If ever a scientist didn't get his fair share of posthumous glory, it was Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace co-founded the theory of natural selection with the country gentleman Charles Darwin, but though Wallace enjoyed recognition during his own lifetime, his contributions were largely overlooked for much of the 20th century. And while he lived, he led a much less luxurious life than Darwin.
Before starting a family, Wallace's father Thomas spent his days as an idle gentleman. He gave up that idleness reluctantly, wandering from one bad investment or low paying job to another. This financial uncertainty may have been what fostered in the future naturalist an unusual sensitivity to people others considered inferior. He sympathized with both the poor and the so-called savages of other cultures, a trait illustrated by his ability to see himself through their eyes. He once recounted:
One day when I was rambling in the forest, an old man stopped to look at me catching an insect. He stood very quietly till I had pinned and put it away in my collecting box, when he could contain himself no longer, but bent almost double, and enjoyed a hearty roar of laughter.
Something else likely had a lifelong influence on the young Wallace. Born along the border between England and Wales, he noted that the Welsh not only sounded different but also looked different. Some locals, meanwhile, called the tall blonde boy the "little Saxon." Celts filled Ireland, Scotland and Wales while Anglo-Saxons filled most of the rest of the British Isles, and the ethnic differences related to geography no doubt interested him in the connection between place and race.
The family moved to Hertford north of London when Wallace was six, and stayed there until he was 14. At that time, he had to leave school and start working in London. He never studied at a university, but he used his meager spare time to continue his unofficial education. While visiting his older brother in London, he took a break from the weekly sermons on fire and brimstone he always heard in the parish back home. He attended scientific lectures, read Tom Paine's Age of Reason, and read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation endorsing transmutation. Vestiges had a long-lasting effect on him, and he set the goal of uncovering how organisms change over time. (Like Darwin, he also read Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, which also influenced his thinking.)
While he enjoyed his new intellectual liberties, Wallace worked as a surveyor for his older brother. In that occupation, he started a practice that would recur later in his life: initiating correspondence with prominent scientists to discuss their field of research. (A 2006 discovery revealed an unpublished letter of his to William Henry Fox Talbot about ways of improving telescope mirrors. On January 24, 2013, marking the centennial of Wallace's death, the Natural History Museum of London opened to the public an online database of his correspondence.) Wallace worked as a surveyor for several years before setting out for the Amazon to work as a commercial collector. There, he searched the New World's rainforests looking for exotic specimens for European buyers. Early on, he began to see himself (accurately) as more than a collector — as a scientific traveler. But the voyage from South America back to England ended in disaster: a fire forced everyone to abandon ship, and Wallace lost virtually everything he had collected. On the bright side, he had a shrewd agent who had insured the collections for £200, affording Wallace the opportunity to live fairly comfortably in London for a year, instead of plunging back into a demanding job to survive. He mourned his losses, participated in scientific societies, wrote books and papers (though they suffered from the loss of evidence consumed by the ship fire), and started planning his next expedition. Not long afterwards, he was in the Malay Archipelago.
While in the archipelago, Wallace was unfussy about where he lived, what he ate, and how he traveled. He lived in huts with thatched roofs, ate whatever the natives ate, and paddled himself around in a canoe when necessary. He was particular about what he collected, however, and usually collected six specimens for every species. Driven by the need to make a living as a commercial collector, Wallace realized early on that tremendous variety exists within each species. And while he recognized that species change, as Darwin did, Wallace also realized that one species can evolve not just into a different species, but into multiple species.
Among Wallace's discoveries in the South Pacific was a breakthrough in biogeography: the Wallace Line, the recognition of distinctly different organisms living in close proximity to each other in similar environments. What he could not know at the time — the theory of plate tectonics was a long way off — was that this line marks the ancient boundary between Laurasia and Gondwana, supercontinents of the Mesozoic.
In the 1870s, Wallace took his species-distribution ideas further, dividing the world into six regions, which he described in The Geographic Distribution of Animals. His theory was based on far more limited information than biologists have today, but although scientists have long argued over the optimal placement of the dividing line between Australian and Asian fauna, his original map is still in use. A study published at the beginning of 2013 refined Wallace's view with richer data, and identified 11 broad zoogeographic realms: Oceanian, Panamanian, Nearctic, Neotropical, Saharo-Arabian, Afrotropical, Palearctic, Sino-Japanese, Oriental, Madagascan, and Australian.
Wallace made a similar breakthrough in understanding evolution. In 1855, he published a paper entitled "On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species" in a prestigious periodical, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, explaining the spatial and temporal closeness of similar species. A few years later, weak with a bout of malaria, Wallace had a flash of insight on how species change. The result was his scientific paper "On the Tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type." Although he didn't use the term "natural selection," he argued the same thing:
An antelope with shorter or weaker legs must necessarily suffer more from the attacks of the feline carnivora; the passenger pigeon with less powerful wings would sooner or later be affected in its powers of procuring a regular supply of food . . . If, on the other hand, any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence, that variety must inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers. . . . Now, let some alteration of physical conditions occur in the district — a long period of drought, a destruction of vegetation by locusts, the irruption of some new carnivorous animal seeking "pastures new" . . . it is evident that, of all the individuals composing the species, those forming the least numerous and most feebly organized variety would suffer first, and, were the pressure severe, must soon become extinct.
Rather than send his paper directly to a publisher, Wallace instead sent the manuscript to Charles Darwin, with whom he had initiated a correspondence. A painstaking study of 1858 postal connections, published at the end of 2011, retraced the 77-day journey of Wallace's packet to Darwin, from Ternate to Down House, including a brief trip on the swaying back of a camel between Suez and Alexandria.
Darwin had earlier been warned, by friends who had seen Wallace's 1855 paper, that the young man was onto the process of evolution, but he apparently hadn't taken their warnings very seriously. Upon seeing Wallace's paper, which Darwin described to his friends as "admirably expressed and quite clear" compared to his own jumbled correspondence, he realized he was about to be scooped, and decided to end the 20-year delay in publishing his own theory. Wallace's paper and Darwin's various notes and correspondence on the subject were read at the same Linnaean Society meeting, in London on July 1, 1858. In fact, neither paper made a huge splash at the time. The next year, while Wallace still roughed it in the archipelago, Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
Although Wallace independently reached the same conclusion, it has usually been Darwin's name alone associated with the theory of natural selection. Wallace expressed no resentment at receiving less credit. He remained a gracious man to the last, commenting late in life that his greatest achievement had been to prompt Darwin to publish his own theory. Darwin, in turn, proved to be a good friend to Wallace — recalling "how generous and noble was his disposition" in his autobiography, and campaigning vigorously to secure Wallace a government pension he desperately needed. Wallace, it turned out, had no more skill in managing money than his father.
Wallace held other interests besides biology, some of them controversial: land nationalization, a vehement opposition to vaccinations, speculation on the true identity of Shakespeare, and a belief in spiritualism. In fact, other scientists tried to investigate spiritualism, but he lacked their skepticism. His belief may have been influenced by the untimely death of his eldest child; like many others, Wallace hoped to communicate with his lost loved one through a medium. His belief in spiritualism caused him to differ with Darwin on the origin of the human mind. Darwin saw humans as highly evolved organisms; Wallace believed that the human mind was inspired by something outside evolution, and that the human spirit could continue to progress after death.
Wallace's beliefs about man's role in the universe changed with time. In later years, he claimed that the whole purpose of the universe was the development of mankind, just "a little lower than the angels." As a young man, though, he thought differently. In one passage about the King Bird of Paradise, Wallace both marveled at the existence of such amazing creatures that had so seldom been seen by people, and made a prescient observation about humanity's impact on nature:
I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.
Wallace's accomplishments were remarkable. He assembled vast plant and animal collections, many of his discoveries completely new to science. He wrote more than 20 books, and roughly 700 articles and published letters. His work secured him not only election into the Royal Society, but the award of the Society's Royal Medal in 1868. He keenly understood the role of competition in nature, but maintained throughout his life that cooperation and universal education were the surest paths to human achievement.
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Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated February 1, 2013