Evolution Icon Evolution
Intelligent Design Icon Intelligent Design

Dembski: “Recent Studies Have Vindicated Wallace” Over Darwin

Wallace notebooks
Photo: Wallace's notebooks, at the Linnean Society, London, by John Cummings / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0).

The newly released Intelligent Evolution: How Alfred Russel Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism offers a direct encounter with the thought of A. R. Wallace, who co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection only to adopt a proto-intelligent design view. Over this, he subsequently broke with Darwin. The book is edited by science historian Michael Flannery and it includes a rich selection of accompanying background material.

“Three Powerful Claims”

William Dembski writes in his preface to Intelligent Evolution that “Flannery advances three powerful claims”:

1. Darwin developed his theory of evolution not from painstaking field analysis by testing hypotheses against the evidence and following it dutifully wherever it led, as he and his supporters to this day so insistently claim; rather, he came to the field already armed and equipped with a materialistic worldview that served both as the lens through which he made his observations of the natural world and then as the framework into which he made them fit.

2. Although Wallace always claimed to follow Darwin, in fact he increasingly distanced himself from the anti-teleology so prevalent in Darwin’s approach to evolution; in contrast, he developed a comprehensive teleological counter-theory to Darwinian natural selection that may appropriately be called intelligent evolution. 

3. Recent studies have vindicated Wallace in three key areas: 1) his emphasis upon human exceptionalism, as witnessed in the remarkable property of language and speech eloquently presented by the superb literary stylist, Tom Wolfe; 2) his intelligent evolution, as confirmed in the research of physician/geneticist Michael Denton and biochemist Michael J. Behe; and 3) the counterfactual exercise — suggested by noted Darwin defender, historian Peter Bowler, no less! — of erasing Darwin from the scene and calculating the hypothetical results. In the first two cases, all evidence points to the enduring accuracy of Wallace’s prescient conclusions regarding the unique attributes of human beings and the necessity of an information-filled, Mind-like teleological biosphere. In the last, a world without Darwin would still have been far from perfect (many ills have nothing to do with him or his theory), but would we have had to suffer from the delusions of scientism, and worse, the horrific effects of its social applications? University of Pennsylvania historian of science and social anthropology, Henrika Kuklick, has stated unequivocally, “scholars have wasted their time trying to exonerate Darwin of responsibility for Social Darwinism, for he was a Social Darwinist.”

Wallace’s Counter to Darwin

To discover the metaphysic that preceded Darwin’s science, Wallace’s counter in a new guided and goal-oriented evolution, and the present-day science that confirms ideas about human exceptionalism, unblinded evolution, and the real consequences of a Darwin “deleted,” get your copy of Intelligent Evolution now.