Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s lesser-feted codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, saw things differently. He was convinced that natural selection could not shed light on the human capacities for music, art, and, in particular, language. In the competitive arena of survival, our singing, painting, and chattering ancestors were, in Wallace’s view, no better off than their less flamboyant cousins. Wallace could see only one way forward: “We must therefore admit the possibility,” he wrote in the widely read Quarterly Review, “that in the development of the human race, a Higher
...more
