particularly as mediated through the likes of herbert spencer.so i as i was beginning to look at the process that created us, read reread darwin and began to despair that perhaps we were selfish, short-sighted, ruthless entities forged by an amoral and utterly cruel process. that it was this man here that really gave me hope that that may not necessarily be the case. alfred russell wallace lived a very long and full life, dying at the age of 90. at the age of 08, he was still -- 80, he was still writing and, in fact, i would argue his most important work was published in many 1904 in his eighth decade. and that's the title page of it there, "man's place in the universe: a study of the results of scientific research in relation to the unity or plurality of worlds." very very strange title indeed. but what this book really is, is a summary of wallace's understanding of what the evolutionary mechanism had created. he wasn't like darwin. he wasn't interested in drilling down with reduction of science ever more finely in terms of understanding the evo