British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, proposed that evolution occurs because of a phenomenon called natural selection. In the theory of natural selection, organisms produce more offspring than are able to survive in their environment.
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Wallace’s research on the geographic distribution of animals provided critical support for his evolutionary theories and led him to draw a boundary line through Southeast Asia that divides Asian and Australian animal groups.
Alfred Wallace Death
On 7 November 1913, Wallace died at home in the country house he called Old Orchard, which he had built a decade earlier.
He was 90 years old. His death was widely reported in the press. The New York Times called him “the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionised and evolutionised the thought of the century.”
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Alfred Wallace Education
Wallace’s formal education was limited to six years at the one-room Hertford Grammar School.
Although his education was curtailed by the family’s worsening financial situation, his home was a rich source of books, maps, and gardening activities, which Wallace remembered as enduring sources of learning and pleasure.
Alfred Wallace Facts
Wallace and Bates discussed the idea of an expedition to the Amazon.
From 1854 to 1862, age 31 to 39, Wallace travelled through the Dutch East Indies (now Malaysia and Indonesia), to collect specimens for sale and to study nature.
Unlike Darwin, Wallace began his career as a travelling naturalist already believing in evolution. Both he and Bates had read Vestiges, a controversial work of popular science, published anonymously in 1844.
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