Darwin & Wallace: Life-long Friends With Room for Disagreement

Though they disagreed scientifically about the nature of human beings, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace maintained a lasting friendship. On this episode of ID The Future from the vault, we continue to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace. Host Mike Keas concludes his three-part discussion with Michael Flannery about Flannery’s book Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology. Here, Flannery describes the tolerance Darwin and Wallace maintained for each other, a quality crucial to the spirit of science and academic inquiry. He notes that some contemporaries of Darwin lacked this spirit of professional civility, including Darwin's "bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley. Flannery also relates his experiences at the 2nd Annual International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace. The paper he presented raised some eyebrows and inspired students and fellow Wallace scholars alike, some of which were entirely unaware of Wallace's natural theology. Both Keas and Flannery hold out hope that the same spirit of tolerance Darwin and Wallace demonstrated can be emulated today by Darwin's defenders and critics.