Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace is quietly yanking the rug out from under a cozy Victorian habit: treating animal behavior as a kind of immovable truth, then reverse-engineering bodies to match it. He’s describing a default storytelling mode in natural history, one that flatters human common sense. If an animal does X, then surely its anatomy must be “designed” for X. The move feels empirical, even humble. Wallace is pointing out it’s also a trap.

The subtext is methodological and, for its era, mildly subversive. “Habits and instincts” sound like stable facts, but they’re slippery: hard to observe cleanly, easy to anthropomorphize, and often inferred from a handful of encounters. By calling them the “fixed point,” Wallace exposes how writers smuggled assumption in as foundation. Structure and organization then become a just-so explanation, “specially adapted” not by evidence but by narrative convenience. The sentence is a critique of explanatory direction: start with what looks purposeful, then retrofit biology to preserve that purpose.

Context matters. Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection, is working in a moment when older natural theology and newer evolutionary thinking are colliding in polite prose. His target isn’t only religion; it’s a broader intellectual reflex to treat nature as already interpreted. Evolution demands the opposite posture: anatomy, ecology, and history constrain behavior; behavior can shift; selection can favor bodies that work “well enough” rather than perfectly.

The power of the line is its calm tone. No fireworks, just a surgical “generally the custom” that indicts a whole genre’s complacency and invites a more honest science: one that doesn’t confuse the story that sounds right with the mechanism that is.