Slotten, 2004, for further discussion). Upon his return to England in 1862, Wallace was enthusiastically welcomed into the circle of "Darwinians" that included Huxley, Spencer, Sir Charles Lyell, and of course, Darwin himself. Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, securing for himself the lion's share of posterity's recognition for the origin of natural selection and negating the need for Wallace to write his own book on the subject. However, the seminal work made no more than a passing reference to the implications of the theory for Man. Wallace took it upon himself to address the issue, and did so in 1864 by publishing what Darwin called "the best paper that ever appeared in the Anthropological Review" (Marchant, 1975). In "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the 'Theory of Natural Selection,'" Wallace proposed that Man had evolved in two stages (Eiseley, 1961). The first "bodily" stage of Man's development occurred via natural selection in the same manner as the evolution of all other species, with the organism adapting in response to the pressures of the environment and competition. However, the second "mental" stage of Man's development, Wallace insisted, ushered in a new era in the evolution of life. With the origin of the uniquely human brain, the human organism began to shape the environment, rather than the other way around. The gradual modification and specialization of body parts was no longer necessary, because the human brain emerged as an unprecedented tool for modifying and specializing environmental factors in the best interests of the organism. Wallace concluded: The same power which has modified animals has acted on man… [However], as soon as the human intellect became developed above a certain low stage, man's body would cease to be materially affected by
natural selection, because the development of his mental faculties would render important modifications of its form and structure unnecessary (1973). As historian of science Loren Eiseley noted: "Wallace was apparently the first evolutionist to recognize…that, with the emergence of that bodily specialization which constitutes the human brain, bodily specialization itself might be said to be outmoded" (1961). On this aspect of the question of Man, Darwin and Wallace were certainly in agreement: Man had a unique consciousness that allowed him (at least to a certain extent) to escape the shackles of the classic means of evolution. However, their theories vastly diverged, becoming essentially irreconcilable, when they concurrently addressed the issue of how the mind of Man came to be, and to what extent it was differentiable from consciousness in all other species. While Darwin insisted time and again that "the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind" (Darwin, 1981), Wallace became convinced that natural selection could not account for the appearance of human consciousness as distinct from that of lower animals (Wallace, 1973). He realized that the mind of the primitive man was vastly different from that of the ape, and comparatively very similar to that of the modern civilized European; thus, the human brain had achieved the greater portion of its structural capacity early in the evolution of Man (Eiseley 1961). Wallace was certain that natural selection could not have produced in early man a brain with the latent capacity to appreciate high art or perform complex algorithms. Man's mind is too "perfect," and too marked by abilities that would seem to have little bearing on the survival of Man in a state of nature, to have been the product of

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