Disappearing without a trace
The three scholars that I have chosen (following a suggestion in L. H. Martin 2014: 163-5) represent only a tiny fraction of possible cases, but no matter how big the sample, whatever the outcome and the brilliance, their scientific hypotheses were soon forgotten.
Baldwin's, Harrison's and Macalister's ideas were to leave almost no trace in the HoR. Baldwin fell in disgrace after being found in a brothel in 1908, and ‘what was thought to be even more scandalous [...] was that the prostitutes were black' (Plotkin 2004: 88). Notwithstanding the fact that charges against him were eventually dropped, he was forced to resign from Johns Hopkins University, and relocated in France (Richards 1987: 451-502; Wozniak and Santiago-Blay 2013). Baldwin's demise was a setback for the scientific study of culture, and his ideas are just being currently rediscovered (Morgan and Harris 2015; independent theories that described the same mechanism behind the Baldwin Effect had almost no impact on the study of culture). He anticipated many of the current pillars of both CSR and ESR, mainly the elaboration of both the theory of mind (or ToM), which is the innate ability to recognize what other individuals think and what their desires and beliefs behind their behaviours might be, and the epidemiology of cultural representations, which explains the cognitive mechanisms in charge of the selection, retention and transmission of ideas (Plotkin 2004: 77), while providing a unified Darwinian frame. As far as the scientific study of religion is concerned, Baldwin argued for a ‘comparison and correlation of the results reached by' the ‘anthropo-genetic study of religion', i.e. the comparative and anthropological history of religion(s), and the ‘psycho-genetic study', that is, psychological aspects of religion (Baldwin 1909: 90-1). This consilient approach has been reinvigorated only recently (e.g. Burman 2014).Harrison's evolutionary psychology and her focus on cognition were destined to oblivion too - although her situation is more complex. As seen above, Harrison's evolutionary foray exhibited some of the spiritualist biases that were beginning to characterize the field at that time (Wheeler-Barclay 2010: 235-42). Harrison ended her contribution by citing a complacent passage on magic from esotericist Eliphas Levi (Harrison 1909: 510) and saving ‘mystical apprehension' from criticism, which she thought might reveal the existence of something true, thus crucially undermining her plea for scientific clarity and her lucid evolutionary rebuttal of degenerationism (Harrison 1909: 510-11). Harrison was aware of her self-s abotage: ‘I am deeply conscious that what I say here is a merely personal opinion or sentiment, unsupported and perhaps unsupportable by reason, and very possibly quite worthless, but for fear of misunderstanding I prefer to state it' (Harrison 1909: 511 n. 2; my emphasis). Harrison also ‘accept[ed] uncritically the assumption that bedevilled ritual studies, that what the anthropologists learned about savages was indicative of the early development of human beings everywhere at all times' (Robinson 2002: 209). Finally, a misguided focus on the differences between ‘primitive' and modern cultures drew scholarly attention away from the outstanding similarities among religious rites and ethological rituals exhibited by nonhuman animals - a Darwinian point which would only be resurrected more than 80 years later. Admittedly, this mix makes any overall judgement of Harrison's scholarly legacy highly problematic, although, in the end, her penchant for pseudoscience did more harm than good to the comparative science of religion (cf. Wheeler-Barclay 2010). In any case, by highlighting the ‘psychosocial role' of ritual in an evolutionary framework, Harrison's work was in line with coeval cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research (Wheeler-Barclay 2010: 230-2).
As to Macalister's ideas, his adaptationist cultural in-group cooperation had no impact on the HoR whatsoever. Again, his ideas have been independently replicated only in recent times (e.g. Wilson 2002).