Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace, born 8 January 1823 and died 7 November 1913, worked as an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and illustrator. He came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection on his own; in 1858, his paper on the subject appeared together with excerpts from Charles Darwin’s writings. That pushed Darwin to set aside the large book he had been planning and instead produce a shorter summary, published in 1859 as *On the Origin of Species*.

Wallace carried out extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and later in the Malay Archipelago. There he spotted the faunal boundary now called the Wallace Line, which splits the Indonesian archipelago into two zones: a western part where animals mostly come from Asia, and an eastern part where the fauna are Australasian. He was regarded as the top authority on animal species’ geographic distribution in the 1800s and is often called the “father of biogeography,” or more specifically of zoogeography.

A leading evolutionary thinker of his century, Wallace studied warning coloration in animals and reinforcement—also known as the Wallace effect—where natural selection can help speciation by promoting barriers to hybridization. In 1864 he became the first to suggest that, during the later stages of human evolution, natural selection would have mainly worked on mental abilities rather than physical traits. His 1904 book *Man’s Place in the Universe* marked the first serious attempt by a biologist to assess the chance of life on other planets, and he also took a scientific interest in whether life existed on Mars.

Beyond science, Wallace was a social activist who criticized what he saw as the unjust social and economic systems of 19th-century Britain, and later in life he became an active socialist. His support for spiritualism and mind–body dualism created tension with other scientists. He was among the first prominent scientists to warn about human activity’s environmental impact. He wrote extensively on both scientific and social topics; his account of his travels and observations in Southeast Asia, *The Malay Archipelago*, first came out in 1869 and remains popular and highly regarded.

**Biography**

**Early life**

Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire, the eighth of nine children of Mary Anne Wallace and Thomas Vere Wallace. His mother was English; his father had Scottish ancestry. The family claimed a connection to William Wallace, the 13th-century Scottish leader. Thomas Vere Wallace studied law but never practiced it, and owned some property that brought in income, but poor investments and failed businesses steadily worsened the family’s finances. Wallace’s mother came from a middle-class family in Hertford, where the family moved when he was five. He attended Hertford Grammar School until 1837, when he turned 14—the usual age to leave if not heading to university.

He then went to London to stay with his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder, as a temporary arrangement until his oldest brother William could take him on as a surveyor apprentice. In London, Wallace attended lectures and read books at the London Mechanics Institute, where he encountered the radical political ideas of Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and English-born political theorist Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as his apprentice for six years. They moved repeatedly around Mid-Wales, then at the end of 1839 to Kington, Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, before finally settling in Neath, Wales. From 1840 to 1843, Wallace worked as a land surveyor in the countryside of western England and Wales. The natural history around him sparked his interest; starting in 1841 he collected flowers and plants as an amateur botanist.

One result of Wallace’s early travels is a modern debate about his nationality. Because he was born in Monmouthshire, some sources consider him Welsh. Other historians question this, noting that neither parent was Welsh, his family lived in Monmouthshire only briefly, the Welsh people he knew as a child considered him English, and he always called himself English rather than Welsh. One Wallace scholar has said the most reasonable interpretation is that he was an Englishman born in Wales.

In 1843 Wallace’s father died, and a drop in demand for surveying meant William’s business had no work for him. Wallace was unemployed for a short time, then early in 1844 the Collegiate School in Leicester hired him to teach drawing, mapmaking, and surveying. He had already read George Combe’s *The Constitution of Man*, and after Spencer Hall lectured on mesmerism, Wallace and some older pupils tried it out. He spent many hours at the Leicester town library, reading Thomas Robert Malthus’s *An Essay on the Principle of Population*, Alexander von Humboldt’s *Personal Narrative*, Charles Lyell’s *Principles of Geology*, and Charles Darwin’s *The Voyage of the Beagle*. One evening he met entomologist Henry Walter Bates, who was 19 and had published a paper on beetles in *The Zoologist* in 1843. Bates became a friend and got Wallace started collecting insects.