G B
No, I don’t think so. This was before the museum was built. Wallace wrote a paper about the design of natural history museums.² He was the first to suggest that animals from one particular place or habitat should all be displayed together in order to give a sense of the fauna in that area. Museums like ours and the Powell-Cotton Museum, which still has the best formal dioramas in Britain, obviously took up this idea. I think the American Museum of Natural History has the best formal dioramas anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, there are no formal dioramas in our museum anymore. There used to be some in what’s known as the Rowland Ward Pavilion—Rowland Ward, the taxidermy company, produced these dioramas free of charge for the museum with the agreement that they would always be there on display. However, about 10 years ago or so, the museum broke this agreement and destroyed them.

E T
Why? Aren’t they of some historical value?

G B
They were just too old-fashioned. The museum needed space for storing old wooden cabinets and things. There was a beautiful display of a scene on the African Plains with a giraffe and giant sable antelope and then one of the Congo forests with other animals. It’s a shame they were destroyed. As for the formal diorama idea, I don’t know if Wallace ever published another paper on it or whether it was just present in his book The Geographical Distribution of Animals. The plates sort of show the animals of one place illustrated together.

A S
This brings me to another question about curatorial thinking, about the importance of commemorating Wallace. Why is it important for you to bring the memory of Wallace into the grand narratives (especially of Darwin) already dominant in the space?

G B
I think the current story about the theory of natural selection is fatally flawed, and is just a kind of fairytale. Darwin has been central while all the other people have been forgotten. After all, Wallace was the co-discoverer of the theory, as he published the paper with Darwin 14 or 15 months before On the Origin of Species was published. So, in my view, he deserves half the credit, but not only that! He and Darwin almost exclusively, together, laid the foundations of modern evolutionary biology and all the other add-on theories in the early days, like understanding animal colouration in an evolutionary context, biogeography, etc. You know, if you think about the lasting scientific achievements of some of the prominent biologists of the nineteenth century like Haeckel and Huxley, you can’t really come up with anything. No major theoretical ideas that they developed have lasted to this day, whereas both Wallace and Darwin made really major contributions that still endure.

A S
So there’s a concern for historical accuracy, but what about the elements of stories that can be told differently through Wallace than Darwin. For example, Wallace is sometimes called the father of conservationism. He was very outspoken on certain issues which we’d now call conservation, which seem quite relevant for contemporary purposes.