Alfred Russel Wallace Biography

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World of Genetics on Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) were the first two significant evolutionists, each discovering natural selection independently of the other, but Darwin receiving most of the credit.

Wallace was born into a large, happy, middle-class family in Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales. While still a teenager, he became devoted to the utopian socialism of Robert Owen (1771-1858). He developed an interest in natural history while apprenticed as a surveyor to his older brother William in the late 1830s. William hired him in 1839 but laid him off in 1843. He then taught mathematics, English, drafting, and surveying at the Collegiate School in Leicester until 1845, when he returned to the surveying business.

In 1844, Wallace met Henry Walter Bates, with whom he set sail on 25 April 1848 to gather specimens in the Amazon basin. Bates wanted merely to collect and explore, while, in addition to that, Wallace's goal was to find organic evidence for the Owenist theory of social evolution. Bates stayed until 1859, but Wallace left in 1852. On the return voyage his ship sank. He managed to survive in a leaky lifeboat for ten days, but lost all his collections. After seventeen months in England and Switzerland, frustrated by having nothing left to study, he set out for the field again.

From 1854 to 1862, Wallace was in Indonesia and Malaysia. In Sarawak in 1855 he wrote a key paper in the history of evolutionary theory, "On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species. In 1856, he identified the imaginary "Wallace's line" of Asian/Australian faunal discontinuity between Bali and Borneo to the northwest and Lombok and Sulawesi to the southeast.

In February 1858, Wallace sent Darwin a copy of his recently written and still unpublished paper, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type," which outlined his ideas about natural selection. Darwin was then writing The Origin of Species and was afraid that Wallace might preempt him. He allegedly conspired with the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) to minimize the impact of Wallace's contribution to the theory of evolution. Thus the Linnean Society of London heard both Wallace's and Darwin's views on natural selection at its July 1858 meeting without Wallace's permission.

Some historians of science have speculated that if Wallace had been in London in 1858-1859, then his name, not Darwin's, would be primarily and inextricably linked to the concept of evolution. Even though contemporary scientists generally knew that Wallace and Darwin had separately and almost simultaneously conceived of the idea of natural selection, Wallace did not seem to mind Darwin getting the glory. He and Darwin remained friends. Apparently it was Wallace who suggested to Darwin that he use Herbert Spencer's (1820-1903) phrase, "survival of the fittest," to describe the process of natural selection for lay readers.

Wallace's and Darwin's theories of evolution grew apart. In 1864, Wallace presented "The Origin of Human Races Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection'" to the Anthropological Society of London, which indicated that he was beginning to think Darwinism too materialist, unable to account for the higher psychological and spiritual facts about humans. In later years Wallace's forays into spiritualism, extraterrestrialism, the anti-vaccination movement, and other unusual enterprises and causes lessened his reputation as a scientist. He died at home in Old Orchard, Broadstone, Dorset.