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What if Wallace had prevailed, rather than Darwin?

What if Wallace had prevailed, rather than Darwin?

Last updated on: September 8, 2026 at 9:27 pm by Dan Peterson

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What if Wallace had prevailed, rather than Darwin? 2026-09-08T21:27:11-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Baitul Ikram Mosque in Allen, Texas (fair use, I hope, from the mosque’s website at https://visitamosque.us/mosque-item/baitul-ikram-mosque-dallas/)

The folks over at Meridian Magazine took a holiday break on Monday, evidently for the first time in the magazine’s history, so the latest episode of Becoming Brigham went up a day late. But don’t worry! Don’t fret! It’s up and available now for your viewing pleasure and edification: “From Stolen Shirt to Open War? — Becoming Brigham, Episode 33”

Also up in Meridian: “Thank You for Finding Me—When Our Ancestors Make Themselves Known.” I’m enjoying this series and the fascinating accounts that it’s sharing.

And then, alas, there’s this: You’re probably aware that the building of a Latter-day Saint temple in Fairview, Texas, hasn’t been universally welcomed there. But its construction is finally underway — and the site’s construction sign has now been attacked by vandals on two separate occasions: “Fairview LDS temple sign vandalized twice with graffiti.”

In response to this vandalism, Riyaz Muhammad, who is the Director of Outreach for the Baitul Ikram Mosque, an Ahmadiyya Muslim house of worship that is located in nearby Allen, Texas (where, by the way, the official motto of the mosque is evidently “Love for All, Hatred for None”), wrote the following:

“Those who have been driven out from their homes unjustly only because they said, ‘Our Lord is God’ — And if God did not repel some men by means of others, there would surely have been pulled down cloisters and churches and synagogues and mosques, wherein the name of God is oft commemorated. And God will surely help one who helps Him. God is indeed Powerful, Mighty” — Holy Quran Ch 22 v41

It is quite disturbing to hear that our brothers and sisters of The Church of Jesus Christ is being targeted by vandalism in Fairview. As a Muslim, I see it as a duty to stand by with you all during this time. I am sure the culprits do not have the courage or moral grounds to stand up the daylight and will not cause any real damage beyond these acts of cowardice.

Praying to the almighty God that he sees us on the party on his side, who will work to repel the ones trying to spread evil.

God be with you all (Assalamu Alaikum )

Alfred Russel Wallace, shown in roughly 1895 (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Although Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) independently conceived of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection — his 1858 paper on the subject was published along with extracts from Charles Darwin’s earliest writings on the topic, and the appearance of the paper spurred Darwin on to rush his seminal 1859 book On the Origin of Species into print — Wallace has never enjoyed the acclaim that posterity has granted to Darwin. On the whole, he’s typically relegated to a footnote.

But he was a prolific writer and an intrepid explorer (even more so than Darwin, whose 1839 memoir The Voyage of the Beagle is justly famous) and he is quite interesting in his own right. He won the Royal Medal (1868), the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie (1870), the Darwin Medal (1890), the Founder’s Medal (1892), the Linnean Medal (1892), the Copley Medal (1908), the Darwin–Wallace Medal (Gold, 1908), and the Order of Merit (1908).

In 1876, Wallace was unanimously chosen at the president of the Biological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), while already serving as the president of its Anthropological Section. In 1893, at the urging of Thomas Henry Huxley (aka “Darwin’s Bulldog”) and others, he accepted election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. At his death, the New York Times pronounced him “the last of the giants [belonging] to that wonderful group of intellectuals composed of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, Owen, and other scientists, whose daring investigations revolutionized and evolutionized the thought of the century.” Some proposed him for burial in Westminster Abbey, where Darwin already rested, but his widow vetoed the idea.

So I’ve begun, just today, to read Michael A. Flannery, Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2018), and I think that I’ll share a passage or two from it over the next week or two.

In the meanwhile, here are a pair of quotations from the frontispiece of Nature’s Prophet that, I think, illustrate very nicely the diverging trajectories followed by Darwin and Wallace, who evidently remained life-long friends despite their differences:

The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. . . . There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. (Charles Darwin, Autobiography)

My contribution is made as a man of science, as a naturalist, as a man who studies his surroundings to see where he is. And the conclusion I reach in my book [The World of Life] is this: That everywhere, not here and there, but everywhere, and in the very smallest operations of nature to which human observation has penetrated, there is Purpose and a continual Guidance and Control. (Alfred Russel Wallace, New Thoughts on Evolution)

According to Nature’s Prophet (10), Wallace wasn’t a religious man, but he seems plainly to have been working his way toward some sort of concept of what we might call “intelligent design.” One can’t help but wonder how the subsequent history of general and evolutionary biology might have looked had it been Wallace who garnered the widespread acclaim while Darwin was mostly left to the footnotes.

Wallace placed [overall limitations] on natural selection in explaining certain aspects of nature (the origin of life and consciousness), the special attributes of humans, and in natural selection as a force in the elimination of the unfit. When, in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review, Wallace called on “an Overruling Intelligence to explain the special moral and mental attributes of man,” the split between the two naturalists was open and irrevocable.” (8)

Political map of Africa (public domain, Central Intelligence Agency)

This article, which was located in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, describes a wonderful program designed to benefit a fiendishly evil effort by shameless theists to exploit Africans financially: “BYU: Conference helps African entrepreneurs build businesses, confidence”

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