I was pleased to see the current National geographic features an essay by David Quammen on Alfred Russel Wallace, the (relatively)unsung hero of evolutionary theory. A young man of modest means pursuing his interest in natural history and finding a path to the origin of species independent of Darwin. His paper spurred Darwin to publish his long incubating treatise on natural selection, and changed the world.
Wallace — National Geographic Magazine:
That man was Alfred Russel Wallace, a young English naturalist who did fieldwork throughout the Malay Archipelago in the late 1850s and early '60s. What you won't see on Ternate is any grand plaque or statue commemorating Wallace's place in scientific history or the fact that, from this little island, on March 9, 1858, he sent off a highly consequential letter, aboard a Dutch mail steamer headed westward. The letter was addressed to Mr. Charles Darwin. Along with it Wallace enclosed a brief paper titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type." It was the product of two nights' hasty scribbling, which followed a moment's epiphany during a fever, which in turn followed more than ten years of speculation and careful research. What the paper described was a theory of evolution (though not under that name) by natural selection (not using that phrase) remarkably similar to the theory that Darwin himself, then an eminent naturalist of rather conventional reputation, had developed but hadn't yet published.
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