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by Mike Gray
These remarks are not from a creationist, as commonly defined today (and note the evasive use of the passive voice without an identifiable subject):
Well, it is the very simple, plain, and old-fashioned one that there was at some stage in the history of the earth, after the cooling process, a definite act of creation. Something came from the outside. Power was exercised from without. In a word, life was given to the earth. All the errors of those who have distorted the thesis of evolution into something called, inappropriately enough, Darwinism have arisen from the supposition that life is a consequence of organization. This is unthinkable. Life, as Huxley admitted, is the cause and not the consequence of organization.
Admit life, and the hypothesis of evolution is sufficient and unanswerable. Postulate organization first, and make it the origin and cause of life, and you lose yourself in a maze of madness. An honest and unswerving scrutiny of nature forces upon the mind this certain truth, that at some period of the earth’s history there was an act of creation, a giving to the earth of something which before it had not possessed; and from that gift, the gift of life, has come the infinite and wonderful population of living forms.
Then, as you know, I hold that there was a subsequent act of creation, a giving to man, when he had emerged from his ape-like ancestry, of a spirit or soul. Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation. — Alfred Russell Wallace in a 1910 interview
Michael Flannery has other remarks here.
Why should we care about a 100 year old opinion? I don’t understand the point of this assertion, considering nobody has attempted to prove the soul exists or even provide a rigorous definition.
Charles Darwin was a believer (and once a candidate for the Anglican priesthood) and was led by his scientific studies to agnosticism. Wallace was an unbeliever who was led by his scientific studies to belief in God. From there he inferred the existence of a soul. Whether Wallace was right, I can’t say, but my book The End of Darwinism shows that Wallace was a better evolution theorist than Darwin, who was a plagiarist.
Since the human soul, as something apart from the remarkable neuronal complexity we know as consciousness, simply doesn’t exist, Mr. Wallace was obviously wrong. Late in life, after his profound insights into the mechanisms of evolution, Wallace became enamored of spiritualism (which I doubt even those reading this list don’t believe in–or so I would hope) and from this bias went on to believe in the non-evolutionary origin of the human mind, which we now know is not at all true as our brains are clearly derived from those of our simian ancestors. Any simple brain map would demonstrate this to any but the most hardened antieveloutionist, even excluding all the similarities in our cognitive powers and behaviors. It’s unfair to Wallace to selectively quote from a period of his life when he had clearly became somewhat unhinged. It’s akin to quoting from a great scientist’s declarations after he or she has begun to develop Alzheimer’s. It embarrassing to see such tactics used in a professionally oriented listserv.
Yes, I meant “which I doubt even those reading this list believe in”. My editor is on vacation today.
BTW, in spite of Wallace’s comments to the contrary (this was the 19th century, after all), it turns out that primates other than humans actually have some fairly sophisticated mathematical skills. For a start, search Google for: primates mathematical skills