Wallace’s feverishly induced Eureka! moment Wallace realized that this thinking could also be applied to animal species… those least adapted to their environment will die off while the rest, with favorable traits, survive. “there is constant death and struggle in the natural world… there’s finite resources, therefore competition, so who’s going to win that competition. George Beccaloni, NY Times Op-Docs, 2016: He hypothesized, according to London-based anthropologist Dr. Wallace applied those fundamental economic principles to local animal species he had seen in both the Amazon and Malay archipelago. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio… population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.” “Population, when unchecked, increases at a geometrical ratio. He had been immersing himself in reading economist Thomas Malthus’s widely acclaimed, “Essay on the Principles of Population,” published in 1798. In 1858 Wallace was staying on the remote Indonesian island of Halmahera, and came down with a particularly bad fever. Throughout his stay in southeast Asia and Melanesia, Wallace suffered repeated bouts of Malaria. Wallace discovers Malthus and becomes a Social Darwinist The boundary winds between the islands of Indonesia and is known as the Wallace Line. The paper details a geographic boundary between species originating in Asia and Australian species. “On the Zoological Geography of the Malay Archipelago.” As Wallace himself later stated, it was his proudest lifetime achievement. Soon thereafter he launched another exotic excursion, this time to Singapore, and the islands of Indonesia.īased upon his work, he presented a paper to the (Carl) Linnaen Society. On his return trip to England, his ship caught fire and he lost his entire collection.įortunately, he had gained quite a reputation in the London scientific community and was able to cobble funds together from the sale of two books. He spent four years collecting specimens. Wallace traveled to the Amazon in Brazil. At the time, a young man could make a living collecting exotic animal specimens for museums, universities and natural history associations. He started out as an amateur naturalist in the rolling hills of southeast Wales, near the English border. Wallace lived an adventurous, even dangerous life. To celebrate, a multitude of retrospective pieces on his amazing life have come out in a variety of publications worldwide. 8th 2023 was the 200th Anniversary of the birth of the famed British naturalist. Alfred Russel Wallace, a Retrospective, on Occasion of the 200th Anniversary of his BirthĪlfred Russel Wallace, credited as the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, was born January 8th, 1823.
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