As I was scrolling through the science journals, the 200th birthday of a great scientist we always knew but always forgotten caught my eye: Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin (1809-1892) and Wallace (1823-1913) both lived in England and laid the foundations for the laws of almost simultaneous evolution. Both great scientists (and many more) Newton, Huxley …) It is no accident that they arose in England and laid the foundations of modern science. England was the country of the Industrial Revolution, the Royal Academy of Sciences was founded in the 1600s, and even in pubs, science-technology meetings and conversations were held… England was getting rich with technology (and of course science) superiority and was laying the foundations of the world empire.
POOR BUT GREAT PERSON
Wallace was poor, always had to work and earn money. He was also a social revolutionary! He was critical of the unjust system in England. He had a very different personality from Darwin. But he lived an extraordinary life with his personal talents, his passion for plants and later for insects.
In his great travels, he took Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt’He took it as his guide. He traveled to many more regions than Darwin, studied, collected samples and developed his theory. While returning from Brazil with the ship Helen he was traveling on, almost all of his paintings, notes, studies, animals were burned… But he never gave up and continued his travels and studies.
He wrote his first evolution paper in 1855. In 1858 he sent his Indonesian article on Natural Selection to Darwin (with quotations from Darwin’s earlier publications), both of which were jointly published. It is written that Darwin hurriedly published On the Origin of Species as a summary of a larger book work (The Great Species).
Wallace, like Darwin, was not shy, he boldly defended human kinship with chimpanzees, without fear of church attacks.
He did outstanding and early work on the geographical distribution of animal species. For this reason, he was nicknamed the father of biogeography and zoogeography. Not only was he one of the great evolutionist thinkers of that century and theorists of natural selection and speciation, he also put forward ideas on the possibilities of life on other planets with his book The Place of Man in the Universe, was the first scientist to debate whether there was life on Mars, and warned of the environmental effects of human activities.
He was a good illustrator and is considered a far more versatile intellectual than Darwin.
When he died on November 7, 1913, the New York Times would write: “Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, Owen and other scientists, the last of the giants of that great group of intellectuals whose daring research revolutionized and evolved the thinking of the century.”.
For the curious: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04507-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04508-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04507-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04508-4 ://sarkac.org/2019/11/wallacein-yolu-darwininkinden-nerede-ayrildi/
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04507-5
