Historian Explodes Stereotypes About Intelligent Design
This episode of ID the Future has the second installment of Casey Luskin's interview of Michael A. Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwinism (2009). In this podcast, historian Flannery explains how Wallace held views different from Darwin, and thus poses a challenge to modern ID-critics:
"You see, with Wallace they're faced with a real problem, because with Wallace they're faced in one individual someone who is non-Christian, non-creationist, a thorough evolutionist, who not only independently discovered natural selection but came to a view of nature imbued with intelligent design. So an unamended Wallace would really force the Darwinists to admit 3 important things. First, it's absolutely possible to believe in evolution without subscribing to Darwinism. ... Second, ID is not nor was it from the beginning creationist. And third, ID was derived from scientific observations more than a hundred years ago, drawn from Alfred Russel Wallace."
Michael Flannery is Professor and Associate Director for Historical Collections at the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has previously published on Alfred Russel Wallace in Forbes Magazine online, and his book is published by Erasmus Press.
