The Universe Next Door: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace
On this ID the Future from the vault, historian Michael Flannery joins Tom Woodward on The Universe Next Door to discuss Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Dr. Flannery is the author of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life and editor of Intelligent Evolution: How Alfred Russel Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism. What is often passed over in popular historical accounts of Wallace’s work, Flannery explains, is that he argued, beginning with an 1869 essay in the prominent Quarterly Review, that humans could not have arisen purely through mindless evolution but instead required for their origin an “overruling intelligence.” If this sounds like a case for intelligent design in biology more than a century before the modern intelligent design movement, that’s because it is. How did Charles Darwin react to Wallace’s argument? Tune in to find out.