World of Scientific Discovery on Alfred Russel Wallace
An influential nineteenth-century naturalist and explorer, Wallace is credited with helping to formulate the principles of biological evolution and natural selection. Wallace was born in 1823 in Monmouthshire, England, the eighth of nine children of a poor family in England. His formal education ended when he left school at the age of 14, but he was a voracious reader who readily absorbed a wide variety of subjects. In 1837, Wallace moved to London to become apprenticed to his brother, a surveyor. His interest in botany and biology began during these years, and he began to read widely in the natural sciences. From 1844 to 1845, he was a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester, where he taught a variety of subjects.
Wallace's scientific career really began in 1847, when he convinced a fellow amateur botanist, Henry Walter Bates, to join him on an expedition to South America to collect objects of natural history. Wallace spent four years in the Amazon basin, returning to England in 1852. Although his extensive collections were lost at sea when his ship caught fire and sank, his subsequently published book, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853), proved to be quite popular and established his scientific reputation.
In 1854, Wallace sailed to the Malay archipelago (now Indonesia and Malaysia), where he spent eight years and traveled over 14,000 miles (22,526 km) while gathering and cataloging over 125,000 biological specimens. His observations and documentation of the natural history of the archipelago provided him with the scientific evidence to substantiate his evolutionary theory, which he had begun to formulate during his exploration of South America. The series of islands in the archipelago offered an ideal environment for studying the biological variation and geographic distribution of different species. The Wallace Line, an imaginary boundary that divides the natural distribution of Asian and Australian/New Guinea species and their independent biological evolution, is the result of Wallace's careful cataloguing of species he found in the archipelago. In addition to several scientific papers in which he presented his evidence for the evolutionary process, Wallace also published the scientific travel book The Malay Archipelago: The Land of Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise (1869). Wallace's attention to scientific and geographic detail, as well as an ethnographic interest unusual for a natural historian, has made this book an enduring success. A second book, The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), is still considered a classic of its type.
In 1855, Wallace published a paper, "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species," in which he tentatively gave his support for evolution. Although this paper attracted little public commentary, it was followed by an 1858 paper that Wallace mailed to Charles Darwin from the East Indies. This paper galvanized Darwin into publishing his own views on natural selection, and both Wallace's and Darwin's papers were presented before the Linnaean Society of London on August 20, 1858. Both articulated the theory of the origin of species by natural selection, which describes how haphazard genetic changes are perpetuated if they serve to enable a species to adapt to its natural environment.
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