If you happen to be passing through Kuching, Sarawak State, Malaysia on November 7-8, swing by the Riverside Majestic Hotel for the 2nd International Alfred Russel Wallace Conference where Center for Science & Culture fellow Michael Flannery will be presenting. Professor Flannery’s theme: “Alfred Russel Wallace, Nature’s Prophet: From Natural Selection to Natural Theology.” More information on the conference is here.
If your travels take you elsewhere or if you’re not traveling at all, check out a new brief documentary, “A Rediscovered Life,” that we’re releasing in advance of the 100th anniversary of Wallace’s death, tomorrow, November 7.
Mike Flannery has done as much as any scholar to help rediscover Wallace’s life — quite as interesting and dramatic as Darwin’s –and his scientific legacy and defection from Darwinism in favor of what Flannery calls “intelligent evolution,” a proto-intelligent design view.
Most people including intellectuals tend to embrace the views on science or whatever that are expected of us given the political, social, or other associations we enter into. In other words, we think in terms of personal identity rather than ideas, which is not really thinking at all. Wallace was different. A reflection I take away from “A Rediscovered Life” is that much more than most folks I’ve known he arrived at positions, on science and politics, without much regard for what he was “supposed” to think.
That’s how he came to the break with Darwin and with the rest of Darwin’s court, despite being the co-discoverer of the “Darwinian” theory of evolution by natural selection. Scientist, socialist and genuine free thinker, a strikingly rare and powerful example of intellectual integrity, his life is not only a historical and scientific lesson but an important personal one.