Before Charles Darwin famous for Evolution Theorythere’s someone scientist named Alfred Russel Wallace who has proposed a theory about natural selection. Wallace is a thinker who contributed a lot to the development of the Theory of Evolution. Born on January 8, 1823, he was also known as an anthropologist, naturalist, explorer, traveler and biologist from England.
In 1846 at the relatively young age of 23 years, he conducted research in the Amazon River. Then, next he did research in the Archipelago Archipelago. Wallace was noted for doing a lot of field research.
Wallace got the initial capital for exploration in the archipelago, namely by collecting various insects from the results of his expedition in the Amazon. Then, the collection was brought home and sold to Europe, which at that time was crazy about new inventions from other parts of the world.
In 1848, Wallace traveled and finally in 1854 arrived in Singapore. During the exploration of the Archipelago, he wrote the book The Malay Archipelago, the book was the result of exploring for eight years from 1854 to 1862.
In the book 108 Scientists & Inventors of the World, during his expedition in the archipelago, it is estimated that Wallace has traveled no less than 22,500 km, made 60 or 70 separate trips, and collected 125,660 specimens and bones of various animals, 310 mammal specimens, and 100 reptile specimens. The rest reached 109,700 insect specimens, including his favorite butterfly.
Wallace had a habit of taking notes, which amazed me that when he stopped on the island of Ternate on January 8, 1858 to March 25, 1858, Wallace was stricken with malaria, but still forced himself to write letters. He kept the records by sending them to Charles Darwin in England through the post of European merchant ships.
His letter from Ternate sent to Charles Darwin is known as Latter from Ternate. Accompanied by a paper entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitelty from the Orginal type,” the letter became famous. At that time, Wallace in his paper made a basic framework for understanding natural selection, Wallace argued about the process of natural selection in maintaining one species in the world. He mentions species that can survive will not become extinct.
After one year of writing the paper, in 1859 that thought was able to support Charles Darwin’s thinking through the Theory of Evolution which was so popular in the book The Origin of species. On July 1, 1858, Darwin and Wallace were declared the basic discoverers of Evolution, by Darwin’s friends, namely Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker through the engineering scientific meeting at the Linnean Society.
On November 7, 1913 at the age of 90 he died. He received many awards. Wallace’s name is immortalized as one of the names of craters on Mars and on the Moon.
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