Ali: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Right-Hand Gun

This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, explorer, naturalist, and co-developer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace was self-effacing about his fundamental contributions to evolution—he even titled his major book on the subject Darwinism—but it was mostly his whole-hearted support for spiritualism, and his interests in socialism, radical land redistribution, women’s rights, and other causes and fads that dimmed or diluted his scientific reputation after his death in 1913.