Читать книгу The Evolution of Everything: How Small Changes Transform Our World - Matt Ridley, Matt Ridley - Страница 26

Again and again, Darwin’s followers would go only so far, before swerving. Alfred Russel Wallace, for instance, co-discovered natural selection and was in many ways an even more radical enthusiast for Darwinism (a word he coined) than Darwin himself. Wallace was not afraid to include human beings within natural selection very early on; and he was almost alone in defending natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution in the 1880s, when it was sharply out of fashion. But then he executed a Lucretian swerve. Saying that ‘the Brain of the Savage [had been] shown to be Larger than he Needs it to be’ for survival, he concluded that ‘a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose’. To which Darwin replied, chidingly, in a letter: ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’

Later, in a book published in 1889 that resolutely champions Darwinism (the title of the book), Wallace ends by executing a sudden U-turn, just like Hume and so many others. Having demolished skyhook after skyhook, he suddenly erects three at the close. The origin of life, he declares, is impossible to explain without a mysterious force. It is ‘altogether preposterous’ to argue that consciousness in animals could be an emergent consequence of complexity. And mankind’s ‘most characteristic and noble faculties could not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws which have determined the progressive development of the organic world in general’. Wallace, who was by now a fervent spiritualist, demanded three skyhooks to explain life, consciousness and human mental achievements. These three stages of progress pointed, he said, to an unseen universe, ‘a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate’.