Letters of Alfred Russel Wallace Online

The collected letters of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, have been put online by the Natural History Museum.  Wallace was the subject of a chapter in the David Quammen book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. The chapter was called "The Man Who Knew Islands." Where Darwin used the Galapagos Islands and the terrain of South America to devise his theory, Wallace used the islands of Indonesia.  The site is billed as having:

• iconic correspondence between Wallace and Charles Darwin about evolution by natural selection
• important observations and discoveries made when in the Malay Archipelago (1854 - 1862)
• fascinating discussions on a variety of subjects, scientific and social such as glaciology, anthropology, epidemiology, astrobiology, socialism, land reform and spiritualism

Wallace was a spiritualist and began to infuse his scientific writings with spiritualism, a development which dismayed Darwin, who had gone to great lengths to show that natural selection could be thought of in scientific terms, alone.

William Reville on Religion and Science

The Irish Times has a good post by William Reville on the nature of science and what science does to answer questions. In it, he tackles a section that is persistently misinterpreted and misunderstood by modern-day creationism: historical science. After discussing what is understood to be popular science involving experimentation and replication, He writes:

However, not all aspects of the natural world are amenable to investigation by the form of the scientific method just described. For example, phenomena and processes that have developed over historical time, such as the origin and evolution of life or the origin and evolution of the universe, must be investigated in a different manner. Here you must use numerous lines of enquiry, and conclusions can only be drawn after these converge to produce an unmistakeable conclusion. Thus, the theory of evolution through natural selection rests on the converging evidence of the history of life on earth gleaned from palaeontology, geology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, biogeography, molecular genetics, physiology, and so on.

This is what many creationists fail to understand—it is not just the fossil record or just genetics or just anything that supports evolution. It is the whole kit 'n kaboodle. He also rightly questions whether or not the existence of God could ever be shown by using science. This is something I have argued for years. Read the whole thing.