In Radical by Nature, James T. Costa, a professor of biology and expert on the history of evolutionary thought, has given us a fascinating multi-faceted portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Drawing from newly available notebooks, manuscripts, and the Wallace Correspondence Project, as well as honouring Wallace’s two hundredth birthday, Costa argues for telling an “updated story of his life”, meaning “the story of Wallace and his life and times” (xi, italics in the text). In great and vivid detail, Costa demonstrates how Wallace was a man who crossed many frontiers. First, geographical frontiers. From very early on in his life, Wallace was an avid traveller: He spent four years (1848–1852) in the Amazon, then eight years (1854–1862) roaming the Malay Archipelago. When back in Britain, he relocated many times, travelled to Europe, and also toured America as a spokesman for what he himself termed “Darwinism”. Second: social frontiers. Born into an impecunious family in rural Wales, self-educated, but a reader with voracious curiosity and openness to the world, Wallace climbed up the social ladder, became a prolific writer, and received recognition from the British scientific elite, including Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Thomas Huxley, ultimately obtaining a government pension, through their mediation. He was awarded numerous distinctions including the Royal Society of London’s Royal Medal (1868), the Linnean Society of London’s Gold Medal (1892), and the Order of Merit (1908). Third, frontiers of knowledge: Wallace made important contributions to what is now called biogeography. Thus, his naturalist travels in Southeast Asia contributed to the identification of a faunal divide later (and still today) called the “Wallace Line” which divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western part in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern part where the fauna reflect a mix of Asiatic and Australian characteristics. And, of course, his formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection which was published in 1858 and which spurred Darwin to publish an abstract of what would become On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859).

As a young man, Wallace dreamt of adventure and joined up with Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) an entomologist and explorer with whom he travelled to South America to collect not only insects, but also birds and mammals for private collections. They funded their Brazilian trip by selling specimens to museums and collectors back in Britain. Fulfilling his interest in exploration and science, he accumulated specimens and made notes on the geography, flora, and fauna, as well as on the local peoples he encountered. Wallace paid attention not only to each specimen but also to the surroundings in which it had developed, in other words, the geographical distribution of species. Wallace’s trip back to England was a disaster: the boat he was travelling on caught fire and he lost all his collections, but this shipwreck did not deter him from travelling abroad again, and, in 1854, he set off for the Malay Archipelago. There, he collected more than 100,000 specimens, among them several thousand new to science. His unprecedented distributional database gathered through his extensive journey across the archipelago, led him to draw a faunal boundary between what he called the “Indo-Malayan” and “Australo-Malayan” regions and which was called the “Wallace Line” by Thomas H. Huxley in 1864 (289). In parallel, Wallace was musing about how species evolve over time and space, even when he was bed-ridden with bouts of malaria. As with Darwin, when he was on the Beagle more than 20 years earlier, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was a source of inspiration for Wallace. While Darwin reckoned that “the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of his mind”, Wallace mostly focused on countering Lyell’s anti-evolutionary arguments. In 1855, in a paper called “Sarawak Law Paper”, he wrote that: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species” (158). Three years later, he was still mulling over plant distribution in space and time. When he remembered Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population which he “had read several years before, and which had made a deep and permanent impression on my mind” (223), he realized that there is constant death and struggle in the natural world; finite resources, therefore competition. Then, he drafted a paper titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”, which he sent to Darwin. It came as a shock for Darwin, as in it Wallace outlined a theory of evolution which resembled very much the one he had not yet published. As Darwin wrote to Lyell on 18 June 1858 “so all my originality will be smashed” (227). This priority issue ended with the presentation of a joint publication, one part by Wallace, the other by Darwin, at the Linnean Society of London, on 1 July 1858. The paper was read by Joseph Dalton Hooker and Lyell, two of Darwin’s close friends, as Darwin was holed up in Down House (he was also devastated by the death of one of his infant sons), and Wallace was still away in Southeast Asia. Wallace’s paper also pushed Darwin to turn a sketch of an argument into a book which he famously called Origin of Species (1859).

Upon his return to England in 1862, Wallace became one of the staunchest defenders of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and he was soon accepted by the scientific luminaries at that time, such as Darwin, Huxley, and Lyell. He also married and started a family, very much as Darwin had done after returning from his voyage on the Beagle. Unlike Darwin, however, Wallace faced financial difficulties, leading to numerous moves across southern England.

While one can find many similarities between Wallace and Darwin, there are also important points of divergence. A major one is Wallace’s political streak: He was a staunch socialist, a political position to which he fully converted after reading Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialism and science fiction novel Looking Backward (1888). Wallace was also a proponent of land reform, although, ironically, as a former surveyor in his youth, he contributed to land enclosure dispossessing the poorest inhabitants. He was also an advocate of women’s rights (in education, marriage, voting, inheritance, and engagement in intellectual society). An opponent of eugenics, he found Galton’s negative eugenics totally “objectionable”, while considering “positive eugenics” among the “least objectionable” schemes while also among the “least effective” (392). In “Human Selection”, he voiced the opinion that eugenics “was a mere excuse to establish a medical tyranny”, and argued that one should “give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type” (490, footnote 52). In Wallace’s humane view, “uncivilized” people were neither morally nor intellectually inferior to “civilized” people, and there are many occurrences in Costa’s biography to demonstrate how Wallace was interested in living among the local people, either with the Indians of Amazonia or the Dyaks of Borneo. In the field, Wallace needed the help of local people, whether guides, scouts, or assistants, to collect and preserve delicate animal specimens. While Wallace was in charge of collecting insects, most of the birds were collected and prepared by Wallace’s most trusted assistant, a skilled collector and responsible for the discovery of a new bird of paradise, Ali. Wallace did not miss any opportunity to acknowledge and pay tribute to his faithful assistant, but, as Costa suggests, while Wallace “was remarkably respectful and humane when it came to other cultures, it is equally true that at times he saw these cultures through colonialist, rose-colored glasses” (167). But, according to Costa, it would be too simplistic to describe him as “an almost nonracist, egalitarian Victorian” (166).

Wallace’s spiritualism is another element that takes him away from Darwin’s theory of natural selection on a specific point: In Wallace’s eyes, natural selection could not account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, metaphysical musings, or wit and humour. While he drops natural selection as an explanation for the evolution of the brain, he nonetheless, as a religious sceptic, could not invoke a Creator, and so labelled this agency as an “Overruling Intelligence” instead (305). While Wallace’s spiritualism was frowned upon by his scientific colleagues, as Costa point out, “some of Wallace’s most vocal critics often themselves surreptitiously attended séances, […] even Thomas Huxley” (327). Wallace’s other controversial stance was his opposition to compulsory smallpox vaccination. Although he and his family were vaccinated, he ultimately expressed doubts about the efficacy of vaccination, and argued that “good nutrition and sanitary living conditions played a major role in reducing disease transmission and susceptibility” (354).

Why write another biography of Wallace? Why write another biography of Pasteur, and I am alluding here to Michel Morange’s biography of Louis Pasteur, a 423-page book, soberly called Pasteur (Morange 2022), which also marks the two hundredth birthday of a prominent scientist. Why write another story of the discovery of DNA, and here, I am referring to The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA’s Double Helix by Howard Markel (2021). Like Costa, Morange and Markel have drawn on voluminous unexplored or newly available archives in order to engage the reader with a lively and sweeping narrative of landmark scientific figures, shedding new light on them while giving a more balanced view of their life and times. This includes bringing other figures to the fore; Markel pulls Rosalind Franklin out of Watson and Crick’s shadow, and Costa does the same for Wallace with respect to Darwin. The title of this review “The Shining Star of Natural Selection” is also a nod to Rosalind Franklin, sometimes referred to as “The Dark Lady of DNA”.

Indeed, through this biography Costa bring out a new image of Wallace. What struck me most is Wallace’s pugnacity, perseverance, energy, open-mindedness, independence of thought, and humility and also the fact he could blur the line between irrational and rational thought. I greatly enjoyed the ways in which Costa unraveled how “Wallace’s generous spirit, sense of justice, and embrace of non-Western peoples of different faiths, cultures, mores, and customs, set him apart from most of his contemporaries” (xii). Shining the spotlight on figures like Wallace helps us to recall that England, the most developed country in the world at that time, was riddled with social injustice and inequality, a reality that Charles Dickens so impressively portrayed in his novels. It also helps us to develop a less Darwino-centric view, (although I admit to being a Darwin enthusiast myself), and be more aware of Wallace’s impressive contributions to natural history and science. There is no doubt that Costa’s fascinating book has succeeded in making Wallace more visible in this history. Wallace was not buried alongside Darwin (and Newton) in Westminster Abbey, as friends suggested (although his family opposed it), and this might echo the fact that his notoriety faded quickly after his death. Costa’s book, following on other biographies, is definitely a brilliant and major addition to the various tributes paid to Wallace and his impressive contribution to the nineteenth century natural science.