in addition to the rule that the parts shall be subservient to an intelligible purpose of animal life. We have noticed several phenomena in the animal kingdom, where parts and features appear rudimentary and inert, discharging no office in their oeconomy, and speaking to us not of purpose, but of law.²⁰

This was not, moreover, the only time Wallace invoked this kind of support for his ideas prior to 1858. A year earlier in "On the Law..." he remarked: "Another important series of facts, quite in accordance with, and even necessary deductions from, the law now developed, are those of rudimentary organs. That these really do exist, and in most cases have no special function in the animal oeconomy, is admitted by the first authorities in comparative anatomy."²¹ The notion that the authorities agreed that most rudimentary organs "have no special function in the animal economy" played into Wallace's argument quite easily: such organs seemed entirely inexplicable in the absence of forces yielding slow, gradational changes in organisms (forces so pervasive, one supposes, as to override the significance--whatever that might be--of those structures having no immediate utility).

    The example offered by vestigial organs (for example, the remnant leg-like spurs found in some species of snakes) may have been more important in Wallace's thinking than has usually been credited. At that time he mistakenly believed that vestigial structures were actually incipient creations rather than the remnant structures we now know them to be. Thus, Wallace would have viewed them as adaptations that were just coming into being, and of course since it was agreed that they had no function at that point, this would represent the best kind of evidence of a process that was secondarily producing outcomes that were not necessarily utilitarian.

    Wallace's eventual position on rudimentary organs seems to have later paralleled and/or influenced his thoughts on some other subjects. A particularly obvious example is the way he would come to regard man's entire biological, self-centered existence as "rudimentary" with respect to his future more enlightened state, as discussed in Part II of "A Defence of Modern Spiritualism" in 1874:

...The well-spent life is that in which those faculties which regard our personal physical well-being, are subordinated to those which regard our social and intellectual well-being, and the well-being of others; and that inherent feeling--which is so universal and difficult to account for--that these latter constitute our higher nature, seems also to point to the conclusion that we are intended for a condition in which the former will be almost wholly unnecessary, and will gradually become rudimentary through disuse, while the latter will receive a corresponding development.²²

Thanks largely to Darwin, by this time the true nature of rudimentary structures was known, but before 1858 there is no indication that Wallace was not applying the earlier understanding both to his appreciation of certain biological structures, and to human characteristics as well. Certainly, it would have been easy for him to view many of the higher human qualities as incipient phenomena: that is, as adaptive mechanisms that continued to emerge before there was any practical use for them. Indeed, in a psychological sense an ability might even today be treated as either or both incipient or vestigial, depending on how one examines the question: Is it always clear whether particular human mental abilities are "leftover" remnants from evolutionary predecessors, or represent processes that in one sense or another are forward-looking? On this basis it seems quite reasonable that Wallace put considerable effort into warning anthropologists to approach their subject with an open mind, especially as regards not assuming that all the beliefs of primitive peoples derive from uninformed ignorance. This is also a good part of the basis for his wanting people to take the subject of spiritualism seriously: mediums, assuming their basic honesty, might be the instruments of processes that were incipient, not the remnants of ignorant beliefs. This is also how Wallace dealt with the subject of witchcraft, as is shown in the following passage, from an 1872 review of a Robert Dale Owen work:

He shows us how important it was for the welfare of man that the belief in such phenomena should die out when it did, and leave us free to develope the doctrine of law, and to overthrow the very idea of infallible or absolute truth in matters of religion. All the horrors of witchcraft, and all the persecutions of priests, arose from the dogma of infallibility; for if that dogma had been true, persecution would not have been a crime, but a duty. The world could not reach the fundamental truths of these phenomena, or understand their real import, as long as they believed in the devil and in their own infallibility. Now, they are able to investigate the phenomena calmly, and reason upon them logically...²³

*                *                 *

    By the mid and late 1850s Wallace's years of collecting and observation were starting to pay off, as he had begun to recognize several instructive trends in the organism-environment interrelationship. For example, there was the way he looked at elements of the condition of certain island populations (both animal and human). His appraisal of the forces at work on the island of Aru is described by Brooks (1984) in a passage making use of parts of one of Wallace's in-the-field "Species Notebooks," composed in 1857:

During his stay at Wanumbai Wallace learned that surface water on Aru disappeared rapidly when clear weather replaced the intermittent rain that had continued since his arrival in January. [Wallace:] "We have had now seven or eight days of fine hot weather which has reduced the river to a succession of shallow pools connected by the smallest possible thread of trickling water. Were there a dry season like that of Macassar, Aru would be uninhabitable, there being no part of it probably having more than a hundred feet of elevation, and the whole being a mass of porous coralline rock allows the surface water rapidly to escape. The only really dry season seems to be for a month or so about October and then there is an excessive scarcity of water, so much so that in some seasons hundreds of birds and other animals die of drought. The natives then remove to houses near the sources of the small streams where in the depths of the forests a small quantity of water remains. Even then many of them walk miles for their water which they bring in large bamboos and use very sparingly..."

The developing drought appears to have focused Wallace's attention on the vicissitudes of the seasons, particularly evident in that part of the Archipelago. That seasonality was a continuing interest is seen in a field journal entry written during the prau's return to Macassar: [Wallace:] "The sky was continually cloudy and dark and threatening with slight drizzling showers occasionally, till we were west of the Island of Bouru when it cleared up and we enjoyed the bright sunny skies of the dry season in the western part of the Archipelago. Here, therefore, seems to be the place where the remarkable change of seasons occurs between the eastern and western districts. This difference however seems to consist rather in the gloom and dampness of the atmosphere than in the absolute quantity of rain, for the little fresh water streams in Aru were all dried up when we left while in January and February and March they were always flowing, the intervals of rainy weather being marked by heavy showers and the general temperature being higher. The dryest time of all in Aru according to both traders and natives occurs in September and October, so that though the seasons there are very different from those of Celebes and Java they cannot be said to be opposite to them. It will be interesting to trace the modifications in the various islands of the Moluccas and it is much to be wished that the Dutch government would establish simple registers of thermometer Rain and Wind in all the places where they have settlements by which in a few years data would be furnished which might enable the various anomalies of climate to be reduced to some dependence on general laws..."

...Both the fauna of Aru and its indigenous human population proved quite other than expected. Wallace had expected the fauna to be largely New Guinean in character but poor in species, as would be characteristic of a group of small islands separated from that large landmass by over a hundred miles of ocean. Instead, he found a richness of animal life, even in dense forest, that was exclusively New Guinean--species for species, to the extent that he could judge. The explanation of this virtual faunal identity was revealed by the discovery of clear physiographic evidence that the sea between Aru and New Guinea had been created by recent subsidence--recent in geological time. This discovery provided Wallace with a geographic situation of the kind he had sought since his Amazonian days... According to his theory, only a slight change in the organic world should be manifest following a recent physiographic change. The species of birds, mammals, and insects that he found in Aru were identical to those described for New Guinea, with the sole exception of the Ornithoptera. The Aru form was distinct, but minimally so, from O. poseidon, described from New Guinea. Observation thus confirmed theory. Wallace used these observations in Aru to provide the basis for a public challenge to the Lyellian theory of special creation, as well as an opportunity to present his own views of how organic change followed geographic change.²⁴

    And, in fact, in "On the Natural History of the Aru Islands" (S38) he rejects the idea that immediate conditions of climate regulate the distribution of existing species: "We can hardly help concluding, therefore, that some other law has regulated the distribution of existing species than the physical conditions of the countries in which they are found, or we should not see countries the most opposite in character with similar productions, while others almost exactly alike as respects climate and general aspect, yet differ totally in their forms of organic life."²⁵ He concludes, predictably, "It is evident that, for the complete elucidation of the present state of the fauna of each island and each country, we require a knowledge of its geological history, its elevations and subsidences, and all the changes it has undergone since it last rose above the ocean."²⁶

    Since Wallace was increasingly coming to regard the larger scale forces--geological change as opposed to climate--as having the greater significance in disturbing and shaping populations and faunas in the long term sense, it is not surprising that he also continued to demote the significance of individual adaptations in the process to incidental relationships. This shows up most clearly in his comparisons of insect size and color between temperate and tropical regions, for example in the 1856 essay "Observations on the Zoology of Borneo":

...I am in hopes, therefore, that this collection may give a true idea of the Entomology of this country... My Bornean collection shows that brilliant colours are by no means the necessary accompaniments of a tropical sun, for I doubt if, in that respect, these insects will surpass those even of Britain... there is a real want of size and brilliancy in the average of the Bornean Coleoptera; but I think we can show that this is also the case with insects from other tropical countries, compared with those from the sub-tropical or south temperate zone... The extensive collections of Mr. Bates on the Amazon show the same small average size of the Coleoptera compared with those of the Brazilian mountains, the Andes and Mexico... We may, I think, therefore conclude that tropical heat is not necessary to the great brilliance or size of insects, but that those of the countries bordering the Tropics are often equal, and sometimes superior, to those of countries situated nearer the equator.²⁷

Less than two years later, in the last letter written (and then published) before his recognition of the natural selection concept, he reiterates:

...To persons impressed with the idea of the prevalence of large insects in the tropics, my Macassar collections will appear most extraordinary; the average size is certainly less than that of our British species, and the colours not at all more brilliant... I believe that a careful examination of these will lead to the conclusion that there is no superiority of these will lead to the conclusion that there is no superiority whatever in the average size of tropical Coleoptera over those of temperate climates, and that in many groups the latter have the decided advantage.²⁸

...I have long been of opinion that there is no foundation whatever for the very prevalent idea that tropical heat and light have some direct or specific effect in producing the brilliant colours that adorn birds, or insects, or flowers. Here, in Timor, the birds are remarkably dull in colour; and I think a fair average comparison will show that even chilly England possesses more beauty among common birds that give the character to the ornithology of the country than this tropical island... On the whole, therefore, I cannot but believe that a careful investigation of the facts will show that there exists no immediate connexion between tropical heat and light and brilliancy of colour in any department of nature; and I am sure that on no subject does a greater amount of misconception prevail than on the relative beauty of nature and display of colour in temperate and tropical regions.²⁹

    Thus, local physical conditions apparently could conspire to produce the same degree of adaptation in physically separated, unrelated forms. His feelings on analogous matters are reflected in his other works from this general period as well: for example, in his discussion of what constitute useful characters for classification in "Attempts at a Natural Arrangement of Birds" (1856):

...in the Humming Birds and the Sun Birds... a mere outward resemblance appears to have been universally mistaken for an affinity. A similarity in size, in the prevalence of metallic colours, and in the slenderness of a very variable bill, has been taken to overbalance the most important structural differences... The Fissirostres are those passerine birds whose feet are adapted solely for a state of rest,--all motion being performed by the wings. With very rare exceptions, they never move the shortest distance by means of their feet,--a character which distinguishes them at once from all other Passeres, which either hop, climb, or walk almost incessantly. Such a peculiar oeconomy must evidently depend upon corresponding peculiarities of organization; and it is a remarkable proof of how little importance is the form of the bill alone as an index of affinity, that in this highly natural group we find every form of bill,--conical, toothed, hooked, serrated, spear-shaped, curved, and flat.³⁰

    Similarly, there is the "differs in degree versus differs in nature" argument in "Note on the Theory of Permanent Varieties" (1858):

...If, however, the two things [i.e., varieties] are of essentially distinct natures, we must seek a qualitative not a quantitative character to define them. This may be done by considering the permanence, not the amount, of the variation from its nearest allies, to constitute the specific character, and in like manner the instability, not the smaller quantity, of variation to mark the variety. In this way you define the two things by a difference in their nature; by the other, you assert that they are of exactly the same nature, and differ only in degree.³¹

    The notion that local environment had a role in shaping adaptational peculiarities, but not necessarily evolutionary trends, remained with Wallace long after the advent of natural selection, in fact. The influence of this line of thinking is most evident in his continuing allowance that certain peculiarities of adaptation were most likely relatable to direct and local--but subtle--environmental dictates. This position is best summed up in the first half of his 1876 Presidential Address to the Biological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the section entitled "On Some Relations of Living Things to Their Environment."³² Nevertheless, when he subsequently saw how Fritz Müller's discoveries regarding mimicry³³ explained many of these or analogous phenomena he practically gave up on this form of environmental determinism altogether.

    All of which leads us back to the earlier-posed interpretation that before 1858 Wallace perceived adaptation per se--and adaptations--as representing a result, rather than a cause, of the "progressive development" of organisms. Some more general set of influences had to be responsible for determining how new characters combined to effect "progress."

    It is my general surmise that before 1858 Wallace was not putting any of his money on the supposition of necessary character utility. He may well have believed (and probably did), as McKinney observed in 1972,³⁴ that adaptations "occurred" while species evolved, but that this association was merely correlative; i.e., derivative.

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    Wallace's belief that the "necessary utility" argument was an explanatory red herring must have been reinforced by his experiences with the native peoples he encountered over the course of his travels. In this connection it must be kept in mind, as McKinney and others³⁵ have amply demonstrated, that Wallace had been considering man's place in evolution right from the beginning of his attention to the subject. Although many of the activities of people in primitive societies bespoke adaptation forced by local peculiarities of environment, there were yet as many that seemed unrelated. There appeared to be little connection between morality and survival, for example, and even less between the latter and mathematical, artistic or musical abilities. He could only conclude that however evolution operated, it appeared to enlist adaptations/abilities that were in some combinations directly functional and in others not so, at least with respect to fundamental survival. This ostensibly is one of the main reasons for Wallace's great interest in the orangutan: he viewed it as an important bridge between animals and human beings in this respect. Judging from the comments in his "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan..." noted earlier, his study of this animal only served to confirm his then-existing thoughts as to the derivative nature of utility.

    Beyond the physical, biological, and human/social arguments in favor of the "general design" hypothesis, there was also at least one transcendental argument that Wallace was fond of bringing up. This was the matter of the place and meaning of beauty in nature.

    Wallace seemed to take considerable delight in his discussions on the subject of beauty in nature. He brought up the matter rather frequently; one related discussion from his "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan" was reproduced earlier in this chapter, but some further examples follow:

[quoting William Whewell in "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan...," 1856] ...And do we not, in innumerable cases, see beauties of colour and form, texture and lustre, which suggest to us irresistibly the belief that beauty and regular form are rules of creative agency, even when they seem to us, looking at the creation for uses only, idle and wanton expenditure of beauty and regularity? To what purpose are the host of splendid circles which decorate the tail of the peacock, more beautiful, each of them, than Saturn and his rings? To what purpose the exquisite textures of microscopic objects, more curiously regular than anything which the telescope discloses? To what purpose the gorgeous colours of tropical birds and insects, that live and die where human eye never approaches to admire them? To what purpose the thousands of species of butterflies with the gay and varied embroidery of their microscopic plumage, of which one in millions, if seen at all, only draws the admiration of the wandering schoolboy? To what purpose the delicate and brilliant markings of shells which live generation after generation in the sightless depths of ocean? Do not all these examples, to which we might add countless others, prove that beauty and regularity are universal features of the work of Creation in all its parts, great and small?³⁶

[from "Creation by Law," 1867] ...It is simply a question of how the Creator has worked. The Duke [of Argyll] maintains, that He has personally applied general laws to produce effects which those laws are not in themselves capable of producing; that the universe alone, with all its laws intact, would be a sort of chaos, without variety, without harmony, without design, without beauty; that there is not (and therefore we may presume that there could not be) any self-developing power in the universe. I believe, on the contrary, that the universe is so constituted as to be self-regulating; that as long as it contains Life, the forms under which that life is manifested have an inherent power of adjustment to each other and to surrounding nature; and that this adjustment necessarily leads to the greatest possible amount of variety and beauty and enjoyment, because it does depend on general laws, and not on a continual supervision and re-arrangement of details.³⁷

[from "A Theory of Birds' Nests," 1868] ...To some persons it will perhaps appear that the causes to which I impute so much of the external aspect of nature are too simple, too insignificant, and too unimportant for such a mighty work. But I would ask them to consider that the great object of all the peculiarities of animal structure is to preserve the life of the individual, and maintain the existence of the species. Colour has hitherto been too often looked upon as something adventitious and superficial, something given to an animal not to be useful to itself, but solely to gratify man or even superior beings--to add to the beauty and ideal harmony of nature. If this were the case, then, it is evident that the colours of organized beings would be an exception to most other natural phenomena. They would not be the product of general laws, or determined by ever-changing external conditions; and we must give up all inquiry into their origin and causes, since (by the hypothesis) they are dependent on a Will whose motives must ever be unknown to us. But, strange to say, no sooner do we begin to examine and classify the colours of natural objects, than we find that they are intimately related to a variety of other phenomena, and are like them strictly subordinated to general laws.³⁸

[from "The Colours of Animals," 1890] ...Moreover, a large part of the beauty we see in flowers is independent of colour, and is due to the graceful forms of individual flowers, their elegant groupings, and their charming contrast to the foliage which surrounds them. We now know that much of the variety in the form and position of flowers is dependent on their own physical needs, the protection of the pollen and the germ from rain, wind, or insect enemies, and that it has been produced by natural selection acting under the limitations due to the fundamental laws of vegetable growth.³⁹

    Wallace's treatments of the place in nature of beauty are inspired and deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. In one sense, his approach to the subject is exactly akin to his understanding of the role of other characters: that is, that beauty in nature has no pre-ordained functionality (i.e., that it is not there as a first cause for the entertainment of the human race) and is instead merely adaptive. But it would appear that both early in his life and later on he assigned some transcendental qualities to this "merely adaptive" role. This is apparent in the selection produced above in which he quotes--by all appearances approvingly--from Whewell, the anonymous author of The Plurality of Worlds. Whewell almost seems to be endorsing a Creationist vision, but actually it is one in which, as he says, "beauty and regularity are universal features of the work of Creation in all its parts, great and small." There is thus the kernel of a position that something more general than simple first causes is to be considered involved. Wallace even at this point approved of this notion; consider that the Whewell quotation is footnoted to the following passage in "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan...":

Naturalists are too apt to imagine, when they cannot discover, a use for everything in nature: they are not even content to let "beauty" be a sufficient use, but hunt after some purpose to which even that can be applied by the animal itself, as if one of the noblest and most refining parts of man's nature, the love of beauty for its own sake, would not be perceptible also in the works of a Supreme Creator.⁴⁰

Again, this is indicative of Wallace's belief at that point that adaptations might have been largely functional, but not to the point of having been created expressly for their purpose. Some may have been more functional than others to the extent that evolution would retain them in the long run, but in either case their existence could still be considered "law-based." Necessary utility, however, was still out of the picture, because the only kind of "creation" that Wallace could imagine at that point that produced such an outcome invoked pre-ordained results.

    Beyond this, however, there is that element of transcendentalism in Wallace's vision, and it is one which actually changes little between this time and Wallace's later writings, including those sampled from above. Central to this is the notion that in the natural scheme of things adaptive functions include a "love of beauty for its own sake" that is adaptive in its own right. Wallace's position on this is evident in the "Creation by Law" excerpt given above, in which Wallace states that the natural laws of "adjustment" are such as to provide the "greatest possible amount of variety and beauty and enjoyment." This idea is also expressed in the following excerpts from his late work (1910), The World of Life:

...the use of colour to us is by no means of the same nature as it is to insects. It gives us, no doubt, a greater facility of differentiating certain objects, but that could have been obtained in many other ways--by texture of surface, by light and shade, by diversity of form, etc., and in some cases by greater acuteness of smell; and there are very few uses of colour to us which seem to be of "survival value"--that is, in which a greater or less acuteness of the perception would make any vital difference to us or would lengthen our lives. But if so, the exquisite perception of colour we normally possess could not have been developed in our ancestors through natural selection; while what we call the "aesthetic sense," the sense of beauty, of harmony, of indescribable charm, which nature's forms and colouring so often gives us, is still farther removed from material uses. Another consideration is, that our ancestors, the Mammalia, derived whatever colour-sense they possess almost wholly from the attractive colours of ripe fruits, hardly at all from the far more brilliant and varied colours of flowers, insects, and birds. But the colours of wild fruits, which have been almost entirely developed for the purpose of attracting birds to devour them and thus to disperse their seeds, are usually neither very brilliant nor very varied, and are by no means constant indications to us of what is edible. It might have been anticipated, therefore, that our perception of colour would have been inferior to that of birds and mammals generally, no, as is almost certainly the case, very much superior, and so bound up with some of our higher intellectual achievements, that the total absence of perception of colour would have checked, or perhaps wholly prevented, all those recent discoveries in spectroscopy which now form so powerful a means of acquiring an extended knowledge of the almost illimitable universe.

I venture to think, therefore, that we have good reason to believe that our colour-perceptions have not been developed in us solely by their survival-value inn the struggle for existence; which is all we could have acquired if the views of such thinkers as Grant Allen and Professor Haeckel represent the whole truth on this subject. They seem, on the other hand, to have been given us with our higher aesthetic and moral attributes, as a part of the needful equipment of a being whose spiritual nature is being developed, not merely to satisfy material needs, but to fit him for a higher and more enduring life of continued progress.⁴¹

It is apparent that by this late date (1910) Wallace's views on evolution had become explicitly teleological; but it is rarely appreciated the extent to which his ideas prior to his formulation of natural selection directly lend themselves to this eventual orientation. Nothing demonstrates this better than his thoughts on the subject of beauty, and especially in the context of the perception of color.

*                *                 *

    In sum, Wallace's pre-1858 efforts indicate that he had adopted a rather unconventional form of teleology. Following Owen and Chambers, Wallace had allowed the concept of "progress" to permeate his thinking, probably to the extent that he believed such progress represented movement toward a system-level goal: the development of higher, "godly," beings. Whereas the goal-centered Lamarckian model had dwelled on the immediate causes and specific effects of organic change, however, Wallace's tacitly denied a causal role to adaptation. Instead, he imagined the confining/promoting influences to be of grander scale, overriding individual effects through continuity of influence, just as Newtonian forces had supported the original consolidation of the solar system. In short, he thought the direction of the continuing individual "accumulations" of characters was being influenced by very general--and prior--properties of environmental organization.

    It is important to understand that neither natural selection nor his adoption of spiritualism would have any profound effect on re-orienting this basic cosmology, and Wallace in fact integrated these very concepts into several of his later writings. A particularly fine example is afforded by the following passage from the anonymously-penned book review "Darwinism and Design" (1874):

..."Suppose," answers Mr. St. Clair, "we inquire into the water supply of some town, tracing the course of the main pipe, and all the branches ramifying from it; and suppose that on one side of the town we find a pipe diverging half-a-mile into the country, and then being round and returning, like the winding of some river. We ask, where is the wisdom of carrying the water through this mile of pipe, when it might go by the short cut? Why waste the tubing and waste the time, and do what has to be undone immediately, in sending the stream to a point from which there is no course but to return? On the supposition that the town was originally built as it now stands, every street and square having the position they now have, and not a house more nor less, our objection is valid. But if we learn that the diverging bend of pipe follows the route of streets which formerly exited, and that although the shorter cut would now seem better, yet it would cost more to take up the old pipes from the long route, and lay down pipes on the short route, than could possibly be gained by the process, we see the wisdom of leaving the arrangement as it is, and we read in the existence of the bend of pipe a page of the past history of the town."

This, we say, is ingenious, and on the hypothesis that the Divine Being has no command over nature different in kind from that of man, may have some logical plausibility. But in the case of the water-pipes, the townsmen would have removed the tubing when it became no longer useful in its original position, if they had been able, without loss or trouble beyond what the thing was worth, to do so. The very notion of infinite power as belonging to God must be abandoned, if His workmanship is so severely limited as this comes to. The human architect removes the piles used in the construction of a bridge from the river-bed. It is an important consideration, however, which we put at Mr. St. Clair's service, that, but for the leaving of the pipes of his illustration in the old route, the architectural history of the town might have been irrecoverable. Creation by evolution has this advantage, that the procession of being leaves traces of its advance which man can read. So far as human reason can perceive, there was no other method by which the archives of the universe could be folded up and preserved for the instruction of intelligent creatures. If evolution has high intellectual uses which special creation would not have had, and if man is God's child, it is not presumptuous to pronounce evolution more worthy of God than special creation.⁴²

The last several sentences of this passage reveal a teleology of final causes imbued with the notion that progress is self-serving, and law-based. There is actually very little difference in this message from those conveyed either earlier or later in his career--for example, in the passages from "On the Orang..." (1856) or "The Reign of Law" (1867) presented earlier, or in the books Darwinism (1889) or The World of Life (1910) he would write later on.

    One way of looking at Wallace's pre-1858 activities is to suggest that he was searching for what might be termed a "geographical Bauplan." Perhaps as a function of his youthful involvements with trigonometry, mechanics, and geodesy (as described in My Life⁴³) he anticipated that the details of animal distribution would reveal to him, in their organized relations, those ever-present, uniformly-acting laws that conspired to guide evolution, much as the interrelations of the heavenly bodies had revealed the nature of gravity to Isaac Newton.

    Wallace's commitment to a search for a geography-based Bauplan--as opposed to a physiological/ morphological one--should not be puzzling. As I suggested in several places in my 1991 anthology,⁴⁴ in retrospect Wallace emerges more as a geographer than he does anything else; surely his interest in biological distribution patterns, travel, island life, glaciology, climatology, land reform, and social problems, among other things--not to mention his distaste for the study of anatomy and his lack of interest in experimentation--all speak strongly of the more global perspective normally associated with the geographer. And, in fact, all of his pre-1845 nature-related activities had had a distinctly geographical side: plant and insect collecting, surveying, land use evaluation, and informal study of the economics of agriculture. About the same time, moreover, he read--and was very favorably impressed with--several works containing strongly geographical themes; primary among these were Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle, Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Baron Justus von Liebig's Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology,⁴⁵ Sir Humphrey Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry,⁴⁶ Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, and William Swainson's A Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals.

    What Wallace's personal preferences might have been here are largely beside the point anyway: he lacked the resources to support the necessary formal training in physiology and morphology he would have needed to pursue laboratory-based investigations of particular adaptive trends. But surely this fact could not have been very troubling to him--it didn't seem the right direction for exploration, giving into, as it appeared, the creationist/adaptationist line of reasoning that primacy of attention should be given to the study of individual characters and traits.

    Finally, and very significantly, a geographical framework was less remote from an understanding of how human societal change took place. As mentioned earlier, Wallace was much taken with Herbert Spencer's Social Statics--especially with that writer's views on how social problems were created by injustices stemming from the then-existing conditions of land ownership.⁴⁷ Wallace was so taken that he even tried to interest his friends in starting up a discussion group concerning the work. As he later admitted,⁴⁸ Social Statics was one the main inspirations for his work for land nationalization.

    Over the 1853 to 1858 period, then, geographical determinism--as related to the explanation of both biological and social evolution--was a subject at the very front of his mind. Brooks⁴⁹ has commented on related matters; again, Wallace's own ideas at the time are perhaps best relayed through his discussion of Lyell's explanation of the nature of island faunas in "On the Natural History of the Aru Islands,"⁵⁰ and two years earlier in "On the Law..."⁵¹

    It would appear that during this entire period Wallace regarded species diversification per se as the distinguishing feature of biological advance. Adaptation was a derivative, or even incidental, process: a logical necessity, to be sure, to the extent that an organism wholly unadapted to its surroundings was a contradiction in terms, but not the cause of change.⁵² Yet it appeared that character states could be used to distinguish between varieties, and in turn that an understanding of the manner of emergence of varieties was crucial to an appreciation of the process of speciation. Thus it would be necessary, in one fashion or another, to relate his "law" of geographical/geological influence to the adaptive characteristics of individual organisms.

    But as the years passed, Wallace could not recognize any way in which the greater conditions of environment imposed an influence of the kind he was anticipating. Moreover, important characteristics of individual species of animals really did seem more relatable to immediate causal agencies. There was, further, the persisting problem of how to fit social evolution into the picture. Man passed on innovations--in the form of mathematics, art, music, moral teachings, etc.--and did so regardless of whether there seemed to be any survival value involved. How could organic evolution proceed in a fashion responding to environmental constraints and opportunities, yet produce adaptive structures whose persistence was not necessarily a direct and exclusive function of those constraints and opportunities?

    In My Life⁵³ Wallace retrospectively discusses his approach to this question in terms of what was, for him, its most significant immediate component: how divergence into "well-defined and constant species" takes place. Research by other investigators⁵⁴ has emphasized this aspect of his studies, and in those terms, but I am not convinced that this was the only thing Wallace had on his mind at that point. I should next like to continue on in a more general direction, emphasizing the role that the discovery of the natural selection concept was to play in influencing his overall cosmology.

Notes, Chapter Three