Alfred Russell Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (English: Alfred Russel Wallace, January 8, 1823 - November 7, 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, illustrator, anthropologist, and biologist. He is famous for his independent conception of the evolutionary theory of natural selection. Wallace conducted a natural history survey in the Amazon Basin in 1848 and conducted extensive field surveys in the Malay Archipelago for eight years in 1854. In the Malay Archipelago, he determined the dividing line (Wallace Line) that now distinguishes the Oriental and Australasian regions in biogeography. He is considered the leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species in the 19th century and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography" or "Darwin's shield." "Darwin came from a wealthy family and had no worries about food and clothing. He could go out to explore the sea and study behind closed doors. Wallers (Wallace) came from a well-off family with eight brothers and sisters. When he was 13 years old, something unexpected happened and his family fell into ruin, so he had to drop out of school." In the spring of 1858, Wallace fell ill in the Malay Archipelago. Lying in bed with chills and fever, he suddenly remembered the essay on population he had read 12 years ago. Malthus's classic proposed that the rapid growth of the number of individuals in a population will eventually exceed the growth of natural resources, bringing inevitable disaster. So Wallace thought: If we think about the evolution and survival of biological species from this perspective, this automatic process will inevitably improve the race, because in each generation, the inferior ones will be killed, and the excellent ones will survive, that is, the survival of the fittest. In this way every part of the animal's body could be modified according to need, and in the process of modification, the unmodified ones died, so that the peculiar shape and clear isolation of each new species could be explained. Over the next few days, he wrote his ideas into a 20-page paper and sent it to Darwin. In June of this year, when Wallace's paper arrived, Darwin had been writing his own work for some time. When he saw that someone half a world away actually proposed the same evolutionary mechanism as his, he was stimulated to quickly compile a paper and read it together with Wallace's paper at the Linnean Society of London on July 1. At that time, Wallace was still in Borneo, and Darwin was attending his son's funeral. Neither of them was present. Both men's articles were eventually published in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society. These events finally prompted Darwin to write an abstract and expand it into more than 500 pages of "On the Origin of Species." Wallace was one of the major evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century, in addition to co-discovering natural selection