The ideas he’d arrived at on his own were revolutionary - and closely mirrored what Darwin had been mulling over himself. In it, he described how organisms produce more offspring than necessary, and natural selection only favors the most fit. There he wrote a succinct, yet brilliant, paper, which he sent to Charles Darwin. Portrait of Alfred Russel Wallace taken in Singapore in 1862. I am an evolutionary biologist who has always been fascinated by the mechanisms of evolution as well as the history of my own field, and it’s like visiting hallowed ground for me to trace Wallace’s footsteps through the jungle where he puzzled through the mechanics of how evolution works. This insight would ultimately mature into a fully formed theory of evolution by natural selection - the same theory Charles Darwin arrived at independently years before, but had not yet published. In what’s commonly known as his “Sarawak Law” paper, Wallace pondered the unique distribution of related species, which he could only explain by means of gradual changes.

Whether Darwin or Wallace should justly be credited for the discovery of the mechanisms of evolution has stirred controversy pretty much ever since.Ĭomparatively little has been written about Wallace’s seminal work, published four years earlier.

In another year, Charles Darwin would publish “ The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection,” squarely positioning him as the father of evolution. Their authors: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Three years later, in 1858, two papers that would change our understanding of our place in the natural world were read before the Linnean Society of London. It’s as crucial to Wallace’s own thinking in disentangling the mechanisms of evolution as the Galàpagos Islands famously were to his contemporary, Charles Darwin. This is where, in February 1855, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote his hugely influential “Sarawak Law” paper. At last I’ve reached my goal, Rajah Brooke’s cottage, at the top of Bukit Peninjau, a hill in the middle of Borneo’s jungle. The chirping of cicadas is deafening, my clothes are sticky and heavy with heat and sweat, my right hand is swollen from ant bites, I am panting, almost passing out from exhaustion - and I have a big grin on my face.

Alfred russel wallace seminal work