Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism

Feminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.

Alfred Russel Wallace and the Models of Amazonian “Indians” Displayed at the Crystal Palace Ethnological Exhibition

This paper discusses Alfred Russel Wallace’s Amazonian ethnography and his collaboration with Robert Latham on the models of indigenous Amazonian peoples that were placed on display at the Crystal Palace ethnological exhibition in 1854. The reception of scholars and the public to this innovative work is also considered. Wallace’s involvement in the first British ethnological exhibition of large proportions was fundamental to the dissemination of his work, which made a valuable contribution to a field of study—the ethnology of South America—that was still in its infancy in Britain, in marked contrast to Portugal, Spain, Germany and France. Wallace’s field observations of indigenous peoples were instilled in the British imagination through the handbook to the exhibition, in which Latham stressed the importance of Wallace’s descriptions to the advancement of the field of ethnology. Indeed, Wallace’s ethnographic accounts were deemed to provide an authoritative supplement to James Prichard’s preliminary and still somewhat limited ethnological map of northern South America, contributing to the creation of a more complete picture of the indigenous Amazonian peoples of Brazil.

Evolutionary antagonisms and the progress of three categories of traits

Darwin in The Descent of Man deliberates over the question of progress in relation to three categories of traits – aesthetic, moral and intellectual – attending to their interplay. The later formulations of Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace shift and reframe the terms for weighing together progress and the relationship across these traits, downplaying the role of aesthetic assessments. Huxley and Wallace invoke ‘antagonisms’ countering, respectively, ‘ethical progress’ and ‘cosmic process’, ‘humanity – the essentially human emotion’ and ‘physical and even intellectual race-improvement’. Thereafter, evolutionary antagonisms reappear – whether to endorse, dismiss or overcome them – and they remain relevant in evolutionary arguments, whether made explicit or left implicit. Following a thread of ongoing appeals to this interplay of traits and corresponding antagonisms invoking Huxley's 1893 lecture ‘Evolution and ethics’, implicit differences appear in the treatment of aesthetic, moral and intellectual development. These treatments maintain the progress that their own ethical systems represented, even while granting moral variation and conceding independent/alternative notions of the beautiful. They generally took as granted the uniformity of intellectual judgements, where evolutionary progress was both ethical and intellectual/scientific, even when speculating on the development of different types of mind. As characteristic of future-oriented visions of progress by the first decades of the twentieth century, sexual selection was subsumed under natural selection.

Wallace, Sclater e os modelos de distribuição biogeográfica

Desde o início da carreira de Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) como naturalista, além de se interessar pela origem das espécies, ele se preocupou com a distribuição geográfica dos animais e plantas. Contudo, Wallace não foi o único autor de sua época a se interessar por esse assunto. Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) zoólogo inglês, propôs em 1858 um modelo de para explicar a distribuição geográfica das aves. O objetivo deste artigo é discutir sobre a proposta de Sclater no contexto da biogeografia da época, procurando apontar em que evidências ele se baseou. Adicionalmente, esclarecer quais aspectos da proposta de Sclater foram aceitos por Wallace, bem como o que Sclater acrescentou de novo em relação ao assunto. Este estudo levou à conclusão de que embora Wallace tenha defendido e se baseado no modelo de distribuição biogeográfica de Sclater para explicar a distribuição geográfica de outras classes de animais, ele não negou os problemas a ela inerentes. Apontou a existência de casos da distribuição geográfica de alguns grupos que não se enquadravam na proposta de Sclater.

Ewolucjonizm przed Darwinem: Matthew, Blyth, Wallace

Przedmiotem niniejszego artykułu jest analiza tekstów opublikowanych przed pierwszym wydaniem książki Darwina O powstawaniu gatunków, czyli o utrzymywaniu się doskonalszych ras w walce o byt. Autorzy tych tekstów to Patrick Matthew (1831), Edward Blyth (1835) i Alfred Russel Wallace (1855). Nie były one dotychczas przedmiotem szerszego zainteresowania polskich uczonych, a należy je uznać za istotne w historii teorii ewolucji.

How the Easter Egg Weevils Got Their Spots: Phylogenomics reveals Müllerian Mimicry in Pachyrhynchus (Coleoptera, Curculionidae)

ABSTRACTThe evolutionary origins of mimicry in the Easter Egg weevil, Pachyrhynchus, have fascinated researchers since first noted more than a century ago by Alfred Russel Wallace. Müllerian mimicry, or mimicry in which two or more distasteful species look similar, is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Given the varied but discrete color patterns in Pachyrhynchus, this genus presents one of the best opportunities to study the evolution of both perfect and imperfect mimicry. We analyzed more than 10,000 UCE loci using a novel partitioning strategy to resolve the relationships of closely related species in the genus. Our results indicate that many of the mimetic color patterns observed in sympatric species are due to convergent evolution. We suggest that this convergence is driven by frequency-dependent selection.