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Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913)

Wallace was a naturalist, geographer, and social critic who arrived at natural selection independently of Darwin and prompted him to publish. He spent eight years in the Malay Archipelago collecting over 125,000 specimens, discovered the faunal boundary that bears his name, and founded biogeography as a discipline. He was also a committed spiritualist who held that natural selection could not account for the human intellect — a position he maintained for the rest of his life against the objections of Darwin, Huxley, and most of his scientific contemporaries. Andrew Berry has described him as having become “a prisoner of scientific parentheses” — the figure mentioned after Darwin, before the comma.

Life

Born 8 January 1823 in Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales. Trained as a surveyor with his brother William from his mid-teens — the spatial-mapping habit shaped his later science. In 1844 he met Henry Walter Bates, who introduced him to entomology and natural history. From 1848 to 1852 he and Bates collected in the Amazon and Rio Negro basins, parting to cover separate territory. On the return voyage the Helen caught fire mid-Atlantic; most of Wallace’s specimens were lost. He was adrift in a lifeboat for ten days before rescue.

From 1854 to 1862 — eight years — he collected in the Malay Archipelago (present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and surrounding islands), gathering over 125,000 specimens, many representing species new to science. The fieldwork produced the observations on which his major contributions rest.

He returned to England in 1862. In 1881 he founded the Land Nationalisation Society. A ten-month lecture tour of the United States followed in 1886–87. Honours included the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal (1892), the Linnean Society’s Gold Medal (1892), the Royal Society’s Copley Medal (1908), and the Order of Merit (1908). He died at Broadstone, Dorset, on 7 November 1913.

The path to natural selection

In 1855, working in Sarawak, Wallace published “On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of Species” — the Sarawak Law paper. Its formulation: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.” This was a spatio-temporal law about where new species appear, not yet a mechanism.

The mechanism came in 1858. During a malarial fever on the Moluccan island of Ternate, Wallace wrote “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type” — the Ternate essay — and sent it to Darwin. Recent scholarship (van Wyhe, Costa) cautions against reading the Ternate essay as a smooth continuation of the Sarawak Law; Wallace’s emphasis shifted between 1855 and 1858, and his path to selection was distinct from Darwin’s.

Darwin received the letter and recognised the mechanism he had been sitting on for twenty years. Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker arranged for Darwin’s earlier papers and Wallace’s essay to be read jointly at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared the following year. The exact dates of the Ternate dispatch and Darwin’s receipt have been refined and contested in recent scholarship; the traditional chronology is not fully settled.

Wallace accepted the arrangement and remained on good terms with Darwin. His own Darwinism (1889) presented the theory with refinements of his own.

Biogeography

Wallace is commonly called the father of biogeography. The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876, two volumes) and Island Life (1880) became the standard authorities in zoogeography and island biogeography. He proposed the first systematic biogeographic regionalisation — a scheme that remains a reference point in modern analyses. His classification of Amazonian rivers by water type, predicting fish distributions, is still cited.

The Wallace Line

A faunal discontinuity running between Bali and Lombok and northward through the Makassar Strait, separating Asian-affiliated fauna to the west from Australasian-affiliated fauna to the east. Wallace discovered it serendipitously: having missed a boat from Singapore to Makassar in 1856, he took a detour via Bali and Lombok and noticed sharp differences in bird communities between the two adjacent islands. The line was named by Huxley.

Spiritualism and the limits of natural selection

From the mid-1860s Wallace was a committed spiritualist. He held that natural selection was sufficient to explain the evolution of the human body but not the human intellect, moral sense, or artistic capacities — that some further cause was at work. This put him at odds with Darwin, Huxley, and most evolutionists of his day. The conviction was sincerely held throughout the rest of his life and shaped the kinds of questions he was willing to ask publicly. It belongs in the account of who he was, not as a late-life aberration to be apologised for.

Social and political life

Wallace was publicly active across a wider range of causes than most Victorian naturalists. He founded the Land Nationalisation Society in 1881, arguing that land was a common inheritance, not a commodity. He opposed compulsory vaccination, eugenics, and vivisection. He supported women’s rights and women’s suffrage. He identified as a socialist in later life. He speculated publicly on the habitability of Mars, arguing against Percival Lowell’s canal hypothesis in Is Mars Habitable? (1907).

Where Wallace stops

Wallace’s contribution to natural selection was real and independent — but his published development of the theory was briefer and less sustained than Darwin’s, and the further questions he opened (the limits of selection for the human case, the spiritualist alternative) he did not develop into a research programme others could take up. His biogeography established the field’s foundations but predated plate tectonics; the causal explanations he could offer for faunal distributions were limited by the geology available to him. And the range of his public interests — land reform, vaccination, Mars, spiritualism — gave his later career a breadth that cost him focus in the eyes of scientific contemporaries and contributed to the parenthetical reception Berry describes.

Key works

See also: Darwin · Huxley · Kropotkin