Best alfred russel wallace biography

English naturalist (–)

"Alfred Wallace" redirects here. For the artist, see Alfred Wallis.

Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January – 7 November ) was an English^[1][2][3]naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator.^[4] He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic.^[5] It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and to quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in as On the Origin of Species.

Wallace did extensive fieldwork, starting in the Amazon River basin. He then did fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of As