Toward the end of his sojourn, Wallace was invited by Brooke to visit his cottage, a place up on the Bukit Peninjau that was pleasantly cool, surrounded by a lush and promising forest. He stayed in the area a total of 14 months, his longest stay anywhere in the archipelago. Wallace fell in love with Sarawak and realized that it was a perfect collecting ground, mostly for insects, but also for the much sought-after orangutans. Upon their encounter, Brooke and Wallace became friends. James Brooke would create a dynasty of Sarawak rulers, known as the white rajahs. Hugh Low, 'Sarawak its inhabitants and productions being notes during a residence in that country with the Rajah Brooke.'Ī few years earlier, when in Singapore, Wallace had met James Brooke, a British adventurer who, through incredible circumstances, had become the rajah of Sarawak, a large state on the island of Borneo. This insight would ultimately mature into a fully formed theory of evolution by natural selection – the same theory Charles Darwin had arrived at independently years before, but had not yet published.Ī waterfall in Sarawak. In what’s commonly known as his “Sarawak Law” paper, Wallace pondered the unique distribution of related species, which he could explain only by means of gradual changes. Whether Darwin or Wallace should justly be credited for the discovery of the mechanisms of evolution has stirred controversy pretty much ever since.Ĭomparatively little has been written about Wallace’s seminal work, published four years earlier. In another year, Charles Darwin would publish “ The Origin of Species,” squarely positioning him as the father of evolution. Their authors: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Three years later, in 1858, two papers that would change people’s understanding of humanity’s place in the natural world were read before the Linnean Society of London. It’s as crucial to Wallace’s own thinking in disentangling the mechanisms of evolution as the Galàpagos Islands famously were to his contemporary, Charles Darwin. This is where, in February 1855, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote his hugely influential “Sarawak Law” paper. At last I’ve reached my goal, Rajah Brooke’s cottage, at the top of Bukit Peninjau, a hill in the middle of Borneo’s jungle. Conversely, his enthusiasm for spiritualism and vehement opposition to vaccination do not enhance his scientific reputation.The chirping of cicadas is deafening, my clothes are sticky and heavy with heat and sweat, my right hand is swollen from ant bites, I am panting, almost passing out from exhaustion – and I have a big grin on my face. He was also very interested in land nationalization and conservation, shaped partly by a meeting with John Muir on a trip to the USA. His liberal worldview encouraged him to resist Francis Galton’s early ideas on eugenics, with Wallace thinking that education, equality and women’s emancipation were the best ways of improving humanity’s condition. He thought at length about human evolution and, although extremely liberal in his day, many of his ideas (as with those of many of his contemporaries) do not stand well today a particular low was choosing to present a paper to the overtly racist Anthropological Society of London, instead of the less problematic Ethnological Society. He also had many other interests, which posterity has viewed variably. During the course of their preparations, Wallace and Bates read Darwin’s Beagle journal, as well as key works by Humboldt, Lyell and Malthus that were so influential in Darwin’s own thinking on evolution.Īlongside natural selection, Wallace will be best remembered for biogeography, something that his field experience made him especially suited to appreciate. Bates and Wallace encouraged one another’s enthusiasm for collecting, until they managed to get funding for a joint collecting expedition to the Amazon, departing in 1848. Particularly important was his meeting with another young amateur entomologist, Henry Walter Bates (subsequently the discoverer of Batesian mimicry), during Wallace’s brief period as a schoolmaster in Leicester. This work took him all over the countryside of England and Wales, giving him the opportunity to collect plants and insects. Wallace was educated in the local schools there until the age of 14, when he became an apprentice surveyor, working with his brother. When Wallace was three years old, the family moved from this Welsh rural idyll to the town of Hertford, immediately north of London. His parents were financially struggling members of the lower middle class, and money woes would accompany Wallace for all of his life. Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 near Usk, now in Wales but in a region historically disputed with England.
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