Re: Conservation of Environment


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Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on August 12, 2003 at 22:44:22 from 195.93.48.8 user ACB.

In Reply to: Re: Conservation of Environment posted by David Bamford on August 12, 2003 at 22:12:54:

I'm a great admirer of Wallace. He is fun to read; I have a copy of his "Malay Archipelago" and I dip into it for all sorts of things. There is a wonderful description of how to bore a gun barrel with almost no tools, a technique he found in what is now Indonesia. Here is a report of an intervention that he made at a British Association meeting, which perhaps shows what sort of a man he was ("He" is Wallace, reported in the third person):

"It was indisputable, in regard to arts, that man was improving, but he would hardly say so much with regard to morals. We could trace backward to pre-historic races the diminution of the arts of life till we arrived at a period when the arts enabled man to do no more than fashion flints into weapons and tools. But as to morals, we did not find such decided diminution as we looked backward. He had met with savage tribes destitute of the arts of life and low in intellect, but possessed of a wonderfully delicate sense of right and wrong in morals. How did they get that sense? He had met some savages who would refuse to do an action which they thought would infringe on the rights of others, and had refused to answer questions lest they should tell a lie. He was speaking of the Dyaks of Borneo...."

However, in defence of Darwin, I do not think it is right to say that Wallace "gave Darwin the idea" for the theory of the evolution of species by means of natural selection. Darwin had had the idea quite a few years earlier, and had worked it out more clearly than Wallace did. But he had not published it, for fear of the reaction, and he was only propelled into action by Wallace's letter.


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