the official site of Michael Shermer

According to Greek legend, Poseidon’s son Theseus sailed to Crete to slay the monster Minotaur. After his triumphant return to Athens, his ship was preserved as a memorial. As the vessel aged, decaying planks were replaced with new ones; eventually, all the original timber was replaced. Philosophers know the story of Theseus’s ship as a classic example of the problem of identity. What was the true identity of the ship, the shape or the wood?

According to Greek legend, Poseidon’s son Theseus sailed to Crete to slay the monster Minotaur. After his triumphant return to Athens, his ship was preserved as a memorial. As the vessel aged, decaying planks were replaced with new ones; eventually, all the original timber was replaced. Philosophers know the story of Theseus’s ship as a classic example of the problem of identity. What was the true identity of the ship, the shape or the wood?

A more contemporary example may be found in the form of my first car, a 1966 Ford Mustang with a 289-cubic-inch engine and a speedometer that pegged at 140 m.p.h. As a young man high in testosterone but low in self-control, by the time I sold the car 15 years later there was hardly an original part on it. Nevertheless, my “1966″ Mustang was now considered a classic, and I netted a tidy profit. Like Theseus’s ship, its essence — its “Mustangness” — was intact.

The analogy holds for human identity. The atoms in my brain and body today are not the same ones I had when I was born. Nevertheless, the patterns of information coded in my DNA and in my neural memories are still those of Michael Shermer. The human essence, the soul, is more than a pile of parts — it is a pattern of information.

As far as we know, there is no way for that pattern to last longer than several decades, a century or so at most. So until a technology can copy a human pattern into a more durable medium (silicon chips perhaps?), it appears that when we die our pattern is lost. Scientific skepticism suggests that there is no afterlife, and religion requires a leap of faith greater than many of us wish to make.

Whether there is an afterlife or not, we must live as if this is all there is. Our lives, our families, our friends, our communities (and how we treat others) are more meaningful when every day, every moment, every relationship and every person counts. Rather than meaningless forms before an eternal tomorrow, these entities have value in the here-and-now because of the purpose we create.

Provisional Purpose

In science, a fact is something confirmed to such a degree that it would be reasonable to offer our assent that it is true, provided that the assumptions on which it rests are intact. In life, purpose is provisional for the same reason — there is no Archimedean point from which we can authenticate final Truths and ultimate Purposes. In its stead, we have to validate our own facts and determine our own purposes. The self-correcting machinery of science corroborates provisional facts, and life itself provides the template for provisional purpose.

Life’s most basic purpose is survival and reproduction, and for 3.5 billion years, organisms from the pre-Cambrian to us form an unbroken continuity. This alone ennobles us, but add the innumerable steps from bacteria to big brains and the countless points at which our lineage could have died and we conclude that human beings are a glorious contingency in the history of life.

Humans have an evolved sense of purpose — a psychological desire to accomplish goals — that developed out of behaviors that were selected for because they were good for the individual or the group. The desire to behave in purposeful ways is an evolved trait; purpose is in our nature. And with brains big enough to discover and define purpose in symbolic ways that are inconceivable to millions of preceding and coexisting species, we humans are unique.

The Purpose Pyramid

With provisional purpose we define our goals, but there is an inherent structure to the human condition that helps delimit our search. By combining psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and ethicist Peter Singer’s expanding circle of sentiments, one can depict the 1.5 million years over which such drives and sentiments evolved among humans and our social-primate ancestors. At the bottom of the pyramid, the individual’s needs for survival and reproduction — food, drink, safety and sex — are met through the family, extended family and community. Moving up the pyramid, psychosocial needs — security, bonding, socialization, affiliation, acceptance and affection — have evolved to aid and reinforce cooperation and altruism, traits that benefit individuals and the group. About 35,000 years ago, social groups grew larger and cultural selection began to take precedence over natural selection. The natural progression of this upwards trend is to perceive societies as part of the human species and the human species as part of the biosphere.

The width of the pyramid at each level reflects the degree to which purposeful sentiment is under evolutionary control. The height of each level indicates the degree to which purposeful sentiment extends beyond us. Thus, the pyramid shows that these two variables are inversely related — the more a sentiment helps a complete stranger, the less it owes to specific evolutionary mechanisms.

Selfish genes drive kin altruism, and social relations fuel reciprocal altruism, but to achieve species- and bio-altruism, we need to learn higher-order prosocial behavior. Achieving the upper levels of the pyramid requires social and political action. We evolved in a manner in which our concern for the environment was highly restricted, and global ecology and deep time were inconceivable until recent millennia — too short a time for evolution to expand the fundamental range of our purposeful concerns.

The Pleasure of Purpose

How can we attain deep-time awareness and global consciousness when our sense of purpose is grounded in an ancient evolutionary heritage? Thomas Jefferson suggested one answer in a letter to Thomas Law in 1814: “These good acts give pleasure, but how it happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.” Scientific research supports this proposition. Experiments with the “prisoner’s dilemma” — a game in which one person’s cooperation or defection elicits a varying payoff depending on whether the other person cooperates or defects — reveal that subjects adopt a cooperative strategy after multiple rounds, particularly when they can interact to establish trust. Usually, the most selfish thing to do — that is, gain the most in the long run — is to begin by trusting and cooperating, and then do whatever your partner does. Trust … with verification.

Our brains reinforce cooperative behavior. In one study by James Rilling and colleagues at Emory University, subjects that played the prisoner’s dilemma while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that cooperation activated the same brain areas as desserts, cocaine, beautiful faces and other pleasures. These responsive areas, the anteroventral striatum (the so-called “pleasure center,” for which rats will endlessly press a bar to have it stimulated, even foregoing food) and the orbitofrontal cortex (related to impulse control and reward processing), are rich in dopamine, a neurochemical related to addictive behaviors. Tellingly, the cooperative subjects reported increased feelings of trust toward and camaraderie with their game partners. In addition to dopamine, neuroscientists believe that oxytocin — a hormone produced during eating, breast feeding and sexual orgasm — plays a vital role in human bonding and prosocial behaviors. Can we use this knowledge to accentuate purposeful behavior at the personal and global levels?

Bootstrapping Purpose

Purpose is personal, and people satisfy this deep-seated need in countless ways. Among these are avenues by which we can bootstrap ourselves toward higher goals that have proven to be especially beneficial to individuals and society. These include:

Deep love and family commitment — the bonding and attachment to others increases one’s circle of sentiments and corresponding sense of purpose: to care about others as much as, if not more than, oneself;

Meaningful work and career — the sense of purpose derived from discovering one’s passion for work drives people to achieve goals so far beyond their own needs that they lift all of us to a higher plane, either directly through the benefits of the work or indirectly through inspiration;

Social and political involvement — as a social species we have an obligation to community and society to participate in the process of determining how best we should live together;

Transcendence and spirituality — a capacity unique to our species that includes aesthetic appreciation, spiritual reflection and transcendence through art, music, dance, exercise, meditation, prayer or quiet contemplation, thereby connecting us on the deepest level with that which is completely outside of ourselves.

My own journey up the pyramid began with falling in love, parenting a child and making the commitment to place family before self. The immeasurable joy generated by the most quotidian of family functions reinforces this commitment on a daily basis. Even with unlimited wealth, I would continue my career no differently because I have been fortunate enough to find a profession that offers more than just personal gain. As such, my work takes me ever further out of selfhood and toward global goals. Although I have visited many of the grandest cathedrals in the world and sensed a spiritual veneration of the highest order, my greatest transcendent experiences have come through the contemplation of nature in her grandeur, such as the view from Edwin Hubble’s chair through the 100-inch telescope atop Mt. Wilson. From that perch, one’s picture of the cosmos grows to galactic proportions, dwarfing any prior world view and yielding a perspective transcendent beyond imagination.

The Purpose Principle

Although purpose may be found in countless activities, is there a principle by which we may generalize its particulars? In The Science of Good And Evil I suggested two principles of morality. First, the happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness. Second, the liberty principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty. In this context I would like to suggest a purpose principle: it is a higher moral principle to pursue purposeful thought or behavior with someone else’s purposeful goals in mind, and never pursue a purpose when it leads to someone else’s loss of purpose.

Although purpose is inherent, moral purposes are learned; thus, the highest levels of the purpose pyramid require individual volition, personal effort and social consciousness. Morality and purpose are inextricably interdigitated — you cannot have one without the other. Fortunately, nature grants us the capacity for both morality and purpose, culture affords us the liberty to reach for higher moral purposes, and history brings us to a place where we can employ both for the enrichment of all.

Through natural evolution and man-made culture, we have inherited the mantle of life’s caretaker on earth. Rather than crushing our spirits, the realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and space elevates us to a higher plane of humanity and humility: a proud, albeit passing, act in the drama of the cosmos.

This excerpt was originally published in American Scientist.

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About the booklet

The Soul of Science is Michael Shermer’s brief statement of belief on science, the soul, and the afterlife, from a scientist’s perspective, and how we can find meaning in life even (and especially) without the promise of a life beyond this life.

afterlife, God, religion, science, soul, spirituality

Colorful Pebbles and Darwin’s Dictum:
An Introduction to Skeptic Magazine’s Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience

In 1861, less than two years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in a session before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a critic claimed that Darwin’s book was too theoretical and that he should have just “put his facts before us and let them rest.” In a letter to his friend Henry Fawcett, who was in attendance in his defense, Darwin explained the proper relationship between facts and theory:

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

There are few thinkers in western history with more profound insights into nature than Charles Darwin, but for my money this is one of the deepest single statements ever made on the nature of science itself, particularly in the understated denouement. If scientific observations are to be of any use, they must be tested against a theory, hypothesis, or model. The facts never just speak for themselves, but must be interpreted through the colored lenses of ideas — percepts need concepts.

When Louis and Mary Leakey went to Africa in search of our hominid ancestors, they did so not based on any existing data, but on Darwin’s theory of human descent and his argument that because we are so obviously closely related to the great apes, and the great apes live in Africa, it is here that the fossil remains of our forebears would most likely be found. In other words, the Leakeys went to Africa because of a concept, not a percept. The data followed and confirmed this theory, the very opposite of the way we usually think of science working. If there is an underlying theme in this encyclopedia — a substrate beneath the surface topography (to continue the geological metaphor) — it is that science is an exquisite blend of data and theory, facts and hypotheses, observations and views. If we think of science as a fluid and dynamic way of thinking instead of a staid and dogmatic body of knowledge, it is clear that the data/theory strata runs throughout the archaeology of human knowledge and is an inexorable part of the scientific process. We can no more expunge ourselves of biases and preferences than we can find a truly objective Archimedean point — a god’s eye view — of the human condition. We are, after all, humans, not gods.

In the first half of the twentieth century philosophers and historians of science (mostly professional scientists doing philosophy and history on the side) presented science as a progressive march toward a complete understanding of Reality — an asymptotic curve to Truth — with each participant adding a few bricks to the edifice of Knowledge. It was only a matter of time before physics (and eventually even the social sciences) would be rounding out their equations to the sixth decimal place. In the second half of the twentieth century professional philosophers and historians took over the profession and, swept up in a paroxysm of postmodern deconstruction, proffered a view of science as a relativistic game played by European white males in a reductionistic frenzy of hermeneutical hegemony, hell bent on suppressing the masses beneath the thumb of dialectical scientism and technocracy.
(Yes, some of them actually talk like that, and one really did call Newton’s Principia a “rape manual.”)

Thankfully, intellectual trends, like social movements, have a tendency to push both ends to the middle, and these two extremist views of science are now largely passé. Physics is nowhere near that noble dream of explaining everything to six decimal places, and as for the social sciences, as a friend from New Jersey says, “fuhgeddaboudit.” Yet there is progress in science, and some views really are superior to others, regardless of the color, gender, or country of origin of the scientist holding that view. Despite the fact that scientific data are “theory laden,” as philosophers like to say, science is truly different than art, music, religion, and other forms of human expression because it has a self-correcting mechanism built into it. If you don’t catch the flaws in your theory, the slant in your bias, or the distortion in your preferences, someone else will. Think of N-Rays and E-Rays, polywater and the polygraph. The history of science is littered with the debris of downed theories. Throughout this encyclopedia we explore these borderlands of science where theory and data intersect. As we do so, let us continue to bear in mind what I call Darwin’s Dictum: all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.

Using the Encyclopedia

One important tool in finding the right balance between theory and data, ideas and facts, is a broad base of knowledge tempered with balanced wisdom in making judgments about knowledge claims. Without the facts you can’t “judge for yourself” (as television documentaries often suggest viewers do) in any objective manner. What we hope to accomplish with this encyclopedia is a thorough, objective, and balanced analysis of the most prominent scientific and pseudoscientific controversies made in the name of science, mixing both facts and theory. The encyclopedia entries are written at a level for high school and college students conducting research in science and pseudoscience, the media looking for a balanced treatment of a subject, and the general public desiring a highly readable yet trustworthy resource to go to for the most reliable assessments of the most controversial and interesting mysteries involving our universe, our world, and ourselves. As the subjects span all manner of claims from around the world, audiences and markets from around the globe will be interested in reading and references these volumes. In addition, the media desperately needs a reference resource in order to quickly get their minds around a subject, book guests on both sides of an issue in order to properly set up a debate, and get “just the facts” needed for a soundbite story often demanded in the hectic world of journalism. Every newspaper, magazine, radio, and television producer and interviewer should have a copy of this encyclopedia on their shelf of reference works, right between the dictionaries and reference works on contacting experts.

This two-volume encyclopedia encompasses claims from all fields of science, pseudoscience, and the paranormal, and includes both classic historical works and modern analyses by the leading experts in the world who specialize in pseudoscience and the paranormal. The encyclopedia is heavily illustrated (and these subjects lend themselves to both historical and contemporary images) and each entry includes a respectable bibliography of the best books on that subject from both the skeptics’ and the believers’ perspective, allowing readers to conduct additional research on their own after reading what the encyclopedia’s expert author has had to say on the subject.
So as you work your way through this encyclopedia, either start to finish or, more appropriately for this genre, skimming and scanning and plucking out what is needed or wanted, remember Darwin’s Dictum that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service, as well as the words of wisdom from the Harvard paleontologist who has inherited Darwin’s mantle, Stephen Jay Gould, from a 1998 essay entitled “The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature”:

The idea that observation can be pure and unsullied (and therefore beyond dispute) — and that great scientists are, by implication, people who can free their minds from the constraints of surrounding culture and reach conclusions strictly by untrammeled experiment and observation, joined with clear and universal logical reasoning — has often harmed science by turning the empiricist method into a shibboleth. The irony of this situation fills me with a mixture of pain for a derailed (if impossible) ideal and amusement for human foibles — as a method devised to undermine proof by authority becomes, in its turn, a species of dogma itself. Thus, if only to honor the truism that liberty requires eternal vigilance, we must also act as watchdogs to debunk the authoritarian form of the empiricist myth — and to reassert the quintessentially human theme that scientists can work only within their social and psychological contexts. Such an assertion does not debase the institution of science, but rather enriches our view of the greatest dialectic in human history: the transformation of society by scientific progress, which can only arise within a matrix set, constrained, and facilitated by society.

It is my fondest desire that this encyclopedia will facilitate a deeper understanding of pseudoscience, and in the process illuminate the process of science itself.

—Michael Shermer

Bermuda Triangle
by Maarten Brys

The Devil’s Triangle, better known as the Bermuda Triangle, is the triangular area in the Atlantic Ocean between the Bahamas, Bermuda and the east coast of the United States in which ships and airplanes are said to mysteriously disappear. The absolute peak in cultural interest in the Bermuda Triangle followed the bestselling 1974 book, The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz and J. Manson Valentine, of which millions of copies were sold.

Some of the more imaginative explanations for the disappearances are kidnappings by UFOs and dangerous force fields originating in the lost continent of Atlantis below. The truth is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that area. The exact position and size of this devil’s triangle is somewhat disputed: certain authors say that it has a surface of five hundred thousand square kilometres, others mention figures three times as high and also consider the Azores and parts of West India as being part of the triangle. The rumours about mysterious disappearances in that part of the Atlantic Ocean already existed in the era of Columbus, but the craze reached its peak in the 1970s.

What were the claims? All stories about the Bermuda Triangle contain certain similarities: it is always about ships or airplanes that, although in the hands of experienced pilots or sailors, mysteriously disappear in a calm sea and in bright weather conditions. Usually, strange radio messages are mentioned to liven the story up.

But those who truly investigate the facts will find out that often these stories are transferred from one book to another, and each author adds a number of juicy details. As such, an unseaworthy ship that sank during a heavy storm is slowly turned into an unsinkable ship that mysteriously disappears in a calm sea.

The most famous example is the story of ‘Flight 19′, the crew of which is brought home by a UFO in Spielberg’s 1977 box-office hit Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Bermuda Triangle books tell the story of experienced pilots flying out to see, sending mysterious radio messages just before disappearing. The facts about this case, however, make an explanation rather mundane: inexperienced pilots, inaccurate navigation, broken compasses, bad weather conditions, and poor radio connections. The pilots got lost, ran out of fuel, and crash landed in the sea. The heavy airplanes sank to the bottom within minutes.

A year after the book by Berlitz and Valentine was published, the complete and partial lies that had been copied from book to book during the years (until they ended up in Berlitz’ publication) were finally exposed in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved (1975) by Lawrence Kusche. He demonstrated that there is nothing wrong with that part of the sea. He indicated that there are no more accidents there than in other heavily used sea routes and that all these exaggerated stories about mysterious disappearances were just the product of the imagination of a number of writers. Kusche’s book is still held up as a classic in skeptical research.

Slowly, the subject was forgotten. Only occasionally does one hear about the Bermuda Triangle, even though ships and planes still encounter disasters in the normal course of traversing the storming Atlantic. In 1980, Berlitz presented a couple of new “unexplainable” accidents, which turned out to be not so unexplainable at all, and only three of them occurred in the famous triangle. In 1991 there was a stir when one of the hundred airplane wrecks near Fort Lauderdale was thought to be the infamous 1945 Flight 19, but that turned out not to be the case.

References

• Kushe, Larry. 1975. Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books (reprint of the Warner Books 1975 edition).
• Randi, James. 1982. Flim-Flam! Psychics, Esp, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, ch. 3.
• Dennett M.R. 1981. “Bermuda Triangle, 1981 Model.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 6(1), pp.42–52.
• Stein, G. (ed.) 1996. The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

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About the book

A thorough, objective, and balanced analysis of the most prominent controversies made in the name of science — from the effectiveness of proposed medical treatments to the reality of supernatural claims. Is there any truth to alien abduction and cold fusion, recovered memories and conspiracy theories? Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, and his team of well-known scientists and scholars have created an open-minded and authoritative two volume set that gives evidence both for and against extraordinary theories.

Edited by Michael Shermer, editor and publisher of Skeptic magazine, this truly unique work provides a comprehensive introduction to the most prominent pseudoscientific claims made in the name of “science.” Covering the popular, the academic, and the bizarre, the encyclopedia includes everything from alien abductions to the Bermuda Triangle, crop circles, Feng Shui, and near-death experiences.

Fifty-nine brief descriptive summaries and 23 investigations from Skeptic magazine give skeptical analyses of subjects as far-ranging as acupuncture, chiropractic, and Atlantis. The encyclopedia also gives for-and-against debates on topics such as evolutionary psychology and case studies on topics like police psychics and the medical intuitive Carolyn Myss. Finally, the volumes include five classic works in the history of science and pseudoscience, including the speech William Jennings Bryan never delivered in the Scopes trial, and the first scientific and skeptical investigation of a paranormal/spiritual phenomenon by Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier.

Highlights

• Includes over 100 entries about pseudoscientific subjects like the Bermuda Triangle, handwriting analysis, and the health hazards of electromagnetic fields and cell phones
• Presents 35 case studies and investigations from Skeptic magazine about topics ranging from police psychics and recovered memory therapy to Atlantis and witchcraft
• Includes classic primary documents such as “Whatever Happened to N-Rays?,” Edward Condon’s “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,” and Benjamin Franklin’s report on animal magnetism
• Includes over 60 contributors including scholars, psychologists, trial attorneys, and others
  Highlights
• Contains descriptive essays about everything from the Bermuda Triangle and crop circles to Feng Shui, shamanism, and cryptozoology
• Includes investigations from Skeptic magazine of subjects like acupuncture, homeopathy, and witchcraft
• Features pro and con discussions of hot subjects like evolutionary psychology, race and IQ, and race and sports
  Includes historical documents such as Mr. Bryan’s Address to the Jury in the Scopes Case: The Speech Which Was Never Delivered

belief, paranormal, pseudoscience, science, skepticism

Chapter One — Giving the Devil His Due:
The Free Speech Issue

William Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law.
Sir Thomas More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the law was down — and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

—Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, act 1, scene 6

On December 1, 1996, the New York Times reported that Benjamin Austin, a sociology professor at Middle Tennessee State University, found literature in books on the Holocaust at his college library that more than implied that the Holocaust did not happen. Not long after he removed the leaflets from the books, Austin discovered that they had been replaced by more Holocaust denial material. When he looked into the matter further he came across the same literature placed in Holocaust books at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Nashville’s largest independent bookstore. The publishers of the literature, he soon learned, were the Institute for Historical Review and National Vanguard Books, a division of the West Virginia — based National Alliance. The Institute for Historical Review, in southern California, is the leading Holocaust denial organization in the United States. The National Alliance was founded by William Pierce (aka Andrew Macdonald), author of the famed Turner Diaries, an inflammatory novel about the bombing of a federal building, similar to that by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City.

Should the Institute for Historical Review be allowed to publish pamphlets, journals, and books denying the Holocaust? Should it be allowed to place them in public libraries and private bookstores? Should the National Alliance be allowed to publish potentially incendiary books, like The Turner Diaries, if they appear to offer blueprints for violence and destruction? At the heart of these questions is one of the most controversial issues any democracy must deal with as it attempts to strike a healthy balance between freedom of expression and protection of the rights of its citizens.

The Free Speech Issue

In the United States of America, the First Amendment protects the right of all citizens to question the existence of anything they like, including the death of Elvis, the Apollo moon landing, and the single-bullet theory in the JFK assassination. No matter how much an individual may dislike someone else’s opinion — even if it is something as shocking as denying that the Holocaust happened — that opinion is protected by the First Amendment. In most countries of the world, however, this is not the case. In Canada there are “anti-hate” and anti-pornography statutes and laws against spreading “false news” that have been applied to Holocaust deniers. In Austria it is a crime if a person “denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify the national socialist genocide or other national socialist crimes against humanity.” In France it is illegal to challenge the existence of “crimes against humanity,” as defined by the military tribunal at Nuremberg:

Crimes Against Humanity: namely murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

On July 3, 1981, for example, the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson was found guilty in a Paris court of defamation and incitement to racial hatred and violence, based on a law passed July 1, 1972. Specifically, the court ruled: “In accusing the Jews publicly of being guilty through cupidity of a particularly odious lie and of a gigantic swindle … Robert Faurisson could not be unaware that his words would arouse in his very large audience feelings of contempt, of hatred and of violence towards the Jews in France.” As recently as April 21, 1998, the journal Nature ran a news item on a brewing controversy in France’s national scientific research agency — the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) — involving “the revisionist activities of Serge Thion, a CNRS researcher, as well as those of several other scientists.” One of those CNRS scientists was Gabor Rittersporn, who was accused in the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung of denying that the Nazi gas chambers had been used for mass homicide. In response Rittersporn successfully sued the paper and cleared his name, but in the trial it came out that in the 1970s and 1980s he belonged to “extreme left-wing groups that favoured free expression for revisionists.” The article pinpointed the free speech problem for the CNRS, “which is split between the need to preserve academic freedom and a desire to discipline such individuals.”

In Germany the Auschwitzlüge, or “Auschwitz-Lie” Law, makes it a crime to “defame the memory of the dead.” This statute was the result of a judgment by the Federal German Supreme Court on September 18, 1979, when a student whose Jewish grandfather was killed in Auschwitz sued for an injunction against an individual who had posted signs on the fence of his house proclaiming that the Holocaust was a “Zionist swindle.” The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff:

In calling the racist murders by the Nazis an invention, the statements complained of deny the Jews the inhuman fate which they have suffered on account of their origin … This means an attack on the personality of the people who have been singled out by the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Third Reich … Whoever tried to deny the truth of past events, denies to every Jew the respect to which he is entitled.

Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia have similar laws on the books. These laws are all ambiguous enough to allow courts to interpret various Holocaust deniers’ activities as illegal. In December 1982, for example, Sweden arrested Dietlieb Culver Felderer, an associate of a leading Holocaust denier, Willis Carto, when Felderer accused Mel Mermelstein, a Holocaust survivor, of “peddling the extermination hoax.” Specifically, Felderer was tried because, as the Swedish prosecutor explained, his “obscene propaganda against Jews abroad and in Sweden is so large that he must have huge financial backing.” This was the first time such a prosecution had been undertaken in Sweden.

In Great Britain, the Race Relations Act forbids racially charged speech “not only when it is likely to lead to violence, but generally, on the grounds that members of minority races should be protected from racial insults.” In like manner, in Australia, the New South Wales parliament amended the 1989 Anti-Discrimination Act to include a ban on “racial vilification.” The sweeping scope of the government’s power to determine what constitutes vilification is remarkable:

The law invests in the Anti-Discrimination Board the power to determine whether a report is “fair,” and whether a discussion is “reasonable,” “in good faith,” and “in the public interest.” The Board will pronounce upon the acceptability of artistic expression, research papers, academic controversy, and scientific questions. An unfair (i.e., inaccurate) report of a public act may expose the reporter and the publisher to damages of up to $40,000.

In conflict with more laws of this nature than probably any other historian today, and arguably the most widely known Holocaust denier, David Irving was told by Polish authorities in July 1998 that he would not be allowed to film a documentary at Auschwitz. “They have written refusing even to allow me — an historian of worldwide reputation — at the site,” he wrote in an Internet posting. “It is an unprecedented ban.” This kind of censure is nothing new to David Irving, who has been banned from numerous countries around the world. While he cannot be legally prohibited from speaking in America, he can be so loudly shouted down that he is, essentially, banned. On Friday, February 3, 1995, for example, Irving was invited by the Berkeley Coalition for Free Speech to lecture at the University of California, Berkeley. The university allowed it, but student groups did not. More than 300 protesters surrounded Latimer Hall to keep Irving from speaking and the 113 ticket holders from entering the building. The police were at first unable to control the crowd, fistfights broke out, and Irving was forced to retreat behind his book table for protection until order was restored.

The event sparked a heated debate at the university and a flurry of letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in the university’s newspaper, The Daily Californian. Writing in support of the administration’s decision to allow Irving to speak, Robert Post, a law professor, explained that its tolerance did not mean “that we ought to have legitimated Irving by engaging in dialogue with him … [or including him] in the conversation of our community.” Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, opined: “The university is a guardian of truth. I do not believe that Mr. Irving belongs on the university campus except as an example of those who murder history.” But one student, Gurman Bal, countered: “Protesters have a right to speak also and show their point of view, but I think it’s wrong to prevent him from speaking.” A graduate student named Nick Virzi accused the protesters themselves of Nazi stratagems: “They’re the ones showing actual Nazi tactics. I was called an Aryan Supremacist. I told them I’m an Italian-Hispanic. Long live free speech in Berkeley, right?”

Should free speech live and flourish without restriction? Our position regarding the freedom of speech of anyone on any subject is that while the government should not be in the business of limiting speech, an institution should have the freedom to restrict the speech of anyone at any time who utilizes resources within the jurisdiction of its own institution (such as a school newspaper, classroom, or lecture hall). The Holocaust deniers should have the freedom to publish their own journals and books, and to attempt to have their views aired in other publications, as in college newspaper ads. And colleges, since they own their own newspapers, should have the freedom to restrict the deniers’ access to their readership. Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has noted that we must not confuse freedom of expression “with the obligation to facilitate that expression.” We must never pass a law that says Holocaust deniers may not publish their own literature. But we are not obligated to publish it for them in our own publications. The Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel submitted an advertisement to be run in Skeptic magazine (published by one of the authors of this book), but it was declined, even though the editors of Skeptic are in favor of free speech. Being in favor of someone’s right to freedom of speech is quite different from enabling that speech.

An example of this important distinction concerns the Holocaust denier Bradley Smith, who publishes Smith’s Report, “America’s only monthly Holocaust revisionist newsletter” (according to its subtitle). Smith has his own Web site (www.codoh.com [Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust]) and is the author of the widely distributed pamphlet entitled The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate. Smith makes it all sound so banal and innocent: “Students should be encouraged to investigate the holocaust controversy the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical controversy. This isn’t a radical point of view. The premises for it were worked out some time ago during a little something called the Enlightenment.” True enough, the Enlightenment did spawn honest and open debates on all manner of historical questions, including and especially religious, political, and ideological assumptions of centuries past. And the Enlightenment gave birth to the ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But the Enlightenment also shifted science and rationality to center stage and propounded that logical analysis and empirical evidence must take precedence over personal biases and political ideologies. In the bright light of open discussion the truth will emerge. Let Smith publish his newsletter, make his Internet postings, and distribute his pamphlets. But let’s not allow him to do so without a response, without using logical analysis and empirical evidence to show his arguments for what they really are.

How, then, should we respond to Holocaust denial, or any other radical claim? This is a question of strategy: Does one ignore a false claim and hope it goes away, or stand up and refute it for all to see? A decision on this point will be different for different people and different claims. We believe that once a claim is in the public consciousness (as Holocaust denial undeniably is), it should be properly analyzed and, if appropriate, refuted vigorously in the public arena. That is what we intend to do here. Specifically, we hope that our analysis will:

• Draw a fuller picture of the controversy for those who, because they are unfamiliar with the history of the Holocaust, might be open to the deniers’ arguments.
• Provide another avenue for people to learn about the Holocaust.
• Teach readers how historians use evidence to verify that anything in the past happened.
• Demonstrate how anyone can come to believe almost anything because of ideology.
• Show how professional historians have already been revising our knowledge of the Holocaust in light of fresh evidence or interpretations that more closely approximate the truth of what happened. The ultimate irony about Holocaust “revisionism” is that historians, not “revisionists,” are the ones who have been revising widely accepted views of the Holocaust and will continue to do so as new material on specific events becomes available.

Most Americans will say that they are in favor of free speech and that they believe in the First Amendment. They may even call themselves civil libertarians. But these same people, when their beliefs are challenged, may just as loudly proclaim that their challengers should be censored. We want, again, to make our stance clear: no one, in our opinion, is required to publish or aid in the presentation of the Holocaust deniers’ views, but we are against legal attempts to censor those views. Such attempts are what Louis Brandeis called “silence coerced by law — the argument of force in its worst form.” The problem was succinctly summarized by Thomas More, who would give the Devil his due for his own safety’s sake.

Let us pretend for a moment that the majority of people deny the existence of the Holocaust and that they are in the positions of power. If a mechanism for censorship exists, then the believer in the reality of the Holocaust may now be censored. Would we tolerate this? Of course not. The human mind, no matter what ideas it may generate, must never be quashed. By way of example, when evolutionists were in the minority in Tennessee in 1925 and politically powerful fundamentalists had passed legislation making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools, Clarence Darrow made this brilliant observation in his opening remarks in the Scopes trial:

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it in the church. At the next session you can ban books and the newspapers. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy, indeed feeding, always feeding and gloating for more. Today it’s the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After awhile, your honor, it is the setting of man against man, creed against creed, until the flying banners and beating drums are marching backwards to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the man who dared to bring any intelligence, and enlightenment, and culture to the human mind.

The Duty to Respond

Not only is it defensible to respond to the Holocaust deniers; it is, we believe, our duty. The Holocaust deniers have succeeded in spreading their beliefs in the media and in the academic world. They are featured on national and local TV and radio talk-shows, are invited to speak on college campuses, and have succeeded in placing full-page paid advertisements in college and university newspapers, including those of Brandeis University, Boston College, Pennsylvania State University, and Queens College. Some of these ads arguing that the Holocaust never happened ran without comment; others generated op-ed pieces by professors and students.

By also publishing a number of professional-looking books, monographs, and a journal, Holocaust deniers attempt to assume the mantle of respectability and credibility. Few would agree that the deniers have achieved their goal, but they have succeeded in getting people to discuss the question of whether the Holocaust occurred. What do they hope to accomplish? Some Holocaust scholars, like Yehuda Bauer, go so far as to argue that deniers are trying to create preconditions to deny the Jewish people the right to live in the post-Holocaust world. In a similar vein Walter Reich asks, “What better way to rehabilitate antisemitism than to make antisemitism arguments seem once again respectable in civilized discourse and even make it acceptable for governments to pursue antisemitic policies than by convincing the world that the great crime for which antisemitism was blamed simply never happened — indeed, that it was nothing more than a frame-up invented by the Jews, and propagated by them through their control of the media? What better way, in short, to make the world safe again for antisemitism than by denying the Holocaust?” This thought reverberates in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s book Assassins of Memory: “One revives the dead in order to better strike the living.”

Consider this: Some Holocaust deniers, particularly those with extreme right-wing leanings, might gain greater acceptance if the crime attached to fascism had never actually happened. Without the Holocaust perhaps fascism would seem a more acceptable alternative to democracy. Moreover, if people can be convinced that the Holocaust never happened, perhaps they can also be persuaded to believe that slavery is a hoax perpetrated by blacks to coerce Congress to institute affirmative-action programs. Once we allow the distortion of one segment of history without making an appropriate response, we risk the possible distortion of other historical events. For this reason, Holocaust denial is not just a Jewish issue. It is an attack on all history and on the way we transmit the past to the future.

Why, some people ask, do we need to respond at all to the Holocaust deniers? Can’t we just dismiss them all as a bunch of antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs? No, we can’t. Like all sociopolitical movements, Holocaust denial attracts a wide variety of individuals, each with different motives and intentions, loosely held together by a common set of beliefs and ideologies. The subtleties and complexities of the Holocaust denial movement defy such global labels as “antisemitic” or “neo-Nazi.” To resort to labels is to misunderstand what is really going on and therefore to swat down straw men.

We think it is time to move beyond name calling and present the evidence. Failure to do so might create serious consequences. Imagine a student who tells her teacher, “I read in a college newspaper ad that gas chambers were used only for delousing clothing and not for mass murder. How do we know these chambers were used to kill people?” If the teacher responds, “Oh, that ad was placed by an antisemitic neo-Nazi,” what is the student to think? First, she gets no answer to her question. Second, she learns that an ad hominem attack is an appropriate response. Third, she may begin to wonder if there is something to the claims she has read because her teacher did not (could not?) provide answers. We must be forthright and honest about what we know and do not know about the Holocaust.

We can no longer ignore the deniers, calling them names and hoping they will go away. They are not going to go away. They are highly motivated, reasonably well financed, and often well versed in Holocaust studies. Like most fringe groups, deniers may seem relatively small and harmless, but remember the adage: For evil to triumph it only requires that the good do nothing. We cannot remain silent anymore. It is time to respond. As the Holocaust historian Robert Jan van Pelt observed, “Academics who choose to ignore Holocaust deniers are like the crew of the Titanic straightening the deck chairs while the ship is going down.”

Some may wonder if a book like this does not give credibility to the deniers, in the same way the media might be accused of calling attention to a problem of which few were aware. We believe that the public has a “right to know” about a potential social problem and that it is the duty of informed experts on a subject to share their knowledge. To that end this book is not just for Holocaust scholars and historians, it is for teachers and students, libraries and research facilities, and general readers of all levels interested in history, the Holocaust, and the ways that ideologies and belief systems can distort reality and our view of the past.

It is our belief that truth will always win out when the evidence is made available for all to see. “It is error alone which needs the support of government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Truth can stand by itself.” The Holocaust as an event has never been only of scholarly interest. Dozens of movies and thousands of popular books have made it highly unlikely that we shall ever forget. But the details of the Holocaust, and how historians know that it happened as it did, are still relatively unknown to most members of the general public. This is why Holocaust denial has had a modicum of success (and more success in America and Canada than in Europe, where too many people know firsthand that these events occurred). The deniers know a great deal about the Holocaust. In conversation, it is easy for them to convince the uninitiated person that there might be something to their claims. To refute the deniers’ arguments, we examine Holocaust history, evidence, and methods; present an outline of how the science of history works; and in the process show how truth emerges through rational discourse. As Jefferson explained in his original draft of that greatest of all free speech documents, the Declaration of Independence:

And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Endorsements

Whether you have never had an interest in the Holocaust, or have always been passionately interested in it, or are sick and tired of hearing about it, you won’t be able to stop reading this great, gripping story.

—Jared Diamond, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for
Guns, Germs, and Steel

Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman provide the necessary ammunition to confront one of the basest phenomena in today’s academic world: the attempt to deny obvious historical facts surrounding one of the greatest tragedies of our time — the Holocaust. They show how any historical fact is verified and proven, and they deal with the specifics of the deniers’ falsifications. In so doing they are filling a vacuum — the need of people who are not experts on the Holocaust, and who have no easy access to the wealth of documentation about it, to answer those who, usually motivated by pro-Nazi sympathies and antisemitism, deny or corrupt facts.

—Yehuda Bauer, author of The Holocaust in Historical Perspective and Rethinking the Holocaust

An excellent and timely book that not only maps the unseemly quagmire inhabited by Holocaust deniers and other pseudohistorians, but also equips the user with the critical tools and historical information that, in distinguishing acknowledged fact from insidious fabrication, recovers the road to a civic dominion of common sense and common decency.

—Robert Jan van Pelt, co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present

Review

Toronto Globe & Mail (April 2000)

Holocaust denial has been much in the news lately as proponents find their work under investigation, or the glare of courts. First, a documentary — Dr. Death, by filmmaker Errol Morris — retraced the steps of Fred Leuchter, an American who earned his nickname by designing electric chairs for U.S. prisons. Leuchter filched bricks from the Auschwitz camp, then claimed upon examination that mass gassings could not have taken place there; Morris revealed, among other discrepancies, that the physical samples Leuchter studied had been exposed to nearly half a century of weather — a part of the would-be scientific equation Leuchter had somehow neglected to factor in.

Then in April of this year, a British judge dismissed a claim of defamation by historian David Irving against author Deborah Lipstadt over her 1994 book that named him as a Holocaust denier. Irving had long sought to establish scholarly credentials for his attempts to refute the fact that Jews were systematically exterminated in the concentration camps, but the judge ruled that “Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.”

Denying History, an exceptionally interesting study of both Holocaust denial and the deniers themselves, explores these conclusions in depth, and in relatively virgin territory, for the marginal men and women who invent this propaganda are often dismissed out-of-hand. Authors Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, on the contrary, requested interviews with the major players — and got them, along with gifts of documents and smiling photographs. Their approach to the deniers’ arguments is equally direct. Shermer is a professor of the history of science and the founder of Skeptic magazine — a publication dedicated to debunking scientific hoaxes using the tools of standard logic as well as the scientific method. By applying these techniques to the theories of Holocaust denial, he and Alex Grobman — Holocaust historian and founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual – have produced a unique primer for the study of history itself.

The book opens with a foreword on the need to refute, rather than dismiss, such arguments, because with their scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliographies, the Holocaust deniers look convincing to many people. Many have mastered a plethora of details, such as the temperature at which Zyklon-B evaporates, or the fact that a particular gas chamber door cannot lock — points of information that are hard to refute in debate and cloak the presenter with a veneer of unassailable expertise. From these bases in isolated fact, they draw generalized conclusions about the verity of the entire historical event.

But the authors have a larger pedagogical purpose: Using Holocaust denial as a case study, they attempt to teach the reader how to understand the difference between history and pseudohistory. How do we know that the Holocaust (or any other event) actually happened? The proof, Shermer and Grobman say, lies in the convergence of evidence — in the fact that a multitude of separate pieces such as documents, the confessions of the perpetrators, the testimonies of the survivors and photographs, all of them corroborated over and over again, point to the same conclusion. Shermer and Grobman argue that in developing an alternative explanation, it is not enough to extrapolate from individual elements, such as a missing lock on the door of a gas chamber. “[Deniers] must proffer a theory that not only explains all of the evidence, but does so in a manner superior to the present theory. This they have not done.”

Using just such evidence, Shermer and Grobman examine, then dispatch, the deniers’ claims, starting with the open-minded premise that each is an objective possibility to be proved or disproved. They also tackle that bugbear of the contemporary academy, postmodern relativism: the idea that it is impossible to know the truth about anything because all investigations are culturally tainted. The recent fashion of historical relativism is, they argue, “a seedbed” for pseudohistory, since if nothing is demonstrably true, there can be no standards for ascertaining the past.

There are other disconcerting threads connected with Holocaust denial: the tricky free-speech debate, for example, which is relied upon by the entire fraternity of deniers, including Canada’s notorious Ernst Zundel. Here, as elsewhere, the authors approach one of our era’s most controversial subjects with dispassion and fairness. They lay out the arguments for and against legislating hate laws (Canada and many European countries have done so, the United States has not), and reach the interesting compromise conclusion that, although freedom of expression is paramount, it should never be confused with anyone else’s obligation to facilitate that expression. (Zundel once tried to submit an advertisement to be run in Skeptic and was refused.)

In revealing the underlying structures of reputable historical investigation, and contrasting them with the ways disreputable history is built, Shermer and Grobman have introduced a much-needed element into the ongoing struggle to maintain the historical record. Denying History offers us tools for critical thinking that can be applied to all of the disputed past, and to the barrage of undifferentiated information that assaults us on a daily basis.

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About the book

Denying History takes a bold and in-depth look at those who say the Holocaust never happened and explores the motivations behind such claims. While most commentators have dismissed the Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs who do not deserve a response, historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the minds and culture of these Holocaust “revisionists.” They have conducted personal interviews with the deniers, read their literature, monitored their Web sites, attended their conferences, engaged them in debate, and even traveled around Europe to conduct research at the Nazi extermination camps. Uncovering a complex social movement, the authors go much deeper than ever before in not only trying to understand the motives of the Holocaust deniers, but also refuting their points one by one. In the process, they show how we can be certain that the Holocaust happened and, for that matter, how we can confirm any historical event.

conspiracies, extremism, hoaxes, holocaust, pseudohistory, pseudoscience

Epilogue: Psychobiography and the Science of History

In Darwin’s Shadow is the gripping story of the heretical British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace who co-discovered natural selection independently of his more well-known contemporary Charles Darwin. Utilizing a number of never-before-used archival sources that brings to bear new interpretations of this most fascinating scientist, best-selling author Michael Shermer applies his training in both the history of science and psychology to reveal the life, science, and personality of Wallace to unravel the mystery of his scientific, quasi-scientific, and non-scientific ideas. Shermer’s unique approach goes beyond narrative storytelling to analyze the science, culture, and ideas that lie beneath the life story, in what is a path-breaking approach to biography. Shermer presents the two major points of intersection and conflict between Wallace and Darwin, one so radical that Darwin accused his younger colleague of intellectual murder!

Chapter 5 — A Gentlemanly Arrangement:
Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin & the Scientific Priority Dispute

When the 19th-century British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, returned home\ from eight years in the jungles of the Malay Archipeligo in the Spring of 1861, he boasted an almost unbelievable collection of 125,660 total specimens, including 310 mammals, 100 reptiles, 8,050 birds, 7,500 shells, 13,100 butterflies, 83,200 beetles, and 13,400 “other insects.” In addition to collecting, Wallace also wanted to put the seemingly infinite variety of nature’s pieces together into a puzzle so that as a historical scientist he could solve the riddle of what his friend and colleague, Charles Darwin, called the “mystery of mysteries” — the origin of species. It was this combination of broad observational scope and penetrating theoretical depth that set Wallace apart from most of his contemporaries and led him to his discovery about the mutable nature of species and the interdependency of organisms in their geographical location. Wallace was demonstrating the practice of science at its best — the blending of process and product into an art form described by Sir Peter Medawar as “the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them” (1984, pp. 2–3).

The art of the soluble. Our understanding of how Darwin and Wallace discovered the mechanism and process of evolution helps us see that the fitful and sometimes quirky progress of science is more explicable as an interaction of steady historical trends punctuated by serendipitous flashes of insight or discovery. As Thomas Kuhn and others have demonstrated, the history of science is not an asymptotic curve of stately progress toward Truth and the unfolding of the shroud covering Reality. Rather, it consists of long periods of paradigmatic status quo, occasionally interrupted by shifts in the shared cognitive structure, resulting in a new and different way of interpreting nature. The particulars of a specific historical event, however, do not always fit Kuhn’s universal concept, as each is unique to itself. Because of the contingent nature of history, no two paradigms or paradigm shifts are ever the same. The history of the independent discovery of natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, and the resolution of the ensuing priority dispute, provides a case study in the scientific process and the interactive nature of contingency and necessity in history.

A Question of Priority

The matter of who was “first” in the discovery and description of natural selection has recently been “stirred up,” and has essentially remained unresolved for two reasons:

1. missing evidence in the form of the letter and essay from Wallace to Darwin in the spring of 1858 makes empirical resolution impossible;
2. the generally pugnacious zero-sum game (win-lose) model of priority held by scientific communities and the patent/copyright office, does not recognize the interactive and social nature of the scientific process.

It should be noted that Wallace’s “co-discoverer” status with Darwin is generally accepted by most biologists and historians (e.g, Mayr, 1982; Beddall, 1988). The question some raise, however, is this: should Wallace be given even more credit? Barbara Bedall (1968, 1988) and John Langdon Brooks (1984) have provided the best scholarly treatments of the priority question, while Arnold Brackman’s A Delicate Arrangement (1980) is an emotional appeal for Wallace’s case. Brackman suggests that Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, with Darwin’s knowledge (but not his direction), conspired to negate Wallace’s credit, while simultaneously boosting Darwin’s.

As briefly outlined in Part I of this essay, when Wallace was in the Malay Archipelago in March, 1858, he had a sudden realization that “there is a general principle in nature which will cause many varieties to survive the parent species, and to give rise to successive variations, departing further and further from the original type.” These departations eventually become new species, his theory of which gave Wallace a mechanism to solve Darwin’s “mystery of mysteries.” He jotted down his theory in an essay entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” and “sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin,” apparently on March 9. When Darwin received the package (assumed to be on June 18) he expressed his shock to his friend, the great geologist Charles Lyell (in a letter dated the “18th”): “I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short extract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.” On July 1, 1858, Darwin and Wallace were awarded co-credit for the discovery at the Linnean Society meeting, though Darwin’s name was listed first because of his having worked on the problem for so much longer.

Both Brooks and Brackman claim, based largely on missing evidence and therefore inference from tangential data, that Darwin received Wallace’s letter and essay earlier than the announced June 18 date. Brackman claims and Brooks suggests that Darwin might have fleshed out the missing pieces of his theory from Wallace’s essay, then feigned distress at Wallace’s parallel theory. Motive, of course, is virtually impossible to prove, but the chronological sequence can be analyzed. The strongest associative evidence is another letter sent by Wallace to Frederick Bates, the younger brother of his naturalist colleague and Amazon companion Henry Walter Bates. The letter is assumed to have beeen sent the same day, March 9, and appeared in London on June 3. The clearly-dated, post-marked letter (no envelope — the letter itself was addressed and post-marked), is in possession of the grandson Alfred John Russel Wallace. In the letter Wallace tells Bates of the seemingly incoherent diversity of insect coloration in the Malay, and notes that “such facts as these puzzled me for a long time, but I have lately worked out a theory which accounts for them naturally” (AJRW, l. 40). That theory, “lately worked out,” was the essay sent to Darwin, the original autograph manuscript and cover letter of which is missing.

A Delicate Arrangement or a Gentlemanly One?

Thomas Huxley’s son, Leonard, called the Wallace situation “a delicate arrangement.” Arnold Brackman argues that since Darwin had been working on his theory for 20 years, and that because he was an established scientist with a recognized role within the scientific community, when this young amateur naturalist appeared with a theory to match or better Darwin’s, Lyell and Hooker determined that if Darwin was not given the lion’s share of the credit, no one would accept Wallace’s theory. The “delicate arrangement” was, according to Brackman, as follows: Wallace was not part of the traditional scientific community in England (owing to his working-class background and lack of formal university training), and since he spent most of his professional life (thus far) outside the country, it was necessary for there to be an organized “conspiracy” by the intellectual circle surrounding Darwin to lessen the value of Wallace’s contribution. Wallace, with a working-class mentality, deferred to his superior (Brackman, pp. 1–96). Brackman concludes:

No matter how heinous is a conspiracy, the participants — especially if it is successful — are apt to develop a plausible rationale for gilding it. “I do not think that Wallace can think my conduct unfair in allowing you and Hooker to do whatever you thought fair,” Darwin wrote to Lyell. The message was clear: Lyell and Hooker bore historical responsibility for the cover-up. Darwin did not “allow” Lyell and Hooker to act independently. In this instance, he appeared helpless, informed powerful friends of his impending doom, pointed subtly in the direction of a solution, let his friends solve the problem by dubious means, and went along with the solution — claiming it, of course, as theirs (p. 78).

There is no doubt that the Darwin-Wallace situation was a “delicate” one. Any time there is a question of scientific priority the situation could be nothing but delicate. But the respect and deference shown by both Darwin and Wallace toward each other provides us with evidence that though the arrangement may have been a delicate one, it was worked out between the two men in a gentlemanly way. In a letter dated January 25, 1859, for example, Darwin wrote to Wallace:

I owe indirectly much to you and them [Lyell and Hooker] for I almost think that Lyell would have proved right and I should never have completed my larger work, for I have found my abstract hard enough with more poor health. Everyone whom I have seen has thought your paper very well written and interesting. It puts my extracts (written in 1839, now just twenty years ago!), which I say in apology were never for an instant for publication, in the shade (Marchant, pp. 111–112).

Wallace was equally generous in his accreditation to Darwin, as this passage from a letter written on May 29, 1864, shows:

You are always so ready to appreciate what others do and especially to over-estimate my desultory efforts, that I can not be surprised at your very kind and flattering remarks on my paper. I am glad however that you have made a few critical observations and am only sorry you were not well enough to make more, as that enables me to say a few words in explanation (pp. 128–129).

Darwin’s Surprise or Chagrin?

What is surprising, if anything, is Darwin’s apparent surprise at the receipt of Wallace’s essay. A clipping of a letter from Wallace to Darwin dated (in Darwin’s hand) September 27, 1857, clearly shows that Wallace was continuing work on the problem of the origin of species that he had begun with the publication of his 1855 paper (“On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species”), for which he voices to Darwin his disappointment in a lack of response: “[cut off] … of May last, that my views on the order of succession of species were in accordance with your own, for I had begun to be a little disappointed that my paper had neither excited discussion nor even elicited opposition. The mere statement and illustration of the theory in that paper is of course but preliminary to an attempt at a detailed proof of it, the plan of which I have arranged, and in part written, but which of course requires much [cut off] and collections, a labor which I look [cut off]” (DAR 47:145).

It seems clear from this passage, albeit truncated through deliberate cutting, that the only thing Darwin could have been surprised about was how quickly Wallace completed a “detailed proof” of the theory that did, in fact, parallel Darwin’s and result in the 1858 essay sent to Down in the spring. (The deliberate cutting up of letters, manuscripts, notes, and various forms of correspondence by Darwin was his regular, rather disjointed method of organizing his major publishing projects. When one requests the original manuscript for the Descent of Man at the Cambridge Library, for example, one receives a box filled with clippings, snippets, notes cribbed on the backs of envelopes, and the like. Darwin collected these and labeled them as to their source, date of receipt, the chapter into which they would fit, etc. The above letter clipping from Wallace to Darwin, and labeled by Darwin, fits this pattern.) But it leaves one to wonder what plan Wallace was working on that he had already written part of, since the 1858 essay was composed in the course of two nights in late February, a full five months after this letter to Darwin. Did his feverish discovery overturn the ideas he was developing in this 1857 plan? If not, what happened to this manuscript? If so, then why did Wallace not expand the 1858 essay into a longer book-length manuscript? One possible answer may be found in a letter written between these two dates, to Bates on January 4, 1858, in which Wallace discusses what appears to be this same “plan” or “work” (AJRW, l. 41):

To persons who have not thought much on the subject I fear my paper on the succession of species [the Sarawak Law of 1855] will not appear so clear as it does to you. That paper is, of course, only the announcement of the theory, not its development. I have prepared the plan & written portions of an extensive work embracing the subject in all its bearings & endeavouring to prove what in the paper I have only indicated. I have been much gratified by a letter from Darwin, in which he says that he agrees with “almost every word” of my paper. He is now preparing for publication his great work on Species & Varieties, for which he has been collecting information 20 years. He may save me the trouble of writing the 2nd part of my hypothesis, by proving that there is no difference in nature between the origin of species & varieties, or he may give me trouble by arriving at another conclusion, but at all events his facts will be given for me to work upon. Your collections and my own will furnish most valuable material to illustrate & prove the universal applicability of the hypothesis.

Here a plausible scenario presents itself. Wallace, after years of collecting and observing, formed a hypothesis — “On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species” (the 1855 “Sarawak Law”). Lacking further supportive evidence for a mechanism to drive evolutionary change, coupled to the fact that he perceived his paper to be largely ignored by the scientific community, Wallace continued about his business of naturalist in relative anonymity, but never abandoned his ultimate quest to understand the origin of species. He knew that Darwin had been working on the problem for 20 years and was currently writing his “big species book” (originally entitled Natural Selection, later changed to Origin of Species). Wallace, in no position (either logistically in his travels, or scientifically in his research) to complete a work thorough enough to be received positively, decided to sit back and wait to see what Darwin would produce. If Darwin was successful (that is, if Wallace agreed with his arguments), then Wallace would have no need to repeat what had already been done (“He may save me the trouble of writing the second part of my hypothesis”). If Darwin was not successful (“he may give me trouble by arriving at another conclusion”), then Wallace could respond accordingly with his own theory and data. It seems clear that Darwin’s Origin satisfied the first set of criteria, and Wallace never did write his own “big species book” until he published Darwinism in 1889, the title of which indicates his own leanings on the priority question.

The September 27, 1857, clipping indicates that, if anything, Darwin should have been a little chagrined instead of surprised, having already been warned by Lyell that he should publish. Darwin’s response to this portent indicates his dislike of publishing solely for the sake of priority, yet stating his own fear of being forestalled. On May 3, 1856, Darwin wrote to Lyell: “I rather hate the idea of writing for priority, yet I certainly should be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrine before me” (F. Darwin, 1887, p. 68). His hand forced by Wallace in 1858, Darwin found a solution to his apparent dilemma (i.e., publish for priority sake only, or be completely scooped) by writing a book that was midway between a brief sketch and a magnum opus — The Origin of Species.

What We Shall Never Know

With the primary evidence missing in this historical mystery, we can only speculate on what really happened at Down. The extreme interpretation of a conspiratorial cover-up is not supported by the evidence. If Darwin were going to rig (or allow to be rigged) the editorial presentation of the papers to award him priority; or worse, plagiarize from Wallace certain needed ideas (such as the divergence of species, as Brooks suggests), why announce the arrival of Wallace’s essay and submit it for publication in the first place? Why not either just take what was needed, or, if Wallace’s essay added nothing new to the theory, just destroy the essay and letter and blame the loss on an inefficient postal service, or the mishandling of his mail at Down, or whatever? If one is going to accuse Darwin of such devious finagling as delicate arrangements or plagiarization, then would not the same guileful and scheming personality think of complete elimination of Wallace’s essay as a successful strategy?

There is no question that much confusion surrounds the critical period of the spring and summer of 1858, and Brooks’s epilogue, “What Really happened at Down House?,” draws the pieces together and he wisely concludes: “The simple answer is that no one knows” (p. 258). But then Brooks proceeds “to sketch an alternative reconstruction” in which he concludes that Darwin’s letter to Lyell, dated “Down, 18th” and assumed by most to be June 18, was “probably written May 18, 1858” but “it is my view, however, that Darwin did not mail the letter then. Probably after much soul-searching, he restudied Wallace’s Ternate manuscript and, with recourse again to Wallace’s 1855 paper, wrote the material on [divergence] and inserted it into the text of his chapter on ‘Natural Selection’” (pp. 261–263).

Brooks’s subsequent analysis of various manuscripts and letters after that incident, then, are all based on the assumption that Darwin received Wallace’s letter and essay on May 18. But the analysis is inconsistent. Earlier in the book Brooks says that “the evidence indicates that Darwin must have received Wallace’s manuscript on either of two dates in May. Receipt on May 18 would leave 25 days for completion of those folios [on divergence] by June 12 [the date Darwin noted his thoughts on divergence in the manuscript]; May 28–29 would leave scarcely two weeks. But it must be conceded that desperation will make the pen move quickly” (p. 257). Conspiratorial historicism makes the pen move too quickly. First Brooks gives us the dates of May 18 or May 28–29 for the arrival of Wallace’s letter and essay, then he tells us he thinks the “Down 18th” letter to Lyell announcing the arrival of Wallace’s letter and essay was actually written on May 18, thus completely negating the May 28–29 option. But even worse, Brooks assumes the Wallace-Bates letter that arrived in London (and post-marked) June 3, was in the same batch as the Wallace-Darwin letter and essay. This is not a historical fact, but an inference, but even if true, this makes both May dates impossible, and, assuming Darwin did not lie in the letter to Lyell about the arrival of the Wallace material on the same day (the 18th), then the arrival date must be June, not May.

H. L. McKinney (1972) has consistency problems as well. He first concludes that the mail from Malaya to London averaged 10 weeks in transition, and thus “10 weeks from 9 March, when the communication was mailed, is precisely 18 May, one month before Darwin acknowledged receiving it.” McKinney then points to the Wallace-Bates June 3 letter and concludes: “It is only reasonable to assume that Wallace’s communication to Darwin arrived at the same time and was delivered to Darwin at Down House on 3 June 1858, the same day Bates’s letter arrived in Leicester.” To account for the delay from May 18 to June 3, McKinney explains: “Knowing the numerous delays in such matters, we should perhaps allow some leeway, although one month appears to be an excessive allowance.“ (p. 139). Fine, but then why no “delays” and “leeway” for the Bates letter? And what was Darwin doing with Wallace’s manuscript in that time? McKinney wisely ends his discussion “with a series of question marks,” but then hints that Darwin might have been filling in the gaps “on divergence in his long version of the Origin; he finished that section on 12 June” (p. 141).

So which is it? Either the Bates letter is damning evidence, or it is not. Brooks and McKinney cannot have it both ways. They cannot use the Wallace-Bates letter as evidence that the Wallace-Darwin materials arrived on June 3, and then have Darwin writing Lyell announcing same on May 18 (as Brooks does); or that the Darwin letter was delayed while the Bates letter was not (in McKinney’s case). Either way, to accuse one of the greatest scientists in history of committing one of the most heinous crimes in science on one of the most important aspects of his theory, one better have compelling evidence. Modern skeptics are fond of saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. These claims against Darwin are truly extraordinary but the evidence is not.

In addition, Darwin’s contribution to the joint Linnean Society papers did not include materials developed in 1858; rather, he included a letter to the American scientist Asa Gray, written in September, 1857. If Darwin had cribbed divergence from Wallace, they why submit this older version? And why was divergence listed in the table of contents for Natural Selection in March, 1857? And how could he have explained divergence to Asa Gray, almost a year before the Wallace essay?

In 1858 Darwin was knee deep in producing a massive, multi-volume work entitled Natural Selection. He planned on taking several more years to complete it, and without outside pressure to publish he was in no hurry. He had seen the fallout of other theorists who had published prematurely, and he was not about to be subjected to that kind of criticism. But Wallace’s 1858 letter and essay, whether they arrived in May or June, changed all that. Darwin was forced to publish a “shorter” (490-page) book the following year — The Origin of Species. Unless the Wallace letter miraculously turns up, we shall never know what “really happened.” The most logical conclusion is that under the circumstances the delicate arrangement was handled in the most gentlemanly way possible.

The Zero-Sum Model of Scientific Priority

In 1947, the mathematician John von Neumann published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in which he described the zero-sum model where the gain of one participant means the loss of the other, and the more one gains the more the other loses. If I win six games of tennis, my opponent must lose six games, and thus they sum to zero (6+-6 = 0). This antagonistic, win-lose model completely misses the interdependent, sometimes cooperative, and always social nature of the scientific process. Wallace’s priority credit and recognition for scientific achievement can and should be significantly enhanced without taking anything away from Darwin. Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), describes these symbiotic relationships — called by Robert Trivers “reciprocal altruism” (1971) — as common throughout plant and animal relationships, including human interactions.

To describe these reciprocal relationships, Dawkins adopts the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) model developed by Axelrod and Hamilton (1981), a game in which two prisoner’s have several options: they can cooperate with each other and get light sentence terms; or if one defects while the other cooperates, the defector is freed while the cooperator gets an even longer jail sentence; or both can defect, in which case both receive longer jail stays. When this game is iterated, or repeated, the majority of responses produced are cooperative, as this strategy leads, in the long run, to “the greatest good for the greatest number.” In the short run, that is, in a noniterated or one-trial game, defection is the rule. But over time consistent defectors lose out. Dawkins demonstrates that for animals and humans, those who adopted the zero-sum model were losers.

The zero-sum model is at the heart of most disputes of scientific priority, because it assumes that the only way one scientist can profit is through the loss of another scientist. Clearly Newton and Newtonian scholars saw Newton’s gain in the priority of the invention of the calculus to be Leibniz’s loss, and vice versa, leading to centuries of debate and disagreement. Likewise, many authors seem to perceive Darwin’s gain as Wallace’s loss, and Wallace’s gain as Darwin’s loss. Because of this it becomes difficult in most of these debates to tease out the facts from the emotion, the information from the rhetoric. This disputative posturing on both sides wedges historians into a defensive stance that compels an attack-or-be-attacked response. Thus, the antagonism between scholars and historians in both camps could be attenuated by the rejection of the zero-sum model. Darwin, and especially Wallace, clearly rejected the zero-sum model, as both recognized the gain to be had through cooperative interaction. Consider this exchange of letters between the two men. The first, an April 6, 1859, letter from Darwin, reveals a man paying the highest respect for a fellow winner in this game of scientific cooperation (Marchant, pp. 113, 131):

You cannot tell how I admire your spirit, in the manner in which you have taken all that was done about establishing our papers. I had actually written a letter to you, stating that I could not publish anything before you had published. I had not sent that letter to the post when I received one from Lyell and Hooker, urging me to send some ms. to them, and allow them to act as they thought fair and honourably to both of us. I did so.

Wallace responded with an equally generous dose of recognition in this passage from a May 29, 1864 letter:

As to the theory of Natural Selection itself, I shall always maintain it to be actually yours and yours only. You had worked it out in details I had never thought of, years before I had a ray of light on the subject, and my paper would never have convinced anybody or been noticed as more than an ingenious speculation, whereas your book has revolutionized the study of Natural History, and carried away captive the best men of the present age.

(It is interesting to note that not only Alfred Wallace, but his grandson John, were and are satisfied with the historical priority outcome. After a lengthy conversation on this question, John Wallace told me: “I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Grandfather was satisfied with the arrangement, none of us desire to call it ‘Wallace’s theory of natural selection,’ but many of the Darwin people seem defensive about it.” There is no doubt about the latter, but it is understandable because the aforementioned Wallace defenders have embraced the zero-sum model, causing them to give more credit to Wallace while simultaneously taking credit away from Darwin. Darwin scholars, of course, adopt the zero-sum model in defense, as they feel Wallace’s gain is Darwin’s loss.)

The Sum-Plus Model of Scientific Priority

A sum-plus model — the gain of one person is the gain of another — recognizes the contingent, cooperative, and interdependent nature of scientific discovery. Both Darwin and Wallace profited by the profit of the other. Both were winners in the game to understand the origin of species. An 1870 letter of “reflection” from Darwin to Wallace shows the special win-win nature of their relationship: “I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect — and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me — that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals.” In the most gentlemanly fashion Wallace always politely addressed Darwin in virtually every letter written, and Darwin nearly always responded in kind. “I was much pleased to receive your note this morning,” reads a typical letter opening from Wallace to Darwin. “Hoping your health is now quite restored,” “I sincerely trust that your little boy is by this time convalescent,” and so on (DAR:106, 107). Darwin and Wallace used each other and each other’s ideas to their mutual benefit, and the world of science is better off for it.

One of the other problems with the sum-zero model is an assumption of identity between ideas made in priority disputes. This assumption of identical ideas leads to the conclusion that only one individual can be first in discovery. But a law of nature is really the product of both discovery and description of a phenomenon. Two individuals may make the same discovery, but they may not make the same description. This is the case with Darwin and Wallace, where their theories of evolution by means of natural selection are similar and complimentary, but not identical. Through their numerous intellectual exchanges in letters, papers, and books, they stimulated one another with in both knowledge and theory, with a net gain profit for both, making them genuinely codiscoverers.

The historical record has read differently, however, beginning with the ranking of the joint papers read at the July 1, 1858, Linnean Society meeting which placed Darwin’s 1844 extract and his 1857 Asa Gray letter ahead of Wallace’s 1858 essay. If considered by dates of ideas alone, then the ranking is chronologically correct. (It is also alpabetically correct, which was how the names were listed.) But, in fact, what has happened is that Darwin has become a household name and Wallace all but forgotten. This historical reality, of course, was not caused by the ranking of their names at this meeting. In actual fact, according to the Linnean Society President, Thomas Bell, in a reflection of the year’s activities, nothing of significance happened in 1858: “The year which has passed … has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear” (Bell, 1859, pp. viii–ix). Obviously Bell and his colleagues did not grasp the significance of the theory of natural selection at its time of presentation. Darwin’s fame and importance accrued over many decades of sound scientific work, not through a “delicate arrangement” and clandestine priority ranking of his name over Wallace’s. Besides, other than later noting that his paper “was printed without my knowledge, and of course without any correction of proofs,” Wallace was certainly delighted to finally gain the recognition of the scientific community he had desired for so many years, as he indicated to his mother on October 6, 1858, while still in the Malay Archipelago: “I have received letters from Mr. Darwin and Dr. Hooker, two of the most eminent naturalists in England, which has highly gratified me. I sent Mr. Darwin an essay on a subject on which he is now writing a great work. He showed it to Dr. Hooker and Sir C. Lyell, who thought so highly of it that they immediately read it before the Linnean Society. This assures me the acquaintance and assistance of these eminent men on my return home” (Marchant, p. 57).

Consider Wallace’s position at this time. He was a relatively unknown 35-year-old whose only theoretical work — the 1855 Sarawak Law paper — was largely ignored (or, at least, so he thought). He had been away from England and the center of scientific activity already four years, and was, by all rights, really still cutting his teeth on such weighty theoretical matters. Darwin, by contrast, was 49 years old, fairly well-known in scientific circles, had already published numerous important scientific articles, and had shared his theoretical ideas with the most important scientists in England. Wallace did not feel the loser because he was not. An essay written in two nights, sent to the right place at the right time, put him in the scientific inner circle and into the historical record — his name next to Darwin’s — forever. Anyone who thinks that this was Wallace’s loss should reconsider the circumstances in light of the sum-plus model of scientific priority. The gain of Darwin was the gain of Wallace, not the loss.

Consider also, Wallace’s reception and review of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In only seven months, he told his boyhood friend George Silk on September 1, 1860, “I have read it [the Origin] through 5 or 6 times & each time with increasing admiration. It is the ‘Principia’ of Natural History. It will live as long as the ‘Principia’ of Newton.” Silk was not someone Wallace needed to impress with false praise, as he continued the comparison: “The most intricate effects of the law of gravitation, the mutual disturbances of all the bodies of the solar system are simplicity itself, compared with the intricate relations & complicated struggle which has determined what forms of life shall exist & in what proportions. Mr. Darwin has given the world a new science & his name should in my opinion stand above that of every philosopher of ancient or modern times. The force of admiration can no further go!!!” (AJRW, l. 46).

The Sum-Plus Model and The Nature of History

Wallace, perhaps better than most, understood the sum-plus model of scientific interaction, and provides us with a brilliant example of this interpretation in an article entitled “The Origin of the Theory of Natural Selection,” published in The Popular Science Monthly, as a reply to his being honored with the Darwin-Wallace medal of the Linnean Society of London on the 50th anniversary of the July 1, 1858 joint reading of the papers. The 1908 celebration rekindled interest in reconstructing the events that led to the theory of natural selection, and in the popular media in particular, there was much historical confusion. It had become apparent to Wallace that there was much misunderstanding of what actually happened in the years leading up to 1858. An analysis of his article on this subject not only supports the sum-plus model, it offers us insight into the independent and yet interdependent nature of scientific progress in particular, and historical change in general.

In this article we see Wallace’s generosity in offering more of the share of the credit to Darwin (whom he refers to as “my honored friend and teacher”), while at the same time firmly reestablishing what he did and did not do. The paper also contains a certain amount of the obligatory modesty that is usually elicited when one is being so honored, such as when Wallace states that the share of the credit should be allocated “proportional to the time we had each bestowed upon it … that is to say, as twenty years is to one week” (RES, p. 397). Well, Wallace did discover and describe natural selection all in the course of a week in late February, 1858, but his four years in the Amazonian tropical rain forest and another eight in the Malay Archipelago hardly represents one week to Darwin’s twenty years. It is true, however, that had Darwin published, “after ten years’ — fifteen years’ — or even eighteen years’” instead of the 20 following the opening of his notebook in 1838, Wallace “should have had no part in it whatever, and he would have been recognized as the sole and undisputed discoverer of ‘natural selection’” (p. 397). The fact is, however, Darwin waited 20 years, and would have likely waited considerably longer had Wallace not played the role of the intellectual trigger to set off Darwin’s productive spark.

In addition, to the modern historian interested in the relative historical role of contingency (a conjuncture of events occurring without design) and necessity (constraining circumstances compelling a certain course of action), it is interesting to note Wallace’s recognition of the role of both sets of historical forces in the development of scientific discoveries. For example, after first clarifying that he and Darwin independently, not simultaneously, discovered natural selection (“the idea occurred to Darwin in October, 1838, nearly twenty years earlier than to myself in February, 1858,”), Wallace recognizes the role of contingency in scientific discovery, when he notes: “It was really a singular piece of good luck that gave to me any share whatever in the discovery” (pp. 396–397). He then turns to an analysis that shows how a number of contingencies in the lives of both men led to the necessary discovery of natural selection: “we find a curious series of correspondences, both in mind and in environment, which led Darwin and myself … to reach identically the same theory,” including (pp. 398–400, enumeration added):

1. Being “ardent beetle-hunters, [a] group of organisms that so impresses the collector by the almost infinite number of its specific forms, the endless modifications of structure, shape, color and surface-markings that distinguish them from each others, and their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments.”
2. Having “an intense interest in the mere variety of living things … which are soon found to differ in several distinct characteristics.”
3. A “superficial and almost child-like interest in the outward forms of living things, which, though often despised as unscientific, happened to be the only one which would lead us towards a solution of the problem of species.”
4. Both collectors “were of a speculative turn of mind [and] constantly led to think upon the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of all this wonderful variety in nature.”
5. “Then, a little later (and with both of us almost accidentally) we became travellers, collectors and observers, in some of the richest and most interesting portions of the earth” (Darwin’s five-year global circumnavigation and Wallace’s four years in the Amazon and eight in the Malay Archipelago). “Thence-forward our interest in the great mystery of how species came into existence was intensified.”
6. Both men on their voyages and in their home lives enjoyed “a large amount of solitude … which, at the most impressionable period of our lives, gave us ample time for reflection on the phenomena we were daily observing.”
7. Both men carefully read Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Malthus’ Principles of Population, the latter “at the critical period when our minds were freshly stored with a considerable body of personal observation and reflection bearing upon the problem to be solved,” that acted on both like “that of friction upon the specially-prepared match, producing that flash of insight which led us immediately to the simple but universal law of the ‘survival of the fittest.’”

All of these contingencies created necessities (what Wallace calls “the combination of certain mental faculties and external conditions”) that drove Darwin and Wallace down parallel paths that became cut ever deeper until they finally crossed in the spring of 1858. This historical tension between what happens by chance and what must be — the contingent and the necessary — for an 85-year old Wallace reflecting back on a life of science, explains why it was Darwin and himself who finished first and “a very bad second,” in the “truly Olympian race” to discover the mechanism of evolutionary change; and why it was not the “philosophical biologists, from Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to Richard Owen and Robert Chambers.” For Wallace, the explanation is simple. These “great biological thinkers and workers” were on different paths at different times that made it impossible for them to “hit upon what is really so very simple a solution of the great problem.” An adequate explanation of a historical development requires a healthy balance of the internal and the external, individual thought and collective culture, or “the combination of certain mental faculties and external conditions that led Darwin and myself to an identical conception” (p. 399).

Finally, Wallace applies his model to the large picture of the development of ideas in general, and comes to the conclusion that “no one deserves either praise or blame for the ideas that come to him, but only for the actions resulting therefrom.” Wallace, of course, is not suggesting that great ideas come from “on high” or any other metaphysical source; rather, the vagaries and nuances of our life and thoughts leads us down certain paths toward conclusions that can only be reached by way of that particular road. Wallace and Darwin shared nearly parallel paths for a time (which later diverged on other issues), and Wallace acknowledges the role of such historical contingencies and necessities in the larger scale of the discovery of scientific ideas: “They come to us — we hardly know how or whence, and once they have got possession of us we can not reject or change them at will.” Wallace also addresses the even larger role of human freedom within historical trends by explaining that it is not the development of ideas but in the “actions which result from our ideas,” that individuals have the most say in their historical context. And here we catch a glimpse of Wallace, the hard working, common man who made a most uncommon discovery: “it is only by patient thought and work, that new ideas, if good and true, become adopted and utilized; while, if untrue or if not adequately presented to the world, they are rejected or forgotten” (p. 400). Such is the nature of science and history.

Bibliography

Abbreviations for Primary Source Archives

AJRW: The private collection of Wallace’s two grandsons, Alfred John Russel Wallace, and Richard Russel Wallace. Letters are designated by letter number, corresponding to a catalogue of the collection.

DAR: Darwin Archives, Cambridge University Library.

RES: Royal Entomological Society. No referencing designation.

• Alexrod, R. and Hamilton, W. D. 1981. “The Evolution of Cooperation.” Science, 211: 1390–6.
• Beddall, B. G. 1968. “Wallace, Darwin, and the Theory of Natural Selection: A Study in the Development of Ideas and Attitudes.” Journal of the History of Biology, 1: 261–323.
• ____. 1988. “Darwin and Divergence: The Wallace Connection.” Journal of the History of Biology, 21, no. 1: 2–68.
• Bell, T. 1859. “Presidental Address.” J. Linn. Soc. London, (Zool.), 4.
• Brackman, A. 1980. A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. New York: Times Books.
• Brooks, J. L. 1984. Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Darwin, C. and A. R. Wallace. 1858. “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Zoology), 3: 53–62.
• Darwin, F. 1887. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Vols. 1–3. London: John Murray.
• Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McKinney, H. L. 1972. Wallace and Natural Selection. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Marchant, J. 1916. Alfred Russel Wallace, Letters and Reminiscences. New York: Arno Press (1975).
• Mayr, E. 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Medawar, P. 1984. Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Neumann, J. V. and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Trivers, R. L. 1971. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Quarterly Review of Biology, 46: 35–57.
• Wallace, A. R. 1855. “On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” Annals and Magazine of Natural History, II. 16: 184–196.
• ____. 1908. “The Origin of the Theory of Natural Selection.” The Popular Science Monthly. July.

Reviews

New York Review of Books (December 18, 2003)

The following is a joint review of Frank J. Sulloway’s Darwin and His Doppelgänger, Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, and Michael Shermer’s In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace.

In 1922 Sigmund Freud wrote to Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian playwright known for his penetrating psychological dramas, to congratulate him on reaching his sixtieth birthday. In this letter Freud asked himself why, for so many years, he had avoided meeting a fellow Viennese intellectual whose ideas he so esteemed for their similarity to his own. In answering this question, Freud offered “a confession” to Schnitzler — one that he requested the playwright to keep to himself. “I think I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double [Doppelgängerscheu] … Whenever I get deeply interested in your beautiful creations I always seem to find behind their poetic sheen the same presuppositions, interests and conclusions as those familiar to me as my own.”¹

Freud was ambivalent about meeting his Viennese doppelgänger because, like most scientists, he was intensely concerned about scientific priority, raising this concern more than 150 times in his correspondence and published works. According to the sociologist Robert K. Merton, who documented Freud’s intense preoccupation with securing his own claims to originality, ambivalence is a hallmark of the way scientists feel about having scientific priority.² Merton even declared, as a rule of thumb, that whenever the biography or autobiography of a scientist states that he has had little interest in being the first, one is likely to find, within a few pages, one or more references to his having been embroiled in controversy over this very issue.

1. “I Never Saw a More Striking Coincidence”

If ever a famous scientist was unexpectedly confronted by his intellectual double — a colleague whose independent discovery of the same revolutionary idea threatened to undermine his prospects for scientific immortality — that scientist was Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882). The man who threatened Darwin with losing his place as an original thinker was another British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Living in the jungles of the faraway Malay Archipelago, Wallace was diligently collecting tens of thousands of natural history specimens when he experienced, in February 1858, one of many recurrent attacks of malarial fever. While he was incapacitated and in a state of intermittent delirium, Wallace found himself mulling over the relentless destructive forces in nature that keep natural populations from increasing in size. Wallace suddenly recalled the argument of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1826), in which Malthus had maintained that human populations tend to increase at a geometric rate whereas the food supply tends to increase only at an arithmetic rate. According to Mal-thus, the inevitable consequence of this mathematical discrepancy was the existence of powerful “checks” to population increase. It then flashed across Wallace’s mind, as it had Darwin’s when he read the same book by Malthus twenty years earlier, that only the fittest and most adapted individuals would tend to survive in nature, and hence that a process of natural selection would cause new and better-adapted varieties to replace older and inferior ones.

When his malarial attack had subsided, Wallace quickly sketched out his theory and dispatched his manuscript to none other than Darwin, with whom the younger naturalist had previously corresponded. Upon receiving this manuscript, Darwin, who was busy writing his own “Big Book” on species, was stunned by what he read. As he explained to his close friend the geologist Charles Lyell:

Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the Struggle for existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence. [I]f Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters … So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.

Darwin agonized over what to do, thinking that the only honorable course of action was to step aside and yield to Wallace, but he gladly acquiesced in the solution proposed by his two closest scientific colleagues — the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell. In what has been referred to as a “delicate arrangement,” Darwin’s two friends oversaw the publication of Wallace’s paper, preceded by portions of an unpublished essay that Darwin had written in 1844, and by a letter summarizing his theory, which Darwin had sent to the American botanist Asa Gray in 1857. Darwin’s scientific priority was thereby assured. In part because of this delicate arrangement, we now describe modern evolutionary theory as “Darwinian” rather than “Wallacian.”

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The life stories of these two scientific doppelgängers, their extraordinary intellectual accomplishments, and their even more extraordinary discovery of the same cornerstone of evolutionary biology have now been retold in two new and eminently readable biographies. Janet Browne starts the second and concluding volume of her superb life of Darwin with that dramatic moment in June 1858 when Darwin received Wallace’s manuscript anticipating his theory of natural selection. The life of Darwin’s intellectual double has been comprehensively chronicled by Michael Shermer in his provocative study about the scientist who was content and even flattered to live “in Darwin’s shadow.” Although Darwin and Wallace may have been scientific doubles, their latest biographers are clearly not, taking very different methodological approaches to their subjects based on disparate conceptions of what makes for good history and good biography.

Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: The Power of Place is a commendable successor to Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995), in which Browne tells the story of Darwin’s five-year voyage around the world on H.M.S. Beagle (1831–1836), his conversion to evolutionary theory and subsequent discovery of the principle of natural selection, and finally his prolific pre-Origin contributions to natural science, which grew out of his Beagle voyage exploits. Browne’s second volume follows Darwin through the storm of controversy over the Origin of Species (1859) and then takes us through the remarkable diversity of his later achievements, which included The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), as well as pioneering books on orchids, variation in domesticated animals and plants, insectivorous plants, the evolutionary implications of flower structure, and a best-selling work on earthworms.

Lavish and justified praise has been bestowed on the first volume of Browne’s study. There can be no doubt, however, that her second volume is an even more important contribution to Darwin studies, and, among other accolades, it has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. The importance of Browne’s second volume lies substantially in the fact that less is known and properly understood about Darwin’s later life, mainly because the volume of relevant documentation for Darwin’s years as a scientific celebrity is far greater, and far more diverse, than the already formidable material associated with the first five decades of his life.

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What is particularly new about Browne’s approach to Darwin is her ability to place him and his scientific research within the real-life, day-to-day setting provided by his wife and family, by the small town in which he lived sixteen miles south of London (and where he served as a local magistrate, handing out pig licenses and administering fines for poaching), and by the broader mix of friends, colleagues, and celebrity seekers with whom he was in touch during the last two decades of his life.

Especially fascinating is Browne’s detailed reconstruction of Darwin’s emotional life. In fact, Browne’s biography has brought Darwin alive for me in ways that I, as someone who has studied Darwin’s life for more than thirty years, had not thought possible from the available documentary evidence. Browne’s achievement is testimony not only to her diligence in locating and judiciously mining new sources — particularly family letters — but also to her ability to exploit the previously known documents in new and fruitful ways. Owing to Browne’s perceptiveness and gifts as an author, she often writes more like a novelist than a biographer. Of course, the best biographies do sometimes read like good novels, but achieving this result with a life dedicated to science entails another degree of literary skill alt