Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace at age 25 years.
Courtesty: The Alfred Russel Wallace Page

In the early 21st century, as well as in the previous century, many biologists have argued for a more informed and celebrated acknowledgement of the contributions to our understanding of evolution by the 19th century British naturalist and contemporary of Charles Darwin (b February 12, 1809; d. April 19, 1882), Alfred Russel Wallace (b. January 8, 1823; d. November 7, 1913). 

Like Darwin, Wallace, 14 years Darwin's junior, possessed a passionate and inveterate desire to observe the natural world of plants and animals, both at home and in the unexplored wilds of the world. Also like Darwin, inspired by the economist, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and Malthus's ideas about the limits of population growth due to the limits of growth-supporting resources, came to the conclusion that nature selected for reproductive success those individuals of an interbreeding population with heritable traits enabling them to best cope with a changing environment threatening their ability to generate progeny — natural selection, or 'survival of the fittest'. Wallace developed the idea independently of Darwin, though not before Darwin had worked out the idea in great detail but before Darwin had published it.

In a speech by the eminent British evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins FRS, given November 26th, 2001, for the unveiling of a plaque in the Royal Academy commemorating the concurrent reading of the Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers describing natural selection at England’s Linnean Society, July 1st 1858, Dawkins stated:

Not only is it [natural selection] the all-but universally accepted explanation for all the complexity and elegance of life. It is also, I strongly suspect, the only explanation that in principle could provide that explanation. But Darwin was not the only person who thought of the idea. When Professor [Daniel] Dennett and I made our remarks, we were — certainly in my case and I suspect that Dennett would agree — using the name Darwin to stand for “Darwin and Wallace”. This happens to Wallace quite often, I am afraid. He tends to get a poor deal at the hands of posterity, partly through his own generous nature. It was Wallace himself who coined the word ‘Darwinism’, he regularly referred to it as Darwin’s theory and he referred to himself as ‘more Darwinian than Darwin’. The reason we know Darwin’s name more than Wallace’s is that Darwin went on, a year later, to publish the Origin of Species. The Origin not only explained and advocated the Darwin/Wallace theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. It also – and this had to be done at book length – set out the multifarious evidence for the fact of evolution itself.”

Nevertheless, Wallace and Darwin had different perspectives on natural selection and the mechanisms of evolution, which this article will in part explore.

Wallace's early life

We know a little of Wallace's early circumstances from his autobiography published in 1905, Wallace in his eighties.  Wallace came into the world of Usk, built near a river of that name, in Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1823, in a family of modest means, the eighth of nine children, all of whom he survived. In his 1905 autobiography, he explained in termniology of the pseudoscience, phrenology — a popular 'science' then and persisting in places for decades later — his failure while at Usk (until age 5 years) to create distinct visual memories of his parents or siblings but quite distinct images of the outdoors:

The shape of my head shows that I have form and individuality but moderately developed, while locality, ideality, colour, and comparison are decidedly stronger. Deficiency in the first two caused me to take little notice of the characteristic form and features of the separate individualities which were most familiar to me, and from that very cause attracted less close attention ; while the greater activity of the latter group gave interest and attractiveness to the ever-changing combinations in out¬door scenery, while the varied opportunities for the exercise of the physical activities, and the delight in the endless variety of nature which are so strong in early childhood, impressed these outdoor scenes and interests upon my memory.

Apparently Wallace came to accept phrenology as a valid science in his old age.

As a young child at Usk, he had a recurring nightmare (attack by a house-sized bird with large claws), not as bad nightmares as many he had later during his lifetime. At that time he had light flaxen hair and a fair body (a “little Saxon” by Welsh norms). He remained healthy, which he attributed to vigorous physical activity in a underdeveloped wilderness surrounding the house he lived in. By age six, the family had moved to Hertford, a larger town, where Wallace spent most of his boyhood, becoming increasingly familiar with the natural world of rivers and woodlands and meadows and at the same time curious about the workings of large machines and factories evolving with the industrial revolution. Did he sense ‘survival of the fittest’ machines as a boy? He did note how technological innovations for the convenience of an ever-growing population could destroy the natural beauty of the wild world.

He attended The Grammar School in Hertford, a large one-room school with eighty boys divided among several ‘masters’ (teachers) kept organized by an irascible headmaster. Wallace toiled at learning Latin grammar, and translating the Latin classics. Geography he found painful because it consisted mostly of rote memorization of place names:

It was something like learning the multiplication table both in the painfulness of the process and the permanence of the results. The incessant grinding in both, week after week and year after year, resulted in my knowing both the product of any two numbers up to twelve, and the chief towns of any English county so thoroughly, that the result was automatic, and the name of Staffordshire brought into my memory Stafford, Litchfield, Leek, as surely and rapidly as eight times seven brought fifty-six. The labour and mental effort to one who like myself had little verbal memory was very painful, and though the result has been a somewhat useful acquisition during life, I cannot but think that the same amount of mental exertion wisely directed might have produced far greater and more generally useful results.

His ability to memorize would hold him in good stead as a wage-earning naturalist.