By George Beccaloni, 2013. Minor revisions 2025 & 2026.
SUMMARY: This article argues that Alfred Russel Wallace, not August Weismann, should be regarded as the first neo-Darwinian. Although the term “neo-Darwinism” is usually associated with the later rejection of Lamarckian inheritance, Wallace had already taken this position in his 1858 Ternate essay, where he dismissed Lamarck’s explanation of adaptive change and showed that natural selection made it unnecessary. Darwin, by contrast, continued to accept the inheritance of acquired characters, including use-and-disuse effects, and later proposed pangenesis partly to explain how such inheritance might occur. Wallace’s lifelong insistence that adaptive evolutionary change is produced by natural selection, not by the inheritance of acquired traits, made him “more Darwinian than Darwin himself” in the later, anti-Lamarckian sense. In this respect, modern neo-Darwinism is better understood as Wallacean.
I have sometimes heard it said that Alfred Russel Wallace coined the term "Darwinism". This is incorrect, although he did use the term (perhaps unfortunately!) as the title of an excellent book about evolution which he published in 1889. The term "Darwinism" (as relating to Charles Darwin's theories rather than to his grandfather Erasmus' ideas) was actually first used by "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley in a review he wrote of Darwin's "Origin of Species" in 1860. Curiously, the related term "neo-Darwinism", which refers to the 'modern' view of Darwinism minus the inheritance of acquired characters (i.e. Darwinism without Lamarckism), was coined by Samuel Butler in 1880 with reference to Alfred Russel Wallace's views on evolution. Wallace rejected Lamarckism throughout his long life, correctly insisting that natural selection is the sole mechanism of adaptive evolutionary change and that traits acquired by organisms during their lifetime (e.g. a blacksmith's well-developed arm muscles) are not inherited by their offspring.
Wallace's first published rejection of Lamarckism was in his 'Ternate' essay of 1858 - which formed part of the famous paper in which he and Darwin proposed the theory of natural selection for the first time. Wallace wrote:
"The hypothesis of Lamarck — that progressive changes in species have been produced by the attempts of animals to increase the development of their own organs, and thus modify their structure and habits — has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species, and it seems to have been considered that when this was done the whole question has been finally settled; but the view here developed renders such an hypothesis quite unnecessary, by showing that similar results must be produced by the action of principles constantly at work in nature... Neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes [ancestral forms] with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them."
Wallace’s Ternate essay therefore already contained the essential feature later associated with neo-Darwinism: an explanation of adaptive evolutionary change by natural selection without inheritance of acquired characters. By contrast, Darwin always believed that Lamarckism — what he called the inherited effects of “use and disuse” — played a role in evolution alongside natural selection (e.g. see chapter 5 of his Origin of Species), and in 1868 he even proposed a now-discredited theory, pangenesis, partly to explain how acquired modifications might be transmitted.1
I find it ironic that not only was the term “neo-Darwinism” first used with reference to Wallace’s evolutionary views, but that Wallace was actually the first neo-Darwinian in the later technical sense of the term. He was “more Darwinian than Darwin himself” because, unlike Darwin, he explained adaptive evolutionary change by natural selection without invoking the inheritance of acquired characters. Weismann later supplied a hereditarian theory that reinforced anti-Lamarckism, but Wallace had already formulated the anti-Lamarckian selectionist position decades earlier. In this important respect, modern neo-Darwinism is historically misnamed: it would more accurately be called “Wallaceism”.
Notes:
The term "neo-Darwinism" is usually said to have been coined by George Romanes in 1888 (often erroneously stated to be 1895 or 1896), but it in fact dates back to Samuel Butler's book "Unconscious Memory" published in 1880. Butler used it in the sense described above and cited the above passage from Wallace's 1858 essay as an example of this view (which incidentally Butler disagreed with)!
The term "Wallaceism" was apparently coined by George Romanes in 1889 to refer to Wallace's view that evolutionary change is driven by natural selection alone and does not involve Lamarckism, unlike Darwin’s own theory. Romanes believed that Wallace was wrong, but it turns out that Romanes was!
ENDNOTES
1. In his 1905 autobiography My Life, Wallace remarked: "Pangenesis, and the Heredity of Acquired Characters.—Darwin always believed in the inheritance of acquired characters, such as the effects of use and disuse of organs and of climate, food, etc., on the individual, as did almost every naturalist, and his theory of pangenesis was invented to explain this among other affects [sic] of heredity. I therefore accepted pangenesis at first, because I have always felt it a relief (as did Darwin) to have some hypothesis, however provisional and improbable, that would serve to explain the facts; and I told him that "I shall never be able to give it up till a better one supplies its place." I never imagined that it could be directly disproved, but Mr. F. Galton's experiments of transfusing a large quantity of the blood of rabbits into other individuals of quite different breeds, and afterwards finding that the progeny was not in the slightest degree altered, did seem to me to be very nearly a disproof, although Darwin did not accept it as such. But when, at a much later period, Dr. Weismann showed that there is actually no valid evidence for the transmission of such characters, and when he further set forth a mass of evidence in support of his theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm, the "better theory" was found, and I finally gave up pangenesis as untenable. But this new theory really simplifies and strengthens the fundamental doctrine of natural selection.
It will thus appear that none of my differences of opinion from Darwin imply any real divergence as to the overwhelming importance of the great principle of natural selection, while in several directions I believe that I have extended and strengthened it. The principle of "utility," which is one of its chief foundation-stones, I have always advocated unreservedly; while in extending this principle to almost every kind and degree of coloration, and in maintaining the power of natural selection to increase the infertility of hybrid unions, I have considerably extended its range. Hence it is that some of my critics declare that I am more Darwinian than Darwin himself, and in this, I admit, they are not far wrong."
References
[Huxley, T.H.] 1860. Darwin On the origin of Species. Westminster Review, 17(n.s.): 541-70.
Romanes, G. 1889. Mr. Wallace on Darwinism. Contemporary Review, 56: 244-258.