![]() ![]() Wallace gave up his view that natural selection could account for life. ![]() They are proved quite as well as any facts are proved in other sciences.” He said, “My position, therefore, is that the phenomena of Spiritualism in their entirely do not require further confirmation. Wallace came to believe in panentheism, in a universe permeated with “cosmic intelligence.” In 1876, he published Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, promoting practices such as seances, automatic writing, trance speaking, and clairvoyance. All told, a great cloud of suspicion hangs over Darwin’s claim of priority to the vital divergence principle” ( In the Minds of Men, pp. Brackman brings together good circumstantial evidence to show that Darwin was guilty of plagiarism. Clearly, there had been a ‘delicate arrangement’ to ensure that Darwin took priority for the theory and that Wallace’s name was dropped into obscurity as quickly as possible. Brackman presents very good reasons for crediting Wallace as the real father of the theory of the Origin of Species. “The facts of the Darwin-Wallace relationship have only come to light in recent years through the diligent efforts of Brackman. ![]() Twelve months after receiving Wallace’s paper, Darwin published On the Origin of Species. After this, Wallace’s name was dropped and Darwin’s exalted. At a meeting of the Linnean Society on July 1, they presented Darwin and Wallace as co-founders of the doctrine of natural selection, but they claimed that Darwin had devised it first. When Darwin and his friend Lyell received a copy of Wallace’s paper in June 1858, they rushed to go public with Darwin’s doctrine in order to give the prominence to Darwin. This was exactly what Darwin believed and what he later promoted in his books, and when this “survival of the fittest” proposition was applied to men it became the basis for the eugenics movement founded by Darwin’s cousin. Wallace’s idea was based on the idea that species are improved by “the killing off” of the inferior and the survival of the superior. The more I thought it over, the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problems of the Origin of Species” (cited from Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p. There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest. “It occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? An the answer was clearly that on the whole the best fitted lived. ![]()
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