So that's how Wallace and Darwin connect and they soon departed because Wallace became a hyper-selectionist, that is, he reasoned that if natural selection can't explain everything and there is no other mechanism in nature to account for it, then there must be an intelligent designer. This is what he ended up talking about regarding the mind. There's no reason why a human should have a brain that's any bigger than say 800 cc's, the size of a large gorilla's brain. Why would you need a 1500 cc brain? There's no reason for it in the natural environment. Ergo some intelligent designer created this big brain and mind. Darwin, of course, was a strict materialist and didn't accept this, and this was when Wallace and Darwin parted ways.

EDGE: Why is it that someone who is total nonspecialist like myself knows a lot about Darwin and barely anything about Wallace?

SHERMER: Because Darwin was really the first big thinker to synthesize the whole thing and put it in a book. See? You've got to write a book.

EDGE: Wallace didn't write a book?

SHERMER: No, he only wrote the paper. And as we discussed, people don't read papers. You've got to write a book that's readable. The Origin of Species is very readable. Granted a hundred fifty years later, it's a little dry as it's written in 19th century prose. Still it's quite readable by anybody.Technical papers, on the other hand, are so boring that no one reads them. That's why you have to write books. Also Darwin set out a whole research program, whereas Wallace never did. A research program creates other scientists who then get into the program, and then they create graduate students who become professors who have graduate students, and the program perpetuates.

EDGE: What do you hope to accomplish with this biography?

SHERMER: First, to put Wallace back on the map because he's an important thinker, but more importantly, to try and tease out the Wallace's influences the way a psychologist would. Wallace was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and the socialist, Robert Owen, and my own approach to biology is to use a lot of modern psychology, such as our understanding of family dynamics, sibling rivalry, peer group influence and the influence of mentors, to understand why people believe the things they do.

EDGE: How does Spencer fit into the picture?

SHERMER: Wallace was pretty much self-taught since he dropped out at the end of grammar school. His father died when he was 13, and he went away to London to live with his brother. In London there were night schools and mechanics institutes, which were like the modern-day equivalent of community college night programs for adults who want to get back to college. There he heard lectures about the radical writings of Owen and Spencer, the socialist movement, phrenology and all kinds of other heretical material. Now why would Wallace be so open to that while other people aren't? That's personality, temperament, openness to experience. That's being less skeptical and more credulous. Ultimately I think a person's acceptance or rejection of heretical ideas is really a personality thing. We have to understand human personality and temperament to get to the core of how science works. Because it ultimately comes down to the support of a single individual and as often as not, psychological factors are as important as empirical data.

EDGE: What have you learned in writing the book?

SHERMER: The approach I'm taking is to look at how Wallace as an individual attempted to synthesize all of his ideas into a grand theory. In reality none of us start off in our late teens or early 20s with the final goal in mind because we don't know what that's going to be. Later in life, you can look back and reconstruct how the ideas came to you.

This is an interesting process because in science when a paper gets published, it's always done in a linear way: first this happened, then this, then this, it's like some sort of polished, inductive process. First I collected the data, then I formulated the theory, etc. In reality, it never happens like that, the process is usually messy, and in the case of Darwin and Wallace discovering natural selection it wasn't linear at all.

In fact Darwin did not discover natural selection and have his epiphany in the Galapagos. It never happened that way. He actually pieced it all together when he was back in London a year and a half later. He had to go to Fitzroy and some of his other shipmates to reconstruct how it happened. Later, though, we have this myth of science that it all works in a linear fashion when it actually doesn't.

That's the interesting thing about Wallace; he lived to be ninety, almost ninety-one years. From 1823 to 1913, from the end of the Napoleonic era to World War I: that's a long lifespan. Late in life, he's writing autobiographies and piecing it all together, but in reality it didn't happen that way. It's been fun for me to try to reconstruct how his ideas did develop, and how they were heavily influenced by all these social and psychological forces, like the fact that he was the eight born or that his father died young. I'm applying many of Frank Sulloway's models on family dynamics and birth order, for example, being later-born makes you more radical, because you have to diversify to find new ways of doing things in your competition with siblings for parental attention. Wallace is a perfect case for this. In fact, according to Sulloway's model, Wallace had a 96% probability of accepting the theory of evolution. In actuality, even though he reconstructs it to make it look like the data led him to the theory of evolution, Wallace was already converted to evolution before he ever left for his very first voyage to the Amazon. He took two major voyages: four years in the Amazon, and eight years in the Malay archipelago, twelve years in total. But before he even stepped off the boat, he was already an evolutionist.