Alfred Russel Wallace (January 8, 1823 - November 7, 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is famous for independently understanding the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on this issue was published in conjunction with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in Concerning the Origins of Species. Wallace conducted extensive field research, first in the Amazon basin and later in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the separation of fauna now called the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: the western part where most animals from Asia, and the eastern part where fauna reflects Australasia.
He was considered a leading expert of the 19th century on the geographic distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography". Wallace was one of the foremost evolutionist thinkers of the nineteenth century and made many other contributions to the development of the theory of evolution in addition to being the inventor of natural selection. These include the concept of animal warning dyeing, and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection can contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers to hybridization. The Wallace Book of 1904 The Human Place in the Universe is the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the possibility of life on another planet. He was also one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of the question of whether there is life on Mars.
Wallace is very interested in unconventional ideas (like evolution). His defense of spiritualism and his belief in the non-material origin for the higher mental faculty of man strained his relationship with some members of the scientific establishment.
Apart from his scientific work, he was a social activist critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system (capitalism) in 19th century England. His interest in natural history resulted in him becoming one of the first leading scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. He is also a prolific writer who writes both scientific and social issues; Her story of adventure and observation during her explorations in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, Malay Islands , is very popular and highly respected. Since the publication in 1869 it has never been printed.
Wallace was in financial trouble all his life. The journey of Amazon and the Far East is supported by the sale of specimens he collects and, after he loses most of the money he earns from a sale in a failed investment, he has to support himself most of the publications he produces. Unlike some of his contemporaries in the British scientific community, such as Darwin and Charles Lyell, he had no family fortune to return, and he was unsuccessful in finding a long-term salaried position, not receiving a steady income until he was awarded a small government pension, through the efforts of Darwin, in 1881.
Video Alfred Russel Wallace
Biography
Initial life
Alfred Wallace was born in Welsh village in Llanbadoc, near Usk, Monmouthshire. She is the seventh child of nine children from Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell. Mary Anne is English; Thomas Wallace may have come from a Scottish ancestor. His family, like many Wallace, claimed a connection to William Wallace, a Scottish army leader during the Scottish War of Independence in the 13th century. Thomas Wallace passed the law, but never practiced law. He owns some income-generating properties, but poor investments and failed business ventures lead to a deterioration of the family's financial position. Her mother came from a middle-class British family from Hertford, north of London. When Wallace was five, his family moved to Hertford. There he followed the Hertford Grammar School until financial hardship forced his family to withdraw him in 1836, when he was 14 years old.
Wallace then moved to London to join his brother, John, a 19-year-old apprentice. This is a temporary measure until William, his eldest brother, is ready to take him as an apprentice surveyor. While in London, Alfred attended college and read books at the London Mechanics Institute. Here he is confronted with radical political ideas from Welsh social reformers Robert Owen and Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as a student for six years.
In late 1839, they moved to Kington, Hereford, near the Welsh border, before settling at Neath at Glamorgan in Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace conducted a land survey in rural west England and Wales. By the end of 1843, William's business had declined due to the difficult economic conditions, and Wallace, at age 20, left in January.
One result of Wallace's early journey was the modern controversy over his nationality. Since Wallace was born in Monmouthshire, some sources regard him as Welsh. However, some historians question this as there is no Welsh parents, his family only briefly resides in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood regarded him as an Englishman, and because Wallace himself consistently calls himself English rather than a language Wales. (even when writing about his time in Wales). A Wallace scholar has stated that the most plausible interpretation is that he was an English born in Wales.
After a brief period of unemployment, he was hired as a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester to teach drawing, drawing, and surveying. Wallace spent a lot of time at the library in Leicester: he read the Robert Robert Malthus Essay on Population Principles, and one night he met the entomologist Henry Bates. Bates was 19 years old, and in 1843 he published a paper on beetles in Zoologist journals. He befriended Wallace and started collecting insects. William died in March 1845, and Wallace left his teaching position to take over the control of his brother's company in Neath, but his brother John and he could not make the business go. After several months, Wallace got a job as a civil engineer for a nearby company that was working on a survey for the proposed railway at Vale of Neath.
Wallace's work on the survey involves spending a lot of time outdoors in the countryside, allowing him to spoil his new passion for collecting insects. Wallace persuaded his brother John to join him in starting another architecture and civil engineering company, which undertook a number of projects, including building design for the Neath Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1843. William Jevons, founder of the institute, was impressed by Wallace and persuaded him to give lectures there about science and engineering. In the fall of 1846, John and he bought a cottage near Neath, where they lived with their mother and sister Fanny (his father died in 1843).
During this period, he read aloud, exchanging letters with Bates on the anonymous evolutionary treatise of Robert Chambers of Charles Darwin The Voyage of the Beagle and Charles Darwin of the Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Lyell Principles of Geology .
Exploration and study of the natural world
Inspired by the naturalist history of previous trips, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin and especially William Henry Edwards, Wallace decided that he also wanted to travel abroad as a naturalist. In 1848, Wallace and Henry Bates left for Brazil aboard the Mischief ship. Their goal is to collect insects and other animal specimens in the Amazon Rainforest for their private collection, sell duplicates to museums and collectors back to the UK to finance the trip. Wallace also hopes to gather evidence of species transmutation.
Wallace and Bates spent most of their first year collecting near Belà © m, then exploring inland separately, occasionally meeting to discuss their findings. In 1849, they briefly joined another young explorer, the botanist Richard Spruce, along with his brother Herbert of Wallace. Herbert soon left afterward (died two years later due to yellow fever), but Spruce, like Bates, would spend more than ten years collecting in South America.
Wallace continued to map Rio Negro for four years, collecting specimens and making notes about the people and languages ​​he encountered as well as geography, flora, and fauna. On July 12, 1852, Wallace left for England at brig Helen . After 26 days at sea, boat loads were on fire and the crew was forced to leave the ship. All of Wallace's specimens were on board, mostly collected during the last, and most interestingly, two years away, missing. He managed to keep some notes and pencil sketches and a little more.
Wallace and the crew spent ten days on an open boat before being picked up by brig Jordeson , who sailed from Cuba to London. The provisions of Jordeson were strained by unexpected passengers, but after a difficult journey with very short rations the ship finally reached its destination on October 1, 1852.
Upon returning to Britain, Wallace spent 18 months in London living on insurance payments for the lost collection and selling some specimens that had been shipped back to England before embarking on an exploration of the Rio Negro up to Jativa city in India. in the Orinoco River valley and as far west as MicÃÆ'ºru (MitÃÆ'º) on the River Uaupà ©. He was deeply impressed by the splendor of the virgin forest, by the diversity and beauty of the butterflies and birds, and with his first encounter with the Indians in the Uaupà © River region, an experience he never forgot. During this period, despite having lost almost all records of the South American expedition, he wrote six academic papers (which included "On the Monkeys of the Amazon") and two books; Amazon Coconut Tree and Its Use and Travel in the Amazon . He also made connections with a number of other British naturalists - most significantly, Darwin.
From 1854 to 1862, ages 31 to 39, Wallace traveled through the Malay Archipelago or the East Indies (now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia), to collect specimens for sale and study natural history. A set of 80 bird skeletons he collected in Indonesia and related documentation can be found at the University of Cambridge Zoological Museum. His observations of the marked zoological differences in the narrow strait in the archipelago led him to suggest a zoogeographic boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Wallace collected more than 126,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago (more than 80,000 beetles only). Several thousand of them represent new species for science. One of the more well-known descriptions of species during this journey is the tree frog gliding Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, known as the flying frog Wallace. As he explored the archipelago, he perfected his thinking about evolution and had a famous insight into natural selection. In 1858 he sent an article that outlined his theory to Darwin; it was published, along with a description of Darwin's own theory, in the same year.
The stories of his studies and adventures were finally published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago, which became one of the most popular books of the 19th century scientific exploration, and has never been printed. It was praised by scientists like Darwin (to whom this book is dedicated), and Charles Lyell, and by non-scientists such as novelist Joseph Conrad, who called him his "favorite bedmate" and used it as a source of information for some of his novels, Lord Jim .
Return to UK, marriage and children
In 1862, Wallace returned to England, where he moved with his sister Fanny Sims and her husband, Thomas. While recovering from his journey, Wallace organizes his collection and gives much talk about his adventures and discoveries to the scientific community such as the Zoological Society of London. Later that year, he visited Darwin in Down House, and became friendly with Charles Lyell and Herbert Spencer. During the 1860s, Wallace wrote papers and lectured to defend natural selection. He also corresponded with Darwin on various topics, including sexual selection, warning colorations, and possible effects of natural selection on hybridization and species differences. In 1865, he began to investigate spiritualism.
After a year of courtship, Wallace was engaged in 1864 with a young woman who, in his autobiography, would only identify as Miss L. Miss L. was the daughter of Lewis Leslie who played chess with Wallace. However, to Wallace's dismay, he broke off the engagement. In 1866, Wallace married Annie Mitten. Wallace has been introduced to Mitten through botanist Richard Spruce, who has been friends with Wallace in Brazil and who is also a good friend of Annie Mitten's father, William Mitten, a moss expert. In 1872, Wallace built a Dell, a concrete house, on the ground he rented at Gray in Essex, where he lived until 1876. Wallace had three children: Herbert (1867-1874), Violet (1869-1945), and William. (1871-1951).
Financial battle
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was deeply concerned about his family's financial security. While he was in the Malay Archipelago, the sale of specimens had brought large sums of money, which had been carefully invested by agents selling specimens for Wallace. However, upon his return to England, Wallace made a series of bad investments in trains and mines that wasted most of his money, and he found himself in desperate need of the outcome of the Malay Archipelago publishing.
Despite getting help from his friends, he could never get a fixed salary position like a curator at a museum. To remain financially solvent, Wallace worked on assessing government exams, writing 25 papers for publication between 1872 and 1876 for a modest amount, and being paid by Lyell and Darwin to help edit some of their own works.
In 1876, Wallace needed a £ 500 advance from the publisher of The Geographical Distribution of Animals to avoid having to sell some of his personal properties. Darwin was well aware of Wallace's financial difficulties and lobbied long and hard to get Wallace awarded a government pension for his lifetime contribution to science. When the annual retirement of £ 200 was awarded in 1881, it helped stabilize Wallace's financial position by supplementing his earnings from his writings.
Social activism
John Stuart Mill was impressed by the comments criticizing the British public that Wallace belonged to the The Malay Archipelago . Mill asked him to join the general committee of his Land Tenure Reform Association, but the association disbanded after Mill's death in 1873. Wallace wrote only a few articles on political and social issues between 1873 and 1879 when, at the age of 56, he entered the debate about trade policy and land reform seriously. He believed that rural land should be owned by the state and leased to people who would exploit anything that would benefit the greatest number of people, thus violating the power of wealthy landowners who are often abused in British society.
In 1881, Wallace was elected the first president of the newly formed National Society of Land. The following year, he published a book, Land Landization; His needs and objectives, on the subject. He criticized the UK free trade policy for the negative impact they have on working class people. In 1889, Wallace read Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward and declared himself a socialist, even though he previously plunged as a speculative investor. After reading the Progress and Poverty, bestseller by progressive land reformist Henry George, Wallace described it as "No doubt the most extraordinary and important book of the century."
Wallace opposed eugenics, an idea supported by other prominent 19th-century evolutionary thinkers, arguing that contemporary society is too corrupt and unjust to allow reasonable determination of who is fit or unworthy. In the 1890 article "Human Selection" he wrote, "Those who succeed in a race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent...". In 1898, Wallace wrote a paper advocating a pure banknote system, unsupported by silver or gold, which impressed the economist Irving Fisher so much that he dedicated his 1920s Stabilizing Dollar to Wallace.
Wallace writes on other social and political topics including his support for women's suffrage, and repeatedly about the dangers and waste of militarism. In an essay published in 1899, Wallace called for public opinion to unite against war by showing people: "... that all modern wars are dynasties: that they are caused by ambition, interest, jealousy and insatiable greed the power of their rulers, or the great trade and financial class who have power and influence over their rulers, and that the outcome of war is never good for the people, who have not yet borne all of their youth. " In a letter published by the Daily Mail in 1909, with a flight in its infancy, he advocated an international agreement to ban military aircraft use, arguing against the idea "... that this new horror" is inevitable, "and that all that we can do is make sure and be at the forefront of the air killers - because of course there is no other term that can accurately depict the fall, say, ten thousand midnight bombs became enemy's capital of the invisible flight of air ships. "
In 1898, Wallace published a book entitled The Wonderful Century: The Success and Failure of Development in the 19th Century. The first part of this book covers the major scientific and technical advances of this century; The second part covers what Wallace considers to be his social failures including: the destruction and waste of war and arms race, the rise of the urban poor and the dangerous conditions in which they live and work, the harsh criminal justice system that fails to reform the criminal, the offense in the mental health system based on private sanatorium, environmental damage caused by capitalism, and the crime of European colonialism. Wallace resumed his social activities for the rest of his life, publishing The Revolt of Democracy only weeks before his death.
Further scientific work
Wallace continued his scientific work in parallel with his social commentary. In 1880, he published Island Life as a sequel to The Geographic Distribution of Animals. In November 1886, Wallace embarked on a ten-month journey to the United States to deliver a series of popular lectures. Most of his lectures are about Darwinism (evolution through natural selection), but he also gives speeches on biogeography, spiritualism, and socio-economic reform. During the trip, he reunited with his brother, John, who had emigrated to California the year before. He also spent a week in Colorado, with American botanist Alice Eastwood as his guide, exploring the flora of the Rocky Mountains and gathering evidence that would lead him to the theory of how glaciation could explain certain similarities between the European mountain flora, Asia and North America, published in 1891 in the newspaper "Flowers UK and America". He met many other eminent American naturalists and saw their collections. His 1889 book Darwinism used the information he collected on American travel, and the information he composed for college.
Death
On November 7, 1913, Wallace died at home in a village house he called Old Orchard, which he built a decade earlier. She's 90 years old. His death was widely reported in the media. The New York Times called him "the last of the giants of a remarkable intellectual group that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose bold investigations revolutionized and evolved thinking of this century." Another commentator in the same edition said, "There is no apology to be made for some literary or scientific folly from the lead author of 'The Malay Archipelago'."
Some friends Wallace suggested that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but his wife followed his wishes and told him to be buried in a small cemetery in Broadstone, Dorset. Several leading British scientists set up a committee to install a Wallace medal at Westminster Abbey near where Darwin was buried. The medal was inaugurated on November 1, 1915.
Maps Alfred Russel Wallace
The theory of evolution
Early evolutionary thinking
Unlike Darwin, Wallace began his career as a traveling naturalist who already believed in the transmutation of species. This concept has been advocated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Grant, among others. It is widely discussed, but not generally accepted by leading naturalists, and is considered to have radical, even revolutionary connotations.
The famous geologists and geologists such as Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Adam Sedgwick, and Charles Lyell attacked him energetically. It has been argued that Wallace accepted the idea of ​​transmutation of species in part because he always tends to support radical ideas in politics, religion, and science, and because he is very open to marginal ideas, even margins, in science.
He is also strongly influenced by the work of Robert Chambers, Vestiges of Natural History of Creation, a highly controversial work of popular science published anonymously in 1844 that advocated the origin of evolution for the solar system, the earth, and living things. Wallace wrote to Henry Bates in 1845:
I have a somewhat better opinion about 'Vestiges' than you seem to have. I do not think of it as a hasty generalization, but rather as an intelligent hypothesis that is strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but that remains to be proven with more facts and additional lights that can be traced more by research. It provides a subject for every natural student to attend; every fact that he observes will make or against it, and thus serve both as incitement to the gathering of facts, and an object that they can be applied when collected.
In 1847, he wrote to Bates:
I would like to take one [beetle] family to study thoroughly, especially by looking at the theory of the origin of the species. By that means I strongly argue that some definite results will probably arrive.
Wallace deliberately planned some of his fieldwork to test the hypothesis that under the evolutionary scenario the closely related species must inhabit the neighboring territories. During his work in the Amazon basin, he realized that geographical barriers - such as the Amazon and his tributaries - often separated the closely allied species range, and he incorporated these observations in his 1853 "On the Monkeys of Amazon" paper. Near the end of the paper, he posed the question, "Is a very close species ever separated by wide country intervals?"
In February 1855, while working in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, Wallace wrote "About the Laws That Have Arranged the Introduction of New Species", a paper published in Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. In this paper, he discusses the observations on the geographical distribution and geology of living and fossil species, which came to be known as biogeography. The conclusion that "Every species has emerged by chance both in space and time with closely allied species" has been known as "Sarawak's Law". Thus Wallace answered the question he asked in his previous newspaper about the monkeys in the Amazon basin. Although it does not mention the possible mechanism of evolution, this paper signifies an important paper that he will write three years later.
The paper shook Charles Lyell's conviction that species can not be changed. Although his friend Charles Darwin had written to him in 1842 expressed his support for transmutation, Lyell continued to strongly oppose the idea. Around early 1856, he told Darwin of Wallace's paper, as Edward Blyth had thought, "Great! Overall!... Wallace, I think the problem is good, and according to his theory, the various domestic races of animals have developed enough to be < Apart from these guidelines, Darwin mistook Wallace's conclusion for a progressive creation at the time and wrote that it was "nothing new... Using my simile about the tree [but] it seems that all creation is with it." Lyell was more impressed, and opened a notebook about the species, where he grapples with the consequences, especially for the human ancestors. Darwin had shown his theory to their mutual friend, Joseph Hooker, and now, for the first time, he spelled out the complete details of natural selection to Lyell. Although Lyell disagrees, he urges Darwin to publish to set priorities. Darwin initially objected, then began writing a sketch of the species of his continuing work in May 1856.
Natural selection and Darwin
In February 1858, Wallace was convinced by his biogeographic research on the Malay Archipelago about the reality of evolution. As he wrote in his autobiography:
The problem then is not only how and why species change, but how and why they are transformed into new and well-defined species, distinguished from each other in many ways; why and how they become so precisely adapted to the different modes of life; and why are all the middle classes dying (as geology shows that they are dead) and leaving only well-defined and well-defined species and genes, and higher animal groups?
According to his autobiography, while he was in bed with a fever, Wallace thought of Thomas Robert Malthus's idea of ​​a positive examination of the growth of the human population and came up with the idea of ​​natural selection. Wallace said in his autobiography that he was on the island of Ternate at the time; but historians have questioned this, saying that based on the journal he kept at the time, he was on the island of Gilolo. From 1858 until 1861 he rented a house in Ternate from the Netherlands Maarten Dirk van Renesse van Duivenbode. He uses this house as a base camp for expeditions to other islands such as Gilolo.
Wallace explains how he found natural selection as follows:
It then occurred to me that this cause or its equivalent continued to act in animal cases as well; and since animals usually breed faster than humans, the annually destruction of this cause must be enormous to suppress the number of each species, since in fact they do not increase regularly from year to year, because otherwise the world would once have been overcrowded with those who breed the fastest. Vaguely thinking of this constant and constant impending destruction, I thought to ask, why did anyone die and some live? And the answer is clear, overall the most fitting of life... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector has shown me there, then it is followed that all the changes necessary for adaptation of species to changing conditions will be brought... By the way this every part of the animal organization can be modified exactly as required, and in the process this unmodified modification will die, and thus the exact character and clear isolation of each new species will be explained.
Wallace had briefly met Darwin, and was one of the correspondents whose observations Darwin used to support his own theory. Although Wallace's first letter to Darwin was gone, Wallace carefully kept the letters he received. In the first letter, dated 1 May 1857, Darwin commented that the October 10 Wallace letter he had recently received, and Wallace's "On the Law, which had arranged the New Species Introduction" of 1855, showed that they both thought the same and to some extent reached the same conclusion, and said that he was preparing his own work for publication in about two years. The second letter, dated December 22, 1857, tells how glad he is that Wallace is theorising about distribution, adding that "without speculation no good and original observation" while commenting that "I believe I went further than you". Wallace trusted Darwin's opinion on this issue and sent him his February 1858 essay, "On the Variety Trend to Go Without Borders of the Original Type," with the request that Darwin would examine it and pass it on to Charles Lyell if he thought it was valuable. Although Wallace has posted several articles for journal publications during his travels through the Malay archipelago, Ternate essays are written in private letters. On June 18, 1858, Darwin received an essay from Wallace. Although Wallace's essay clearly does not use Darwin's term "natural selection", he describes the mechanisms of species evolutionary differences from the like because of environmental stress. In this sense, it is very similar to the theory that Darwin has been working on for twenty years, but has not yet been published. Darwin sent the manuscript to Charles Lyell with a letter saying "he can not make a better short abstract! Even his term now stands as my chapter head... he does not say he wants me to publish, but I will, of course, immediately write and offer to be sent to any journal. "Confused about the illness of his infant son, Darwin put the matter to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who decided to publish the essay in a joint presentation along with unpublished articles highlighting Darwin's priorities. The essay Wallace was presented to the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858, along with a quote from an essay that Darwin had personally disclosed to Hooker in 1847 and a letter Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1857.
Communication with Wallace in the Malay Archipelago is not possible without months of delay, so he is not part of this fast publication. Fortunately, Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, glad that he had been put at all, and never expressed any public or private bitterness. Darwin's social and scientific status is much greater than Wallace, and it is unlikely that, without Darwin, Wallace's view of evolution will be taken seriously. Lyell and Hooker's arrangements bring Wallace to the co-discoverer position, and he is not a social equation of Darwin or any other eminent British natural scientist. However, their joint paper reading on the natural selection associated Wallace with Darwin is more famous. This, combined with Darwinian advocacy (as well as Hooker and Lyell) on its behalf, will give Wallace greater access to the highest levels of the scientific community. The reaction to the reading was silenced, with the president of the Linnean Society commenting in May 1859 that the year was not marked by a striking discovery; but, with Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species later in 1859, its significance became clear. When Wallace returned to England, he met Darwin. Although Wallace's several iconoclastic opinions in subsequent years will test Darwin's patience, they remain friendly with other Darwinian lives.
Over the years, some people have questioned the version of this incident. In the early 1980s, two books, written by Arnold Brackman and others by John Langdon Brooks, even suggested not only that there was a conspiracy to rob Wallace of proper credit, but Darwin had stolen the key idea from Wallace to complete his own theory. This claim has been examined in detail by some scholars who have not found them to convince. Research on delivery schedules shows that, contrary to these allegations, Wallace's letter could not have been delivered earlier than the date indicated in Darwin's letter to Lyell.
Darwin's defense and his ideas
After Darwin's publication of the Origins of Species, Wallace became one of his staunch defenders on his return to England in 1862. In a particularly enjoyable 1863 incident in Darwin, Wallace published a short paper "Remarks on Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, and on the Origin of Species "to refute a paper by a professor of geology at the University of Dublin who has criticized Darwin's comments sharply on Origin about how hexagonal honeybee cells can evolve through natural selection.
The longer defense of Darwin's work is "Creation by Law", a Wallace commentary wrote in 1867 for the Quarterly Science Journal of the Book of Law, which was written by George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, as the rejection of natural selection. After the 1870 meeting of the British Science Association, Wallace wrote to Darwin complaining that there were "no opponents left who knew anything about natural history, so there is not a single good discussion we have ever had."
The difference between Darwin and Wallace's ideas about natural selection
Historians of science have noted that, while Darwin considers ideas in Wallace's paper to be essentially the same as his own, there are differences. Darwin emphasized the competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, while Wallace emphasized the environmental pressures on varieties and species that forced them to adapt to their local conditions, causing populations in different locations to diverge. Some historians, especially Peter J. Bowler, have suggested the possibility that in the letter he sent to Darwin, Wallace did not discuss the selection of individual variations at all but rather the election of the group. However, Malcolm Kottler has pointed out that this idea is incorrect and Wallace does discuss individual variations.
Others have noted that another difference is that Wallace seems to have envisioned natural selection as a kind of feedback mechanism keeping species and varieties adaptable to their environment. They show a very neglected part of Wallace's famous 1858 paper:
This principle action is exactly what the centrifugal machine governor did, examining and correcting any deviation almost before it became clear; and in the same way, there is no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom that can reach a striking magnitude, because it will make itself feel in the first step, by making existence difficult and extinction almost certainly overtaken.
Cybernetic scientist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson will observe in the 1970s that, although writing only as an example, Wallace "probably says the most powerful thing ever said in the 19th century". Bateson revisited the topic in his book 1979 Mind and Nature: A Necessary Union, and other scholars continue to explore the relationship between natural selection and system theory.
Color warning and sexual selection
In 1867, Darwin wrote to Wallace about the problems he had to understand how some caterpillars can evolve a striking color scheme. Darwin became convinced that sexual selection, an agency not attributed by Wallace as important as Darwin, explains the many striking animal color schemes. However, Darwin realizes that this does not apply to caterpillars. Wallace replied that he and Henry Bates had observed that many of the most spectacular butterflies had an odd smell and taste, and that he had been told by John Jenner Weir that birds would not eat a common white moth because they felt uncomfortable.. "Now that the white moth is as striking as the twilight as a colored worm during the day," Wallace wrote back to Darwin that it seems that the striking color scheme serves as a warning to predators and thus can evolve through natural selection. Darwin was impressed by the idea. At the next Entomological Society meeting, Wallace asked for any evidence that might be on the topic. In 1869 Weir published data from experiments and observations involving brightly colored caterpillars in support of Wallace's ideas. COLOR COLOR is one of Wallace's numerous contributions made in the field of animal-staining evolution in general and the concept of protective staining in particular. It was also part of the lifelong disagreement that Wallace had with Darwin on the importance of sexual selection. In his book of 1878 Tropical Nature and Other Essays he wrote extensively on the coloring of animals and plants and proposed alternative explanations for a number of cases that Darwin was associated with sexual selection. He reviewed the topic at length in his book of 1889 Darwinism . In 1890, he wrote a critical review in Nature from his friend Edward Bagnall Poulton's The Colors of Animals that supported Darwin on sexual selection, attacking mainly Poulton's claim of "the aesthetic preferences of the world insects ".
Wallace Effects
In 1889, Wallace wrote the book Darwinism , which explains and defends natural selection. In it, he proposed a hypothesis that natural selection could induce reproductive isolation from two varieties by encouraging the development of barriers to hybridization. Thus it may contribute to the development of new species. He suggested the following scenario. When two populations of a species deviate beyond a certain point, each adapting to a particular condition, the hybrid offspring will be less well adapted than the parent form and, at that point, natural selection will tend to remove hybrids. Furthermore, under such conditions, natural selection will support the development of barriers to hybridization, as individuals who avoid hybrid marriages will tend to have more suitable offspring, and thus contribute to the reproductive isolation of two new species. This idea came to be known as the Wallace effect, which was then referred to as reinforcement. Wallace had suggested to Darwin that natural selection could play a role in preventing hybridization in personal correspondence as early as 1868, but did not make it to this level of detail. This continues to be a research topic in evolutionary biology today, with both computer simulations and empirical results that support its validity.
Application of theory to humans, and the role of teleology in evolution
In 1864, Wallace published a paper, "The Origin of Human Races and Antiquity of Man Concluded from the Theory of 'Natural Selection'", applying that theory to mankind. Darwin has not publicly discussed this issue, though Thomas Huxley has been at the Proof of the Place of Man in Nature . He explains the apparent stability of the human stock by showing a large gap in the skull capacity between humans and great apes. Unlike some other Darwinists, including Darwin himself, he does not "regard modern primitives as nearly filling the gap between man and ape". He sees human evolution in two stages: achieving a bipedal posture liberating the hand to carry out the brain commands, and "the recognition of the human brain as an entirely new factor in the history of life.Popace apparently the first evolutionist to admit clearly that... with the advent of a body specialization is the human brain, the body specialization itself may be outdated. "For this paper he won the praise of Darwin.
Shortly after, Wallace became a spiritualist. At about the same time, he begins to maintain that natural selection can not explain the mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, as well as metaphysical reflection, and intelligence and humor. He finally says that something in the "invisible universe of spirits" has been an intermediary at least three times in history. The first is the creation of life from inorganic matter. The second is the introduction of consciousness in higher animals. And the third is the generation of higher mental abilities in humans. He also believes that the raison d'ÃÆ'ªtre of the universe is the development of the human soul. These views deeply disturbed Darwin, who argued that spiritual attraction is not necessary and that sexual selection can easily explain seemingly non-adaptive mental phenomena. While some historians have concluded that Wallace's belief that natural selection is insufficient to explain the development of human consciousness and thought is directly due to the adoption of spiritualism, other Wallace experts have disagreed, and some argue that Wallace never believed natural selection was applied to them. area. The reaction to Wallace's ideas about this topic among the leading naturalists of the time varied. Charles Lyell supports Wallace's view of human evolution rather than Darwin. Wallace's conviction that human consciousness can not be entirely the product of the pure material causes possessed by a number of prominent intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, many, including Huxley, Hooker, and Darwin himself, are critical of Wallace. As historian Michael Shermer once remarked, Wallace's view in this field contradicts two of Darwin's principal philosophical principles, namely, that evolution is not teleological (driven by purpose) and that it is not anthropocentric (human-centered).. Far later Wallace returned to these themes, that evolution suggests that the universe may have a purpose and that certain aspects of living organisms may not be explained in terms of purely materialistic processes, in a 1909 magazine article entitled The World Life , which later expanded into a book of the same name; a work that Shermer says anticipates some ideas about design in nature and directs the evolution that will arise from various religious traditions throughout the 20th century.
Assessing Wallace's role in the history of the theory of evolution
In many accounts of the development of the theory of evolution, Wallace is only mentioned at a glance as a stimulus to the publication of Darwin's own theory. In fact, Wallace developed his own distinct evolutionary outlook from Darwin, and was considered by many (mainly Darwin) to be the leading thinker of evolution in his day, whose ideas can not be ignored. A historian of science has shown that, through personal correspondence and published works, Darwin and Wallace exchanged knowledge and stimulated their ideas and theories over a long period. Wallace is the most frequently cited naturalist in the Descent of Man Darwin, sometimes in strong disagreement.
Both Darwin and Wallace agreed on the importance of natural selection, and several factors responsible for it: competition between species and geographical isolation. But Wallace believes that evolution has a purpose ("teleology") in keeping species compatible with the environment, while Darwin is hesitant to link any goal with a random natural process. Scientific discoveries since the nineteenth century support Darwin's point of view, by identifying some additional mechanisms and triggers:
- Mutations in germ-line DNA (ie, sperm DNA or egg cells, which manifest in offspring). It occurs spontaneously, or triggered by environmental radiation or mutagenic chemicals. The newly discovered mechanism, which may be more important than the others combined, is a viral infection, which integrates their DNA into its host. Organisms do not want to mutate: mutations just happened. Most of the mutations are dangerous or deadly for their offspring, but a very small minority is beneficial, as new proteins are produced that serve new functions.
- The epigenetic mechanism, in which evolution can occur in the absence of changes in the DNA sequence, through various mechanisms including chemical modification to the DNA base.
- Disaster events (meteorite/asteroid impacts, volcanism) that caused mass extinction of species that, until the event, were perfectly adapted to their environment, such as dinosaurs. The dramatic reduction of competition among surviving species makes the newly evolved species more likely to survive.
Wallace remains a strong advocate of natural selection for the rest of his life. In the 1880s, evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles. In 1889, Wallace published a book on Darwinism in response to scientific criticism of natural selection. Of all Wallace's books, this is the most widely cited by scientific publications.
Other scientific contributions
Biogeography and ecology
In 1872, at the urging of many of his friends, including Darwin, Philip Sclater, and Alfred Newton, Wallace began research for an overview of the geographic distribution of animals. He could not make much progress at first, partly because the classification system for many types of animals changed at that time. He continued his work earnestly in 1874 after the publication of a number of new works on classification. Extending the system developed by Sclater for birds - which divides the earth into six separate geographical regions to illustrate the species distribution - to cover mammals, reptiles and insects as well, Wallace created the basis for the still-used zoogeography area to date. He discusses all the factors that are then known to affect the current and past geographic distribution of animals in each geographic region. These include the effects of appearance and loss of land bridges (such as those currently linking North America and South America) and the effect of periods of increased glaciation. He provides maps showing factors, such as mountain heights, ocean depths, and regional vegetation characters, which affect the distribution of animals. He also summarizes all the famous families and genera of higher animals and lists their known geographic distribution. The text is arranged in such a way that it would be easy for a traveler to learn what animal can be found in a particular location. The resulting two-volume work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals , was published in 1876 and will serve as a definitive text on zoogeography over the next 80 years.
In this book Wallace does not limit itself to the biogeography of living species, but also includes evidence from the fossil record to discuss the process of evolution and migration that has led to the geographic distribution of modern animal species. For example, he discusses how fossil evidence suggests that tapirs originated from the Northern Hemisphere, migrated between North America and Eurasia and then, much later, to South America after the northern species became extinct, leaving the modern distribution of two isolated groups. tapir species in South America and Southeast Asia. Wallace was very conscious, and interested in, mass extinction megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene. In The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) he writes, "We live in a world of poor zoology, from which all the greatest, and most violent, and the strangest forms have just disappeared." He added that he believes the most likely cause for rapid extinction has been glaciation, but by the time he wrote World of Life (1911) he came to believe that extinction was "due to human agents".
In 1880, Wallace published the book Island of Life as the sequel to The Geographical Distribution of Animals . It surveys the distribution of animal and plant species on the islands. Wallace grouped the island into three different types. Oceanic islands, such as the Galapagos Islands and Hawaii (later known as the Sandwich Islands) were formed in the middle of the sea and never became part of a large continent. Such islands are characterized by the lack of terrestrial terrestrial mammals and terrestrial amphibians, and their inhabitants (with the exception of birds and migratory species introduced by human activity) are usually the result of unintentional colonization and subsequent evolution. He divides the continent islands into two separate classes depending on whether they have recently become part of a continent (such as the UK) or less recently (such as Madagascar) and discusses how those differences affect flora and fauna. He talks about how isolation affects evolution and how it can result in the preservation of animal classes, such as the Madagascar lemurs that are the remains of continental fauna that once widespread. He extensively discusses how climate change, in particular the period of glaciation increases, may have affected the distribution of flora and fauna on several islands, and the first part of this book addresses the possible causes of this great ice age. Island of Life is considered a very important work at the time of publication. It has been widely discussed in scientific circles both in published reviews and in personal correspondence.
Environmental issues
Wallace's extensive work in biogeography makes him aware of the impact of human activities on the natural world. In Tropical and Other Essays (1878), he cautions about the dangers of deforestation and soil erosion, especially in tropical climates that are prone to heavy rains. Noting the complex interactions between vegetation and climate, he warned that extensive rainforest clearing for coffee plantations in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India would negatively impact the climate in these countries and lead to their final impoverishment due to soil erosion. At Island Life, Wallace again mentioned deforestation as well as the impact of invasive species. Regarding the impact of European colonization on the island of Saint Helena, he wrote:
... Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã , Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã , Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã , Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã, Ã , Ã, Ã, Ã, general aspects of the island are now so barren and forbidden that some people find it hard to believe that it's all green and fertile The cause of this change, however, is very easily explained. The rich soils formed by decaying volcanic rocks and vegetable deposits can only be maintained on steep slopes as long as they are protected by the largely owed vegetation of origin. When this is destroyed, heavy tropical rain immediately sweeps the soil, and has left a vast expanse of vacant land or sterile clay. This irreparable damage was caused, firstly, by goats, introduced by the Portuguese in 1513, and rising so rapidly that in 1588 they existed in the thousands. These animals are the largest of all enemies to the tree, because they feed on young seedlings, and thus prevent the natural restoration of the forest. However, they are helped by the frivolous waste of humanity. The East India Company took control of the island in 1651, and around 1700 it began to show that forests were rapidly reduced, and needed protection. Two native trees, redwood and ebony, good for tannery, and, to save trouble, stem bark was forcibly removed from the trunk only, the rest left to rot; while in 1709 a large amount of rapidly disappearing ebony wood was used to burn lime to build the castle!
Wallace's comments about the environment grew harder later in his career. In The World of Life (1911) he writes:
These considerations should lead us to view all the works of nature, life or death, as invested with certain holiness, to be used by us but not abused, and never frivolously destroyed or destroyed. To pollute springs or rivers, to destroy birds or animals, should be treated as a moral offense and as a social offense;... But over the past century, who has seen great progress in the knowledge of Nature that we are so proud of, there is no development of love or the same respect for his works; so that there has never been widespread destruction on the surface of the earth by the destruction of native vegetation and with that much animal life, and the destruction of such land by mineral work and by pouring into our rivers and streams refuse manufactories and cities; and this has been done by all the biggest countries that claim first place for civilization and religion!
Astrobiology
The Wallace Book of 1904 The Human Place in the Universe is the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the possibility of life on another planet. He concluded that Earth is the only planet in the solar system that might be able to support life, especially since it is the only one where water can exist in the liquid phase. More controversially he argues that it is unlikely that other stars in the galaxy can have planets with the necessary properties (the existence of other galaxies that have not been proven at the time).
His treatment of Mars in this book is short, and in 1907, Wallace returned to the subject with a book What is Mars Habitable? to criticize the claims made by Percival Lowell that there are Martian canals built by intelligent beings. Wallace did the research for months, consulted with various experts, and produced his own scientific analysis of the climate and conditions of Mars's atmosphere. Among other things, Wallace suggests that spectroscopic analysis shows no sign of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere, that Lowell's analysis of the Martian climate is a serious defect and greatly exaggerates the surface temperature, and that low atmospheric pressure will make liquid water, let alone irrigation systems with planetary patterns, is not possible. Richard Milner commented: "It was a brilliant and eccentric evolutionist, Alfred Russel Wallace... who effectively denied the illusionary network of Martian Mars Lowell channels." Wallace was initially interested in this topic because his anthropocentric philosophy led him to believe that humans would likely be unique in the universe.
Other contributions
Poetry
Wallace also wrote poetic poetry, for example is 'A Description Of Javita' from his book 'Travel on the Amazon'.
Poetry begins:
This is where rivers split, flooding
Of the two great rivers in our world;
Where the brooklet emerge in their cramped bed '
This continues later to describe the villagers and their lives in detail, although that is not a beautiful description:
There is an Indian village; all,
The forest is dark, immortal, infinite spread
Its varied foliage. The high palm trees rise up
On each side, and many trees are not known
Save with strange names into English ears.
Here I live while a white man
Among perhaps two hundred living souls.
They passed a peaceful and satisfied life '
The poem is a lyrical description of the life of the tribe he lived in along the Amazon. Although there is an echo of Tennyson in rhymes and the rhythm of the poem itself is not very romantic, it serves more as a tool to set the scene and then draw a contrast between the lives of the people who live here and the people in England. The poem is a comment about cruelty and greed, making the point that some in Britain are more 'ruthless' than those in the Amazon, whether by greed for gold or by their greed for gold pushes others into poverty.
Wallace concluded:
I will be an Indian here, and live content
For fishing, and hunting, and rowing my canoe,
And see my children grow up, like young wild children,
In the health of the body and in the peace of mind,
Rich without wealth, and happy without gold!
The poem was referenced and partly read on the BBC television series 'The Ascent of Man'.
Controversy
Spiritualism
In a letter to his brother-in-law in 1861, Wallace wrote:
... I remain a kafir in almost everything you consider to be the most sacred truth. I will pass through it as a truly despicable charge that skeptics shut the evidence because they will not be governed by Christian morality... I am grateful I can see many things to admire in all religions. For the masses of mankind, religion is a necessity. But is there a God and whatever is His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or anything that might be our country after death, I can not afraid to suffer for studying nature and seeking the truth, or believing that they will be better in the future that has lived in the doctrinal conviction which is instilled from childhood, and which for them is more a matter of blind faith than intelligent belief.
Wallace is a fan of phrenology. Early in his career, he experimented with hypnosis, which came to be known as mesmerism. He used some of his students in Leicester as a subject, with great success. When he started his experiments with mesmerism, the topic was highly controversial and early researchers, such as John Elliotson, had been heavily criticized by medical and scientific institutions. Wallace draws a connection between his experience with mesmerism and his subsequent investigation into spiritualism. In 1893, he wrote:
Thus I learned my first great lesson in this investigation into this obscure field of knowledge, never accepting mistrust of great men or their accusations of fraud or accident, for any weight when opposing repeatable facts over and over by others, recognized sane and honest. The whole history of science shows us that whenever educated and scientific people of all ages have rejected the facts from other investigators about the basics of absurdity or the impossibility of priori, those who deny always wrong.
Wallace began investigating spiritualism in the summer of 1865, possibly at the urging of his older sister, Fanny Sims, who had been involved with him for some time. After reviewing the literature on the topic and trying to test the phenomena he witnessed at sà © bà © es, he came to accept that beliefs were related to the reality of nature. For the rest of his life, he remains convinced that at least some of the sà © bine phenomena are genuine, no matter how many fraud charges are made skeptical or how much evidence of deception is generated. Historians and biographers disagree about which factors influence the adoption of spiritualism most. It has been suggested by a biographer that the emotional shock he received several months earlier, when his first fiancé broke their engagement, contributed to his acceptance of spiritualism. Other scholars prefer to emphasize the book
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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