Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
selection. Inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian socialist novel
Looking
Backward
, Wallace (along with many social radicals on both sides of
the Atlantic) concluded that, if wealth were equalized, women would
choose mates not for their money but for their mental and moral
qualities. According to Wallace: “The idle and the selfish [men] would
be almost universally rejected. The diseased or the weak in intellect
would also usually remain unmarried; while those who possessed any
tendency to insanity or to hereditary disease, or who possessed any
congenital deformity would in hardly any case find partners, because it
would be considered an offence against society to be the means of per-
petuating such diseases or imperfections.”
18
As a result, the race would
spontaneously improve and, ultimately, we would all become noble
creatures.
19
Wallace was forced to leave school at the age of fourteen to earn his
own way in the world. He found rampant capitalism appalling. Scien-
tifically, he was a “neo-Darwinian” who rejected the Lamarckian prin-
ciple of inheritance of acquired characteristics. The contrast in social
background and worldview with the classical liberal Herbert Spencer,
who championed laissez-faire individualism and was a leader of the
“neo-Lamarckians” in Britain, could hardly have been greater. But
Wallace noted that the general argument of his 1864 essay was inspired
by a reading of Spencer's works, especially his
Social Statics
. Indeed,
Wallace's admiration for Spencer was so deep that he named his first son
after the philosopher. That act becomes more intelligible when one con-
siders the similarity in their visions.
In Spencer's view, unfettered economic competition would act as a spur
to improvement. Competition functioned to make creatures work harder,
thus exercising their organs and faculties. The mental powers, skills, and
traits of character fostered by this struggle would be transmitted to future
generations, resulting in constant material and moral progress. Ulti-
mately (and inevitably), the evolutionary process would produce a
perfect society, characterized by stability, harmony, peace, altruism,
and cooperation. Spencer's description of the features of this utopia is
remarkably similar to the one that Wallace assumed would result from
the equalizing of economic conditions: land would be held in common,
women would have the same rights as men, and government would
become superfluous and ultimately disappear.
