As An Influence On Cybernetics
In a largely overlooked passage from Wallace's essay, he says of the evolutionary principle:
The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.
The cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson would observe in the 1970s that though seeing it only as an illustration, Wallace had "probably said the most powerful thing that’d been said in the 19th century". Bateson revisited the topic in his 1979 book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and other scholars have continued to explore the connection between natural selection and systems theory.
Read more about this topic: On The Tendency Of Species To Form Varieties; And On The Perpetuation Of Varieties And Species By
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