A Genius Overshadowed by Darwin: Who is Alfred Russel Wallace?

Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823, in England. By the time Wallace was thirteen, his fortunes had dwindled so much that his family couldn't afford to have him educated. The carpenter's apprentice was sent to London to stay with his older brother. He completed a grammar school in Hertford.

Alfred Russel Wallace worked with his brother, who was a surveyor and surveyor, between 1840 and 1843. Land surveying allowed Wallace to spend his days outdoors, and a new era began in his life. He discovered geology and botany by purchasing the plant structure booklet published by the Society for the Spreading of Useful Knowledge (Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), which he bought in 1841. Later he became interested in insects as well.

Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.

In 1844, he worked at a school in Leicester for a while, and after the death of his elder brother William in 1845, he returned to the map-cadastre business.

In 1848, he traveled to Brazil to collect specimens from the Amazon rainforest with the naturalist Henry Walter Bates, whom he met at a public library in Leicester. On his way home after four years in the Amazon, the ship burned and sank, and the samples he had spent years collecting were wasted. As a result of the fire, he found himself in an open-top boat in the Sargasso Sea, about one thousand hundred kilometers (seven hundred miles) from the shore. In the middle of his expedition, Henry had a serious argument with Walter Bates and was left friendless. The boat that saved Wallace nearly sank.

The idea of researching the origins of species took shape in his mind during this trip. He returned to England in 1852. His map of the Uaupés River, a tributary of the Amazon River, remained in use for more than fifty years.

Wallace taught himself a crash course in animals and plants, going on local collecting trips and frequently visiting the British Museum. He also read everything he could find on natural science, including Robert Chambers' highly impressive book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.

Alfred Russel Wallace worked on the theory of evolution at the same time as Charles Darwin. While Charles Darwin put his work on the shelf to be published after his death, thinking that it would attract a reaction from religious and conservative circles, a letter he received in 1858 from Wallace, who had prepared a similar work, encouraged him to publish his work.

Darwin and Wallace jointly wrote and published a thesis on the Theory of Evolution and natural selection. After disagreeing with Darwin on some points, Wallace, as a person who believed in the existence of a soul, believed that God created through evolution and argued that human mental activities could not be explained by natural selection and similar mechanisms. While he suggested that human body structure was formed as a result of natural selection, he argued that, unlike Charles Darwin, non-biological factors other than natural selection played a role in the development of mental power.

Between 1854 and 1862, he was in the Malay Archipelago with the support of the Royal Geographical Society for 8 years in Indonesia and Malaysia to conduct research and collect samples. In this research, he examined the plant and animal species of the region. Here he collected 125,660 specimens of 310 mammals, 100 reptiles, 8,050 birds, 7,500 shells, 13,100 butterflies, 83,200 beetles, and 13,400 other insects, including more than a thousand new species.

He concluded that species evolved through natural selection and descended from a common origin. He collected his work here in his work, The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869. Wallace, who previously defined man as a being from the same origin as higher apes, later argued that a creature with superior features and intelligence like a human could not be explained by the laws of nature and that supernatural forces were effective in the formation of the human mind.

Alfred Russel Wallace was married in 1866 and they had three children, Herbert Wallace, Violet Wallace, and William Wallace.

Alfred Russel Wallace died on November 7, 1913, in Broadstone, Dorset, England at the age of 90.

160-year-old riddle: Scientists solve the mystery of the invisible line passing through Indonesia

An invisible line, mapped in 1863, discovered by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, clearly separates species from one another.

In line with Wallace's findings, this line, which appears to extend from the Indian Ocean to the north, crosses the Lombok Strait and Makassar Strait in the Southern Hemisphere and heads east.

Thus, it separates Borneo and Australia. The area on the Asian side of the line is called Oriental, and the area on the Australian side is called Australian animal geography.

The creatures on the Asian side of the line are only of Asian origin. On the Australian side, there are creatures of both Asian and Australian origin.

For more than a century, scientists have studied the factor that allows Asian species to move to the other side but hinders the movement of Australian species.

Dr. Alex Skeels of the Australian National University and colleagues have found an answer to that question in new research: plate tectonics.

About 35 million years ago, according to Skeels' report, Australia was much further south and was attached to Antarctica.

At some point Australia broke away from Antarctica and drifted north over millions of years, crashing into Asia. This collision gave birth to the volcanic islands known today as Indonesia.

This separation of Australia from Antarctica revealed a new, much colder sea passage that caused dramatic cooling of the Earth's climate at the time.

The climate of the newly formed Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia remained much warmer and wetter, while Australia was much colder and drier.

As a result, creatures in Asia were well adapted to living in the Malay Archipelago and used these islands as a "stepping stone" to move towards Australia, Skeels said.

"This was not the case for the Australian species," the scientist added.

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Alfred Russel Wallace

Evolution's red-hot radical

https://www.nature.com/articles/496162a