Re: BBC discussion of Alfred Russel Wallace

Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On BBC Radio 4, 1630 GMT, 01-Jan-2008, and weekly podcast to follow
probably within 24 hours.
"Great Lives"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/greatlives/index.shtml
will be doing Alfred Russel Wallace, although at the moment you'll get
the Victorian artist George Cruikshank.

The format is half an hour with a regular host, a celebrity proposer
of the programme's subject (usually dead), and an expert such as a
biographer, and some kind of agreed narrative in which the host poses
the questions that take the discussion forwards.

T.o.ers will recollect that Wallace independently formed a theory of
evolution while Charles Darwin had not published his own, and then
went a bit funny with Spiritualism.

Actually, he went a bit rigidly logical. For Wallace, natural selection
was all about, and only about, survival. Human cognitive faculties are
way more than is required for survival. Hence selection could not
account for human faculties. So there had to be another cause. Since in
Wallace's mind selection was the all, the cause could not be biological,
and hence *had* to be non-natural.

But if he'd relaxed his view about selection, or allowed that it was
about something other than bare survival, hed have seen that social
forces could be selective pressures. So when he talks about Spirit, I
alwys mentally translate that to Society.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ID and ESP compared
    ... 'Space aliens' or biologists from the future as intelligent ... Wallace saw evolution as all about survival and natural selection. ... "Spirit". ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Dinner in New York?
    ... Ummm, don't go off into spiritualism, OK? ... but I have enormous sympathy for his move to that viewpoint. ... He argued that we couldn't have evolved Mind because ... So as he was focussed entirely on selection for survival, ...
    (talk.origins)