The Wallace line and the Wallace point

Wallace on the evolutionary trail

stock exchange; he argued against globalised free trade; an anti-imperialist, he preached “the rights of every people to govern themselves” [12]. The contrast with Darwin is striking. After publication of The Origin, Darwin’s strategy was to consolidate and concretise the arguments laid out in his seminal work. His output remained resolutely scientific. One of the many reasons that Wallace has ...

Wallace and Darwin

term the common ancestral state of members of a group); morphology (arguing that the “natural inference of an unprejudiced person” is to recognize that homologous structures “are true records of the progress of the organic world); domestication (maintaining that divergent animal breeds constitute evidence of mutability, and offering thought experiments to show that there is no good reason to th...

William Wallace (1791-1837).

Wallace as writer

But despite their differences each man deeply valued the other. Darwin persuaded the British government to award Wallace a pension for services to science. Wallace dedicated his book The Malay Archipelago to Darwin, “as a token of personal esteem and friendship but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works.” Wallace also called his 1889 collection of evolutionary essays Da...

Wallace, Darwin and Ternate 1858.

Recent debates on the mailing date of Alfred Russel Wallace's 'Ternate essay' to Charles Darwin in the spring of 1858 have ignored certain details that, once taken into account, alter the matter considerably. Here, a closer look is taken at the critical question of whether Wallace's manuscript-accompanying letter represented a reply to the Darwin letter that arrived in Ternate on 9 March; it is...