He believed to the end that naturalselection was the motor of evolutionand stood shoulder to shoulder with the neo-Darwinists against the common creationist enemy that continues to stalk parts of American society most worryingly its school system.
These included well known naturalists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who collected specimens in the Amazon and Malay Archipelago and independently formulated a theory of evolution by naturalselection.
"I am quite skeptical that they present detailed, rigorous models of the evolution of the immune system through random mutation andnaturalselection, " he said.
In America creationists mostly of the Christian variety have long campaigned for textbooks to include alternatives to evolution by naturalselection as an account of the natural world and human origins.
Scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed the theory of evolution by naturalselection with Charles Darwin, corresponded with the great and good of 19th Century society.