From the jungle to The Dell

Wallace Anniversary - Commemorating a great Evolutionary Biologist

2013 is the 100th year since the death of Alfred Russell Wallace (8th Jan 1823 - 7th Nov 1913), in the words of David Quammen "the best field naturalist of the nineteenth century." See Quammen's retrospective review of Wallace's seminal book, "The Malay Archipelago".

Wallace tends to get short shrift in evolutionary compendiums, especially those from the mid-20th century. This is probably because he held to some unconventional ideas that, with more information, were largely rejected as unnecessary, wrong or irrational. This is unfortunate because, as Darwin himself recognised, Wallace was an impressively original independent thinker. His 1855 Sarawak paper, which he also discussed with Darwin, raised the concept of regional allopatric speciation leading to sister species in adjacent areas. In his Ternate paper, he independently arrived at the concept of evolution by natural selection, leading to the joint presentation with Darwin to the Linnaean Society. A later paper on the biogeography of Malesia first described his eponymic disjunction between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia, although the term "Wallace's Line" came later (I'm not quite sure who coined it, probably Huxley in 1868. I want to note too that Wallace was not the first, nor the only great biogeographer working in Malesia around that time, both Müller and the Sclater brothers also drew lines in the same area, viz Simpson "Too many lines").

Among diverse interests Wallace was a socialist, who campaigned for nationalisation of land and protectionism in the first era of global trade. He was also interested in mysticism - communing with spirits through séances - in fact he did not believe that evolution applied to the human mind or soul (greatly to the dismay of Darwin and peers such as Huxley, Hooker and Lyell). But, he was also a very modern thinker in other senses, being an environmentalist concerned with extinction far ahead of his time. Even more so, in his last decade he wrote two books on exobiology and the unlikelihood of life on Mars (perhaps responding to HG Wells's 1989 War of the Worlds).

Wallace and Darwin maintained good relations and a lively correspondence throughout Darwin's life - much of it in strident, though amicable disagreement.

Should anyone care to purchase a lovely portion of evolutionary history's history, The Dell, a house built by Wallace in Grays on the lower Thames, England, is up for sale (although perhaps you may first need a lottery ticket).