Alfred Russel Wallace was one of the greatest naturalists of all time, second in that regard perhaps only to Charles Darwin. Wallace's early training was as a surveyor and architect, but after 1845 he devoted his long and productive career to the study of natural history. He undertook several famous expeditions to the tropics, where he collected many species of plants and animals previously unknown to science. His most memorable expeditions were to the Amazon and Negro Rivers of South America (1848-1852), and to the East Indies (1854-1862), visiting peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, various other islands of Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia.
While in Southeast Asia, Wallace developed an outline of a theory of evolution by natural selection, which he shared with Charles Darwin in a letter in 1858. Wallace's idea astonished Darwin, who had been working on a similar theory for more than a decade, based on his own extensive observations during the famous voyage of the Beagle (1831-1835), and on years of analyzing specimens afterwards. In fact, Darwin had been preparing a voluminous rationalization of his theory of natural selection for several decades. Initially, an enormously disappointed Darwin believed that Wallace's letter to him held priority over his own unpublished writings about natural selection. However, after consultation with Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, two famous biologists of the time, Darwin decided that his theory and Wallace's would be announced at the same time, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London in 1858. There, an unpublished manuscript that Darwin had written thirteen years earlier, and Wallace's letter to Darwin, were read to the assembly. The result was a storm of scientific and social controversy, because the theory of evolution by natural selection was in direct opposition to the leading ideas of the time, which held that the Universe and everything it contained, including all life on Earth, had been created by God only a few thousand years previously. In 1859, Darwin published his famous book, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, which is now regarded as perhaps the most famous and influential work in biology. Today, the theory of evolution by natural selection is mostly credited to Charles Darwin, because of his painstaking documentation and analysis of supporting evidence. Wallace, however, should still be acknowledged as the co-discoverer of the theory.
Wallace is also famous for another theory that he developed about the biogeography of the East Indies. He observed that there is a distinct division of the flora and fauna among these many islands of this region. Some islands have a dominant influence of species of Australasian affinity, while others are of Oriental (or Asian) origin. The "boundary" between these great biogeographical realms, whose natural intermixing had been prevented for millions of years by deep, submarine trenches, is today known as "Wallace's Line." It separates the ecosystems and species of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Bali, the Philippines, and many smaller islands, from those of Sulawesi, Logbook, Timor, New Guinea, New Britain, and Australia.
Alfred Russel Wallace was a prolific writer. Among his ten books were: Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853), The Malay Archipelago (1869), Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870), The Geographic Distribution of Animals (1876), Darwinism (1889), Man's Place in the Universe (1903), and The World of Life (1910).
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