WCP5022

[1]¹ [p. 246]

Parkstone, Dorset,

August 15, 1902.

Dear Sir,

I thank you for sending me your work on Development and Evolution. Being more than usually occupied just now I have only been able to look at certain chapters which especially interest me. Your account of Organic Selection, as originated by yourself and Lloyd Morgan, is very clear and I have no doubt is occasionally a real factor in evolution. But I do not think that it is an important or even an essential one. I am myself so impressed by the extreme rigidity of natural selection in keeping up each species to a high standard of adaptability to its environment, and also with the very great range of variation always present in every dominant and wide ranging species (and it is from these alone that new species are produced) that all the arguments of H. Spencer and others as to the impossibility of coincident variations of the right kind occuring when required seem to me purely verbal objections not warranted by the facts of nature. This view is enforced in the various chapters on The Theory of Evolution in my "Studies Scientific and Social," vol. 1.

One other subject I will refer to. On p. 145 you refer to the controlling force of intelligence on evolution in man, which has become mental instead of physical. I believe I was the first to put forth this view nearly forty years ago in my paper on The Development of Human Races (Anthropological Review, 1864) and republished in my "Natural Selection and Tropical Nature," Chap. 8, where it will be found to be enforced by a considerable amount of reasoning which has never been replied to.

Believe me,

Yours very truly,

Alfred R. Wallace.

[English Naturalist.]