Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace, byname A.R. Wallace (born Jan. 8, 1823, Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales
died Nov. 7, 1913, Broadstone, Dorset, Eng.), British humanist, naturalist, geographer, and social
critic. He became a public figure in England during the second half of the 19th century, known
for his courageous views on scientific, social, and spiritualist subjects. His formulation of the
theory of evolution by natural selection, which predated Charles Darwins published
contributions, is his most outstanding legacy, but it was just one of many controversial issues he
studied and wrote about during his lifetime. Wallaces wide-ranging interestsfrom socialism
to spiritualism, from island biogeography to life on Mars, from evolution to land nationalization
stemmed from his profound concern with the moral, social, and political values of human life.
The career of a naturalist
As a surveyor, Wallace spent a great deal of time outdoors, both for work and pleasure. An
enthusiastic amateur naturalist with an intellectual bent, he read widely in natural history, history,
and political economy, including works by William Swainson, Charles Darwin,Alexander von
Humboldt, and Thomas Malthus. He also read works and attended lectures on phrenology and
mesmerism, forming an interest in nonmaterial mental phenomena that grew increasingly
prominent later in his life. Inspired by reading about organic evolution in Robert Chamberss
controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), unemployed, and ardent in his
love of nature, Wallace and his naturalist friend Henry Walter Bates, who had introduced Wallace
to entomology four years earlier, traveled to Brazil in 1848 as self-employed specimen
collectors. Wallace and Bates participated in the culture of natural history collecting, honing
practical skills to identify, collect, and send back to England biological objects that were highly
valued in the flourishing trade in natural specimens. The two young men amicably parted ways
after several joint collecting ventures; Bates spent 11 years in the region, while Wallace spent a
total of four years traveling, collecting, mapping, drawing, and writing in unexplored regions of
the Amazon River basin. He studied the languages and habits of the peoples he encountered; he
collected butterflies, other insects, and birds; and he searched for clues to solve the mystery of
the origin of plant and animal species. Except for one shipment of specimens sent to his agent in
London, however, most of Wallaces collections were lost on his voyage home when his ship
went up in flames and sank. Nevertheless, he managed to save some of his notes before his

rescue and return journey. From these he published several scientific articles, two books (Palm
Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses and Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro,both
1853), and a map depicting the course of the Negro River. These won him acclaim from
the Royal Geographical Society, which helped to fund his next collecting venture, in the Malay
Archipelago.
Wallace spent eight years in the Malay Archipelago, from 1854 to 1862, traveling among the
islands, collecting biological specimens for his own research and for sale, and writing scores of
scientific articles on mostly zoological subjects. Among these were two extraordinary articles
dealing with the origin of new species. The first of these, published in 1855, concluded with the
assertion that every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a
pre-existing closely allied species. Wallace then proposed that new species arise by the
progression and continued divergence of varieties that outlive the parent species in the struggle
for existence. In early 1858 he sent a paper outlining these ideas to Darwin, who saw such a
striking coincidence to his own theory that he consulted his closest colleagues, the
geologist Charles Lyell and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. The three men decided to present
two extracts of Darwins previous writings, along with Wallaces paper, to the Linnean Society.
The resulting set of papers, with both Darwins and Wallaces names, was published as a single
article entitled On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of
Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection in the Proceedings of the Linnean
Society in 1858. This compromise sought to avoid a conflict of priority interests and was reached
without Wallaces knowledge. Wallaces research on the geographic distribution of animals
among the islands of the Malay Archipelago provided crucial evidence for his evolutionary
theories and led him to devise what soon became known as Wallaces Line, the boundary that
separates the fauna of Australia from that of Asia.
Wallace returned to England in 1862 an established natural scientist and geographer, as well as a
collector of more than 125,000 animal specimens. He married Annie Mitten (18481914), with
whom he raised three children (Herbert died at age 4, whereas Violet and William survived their
father), published a highly successful narrative of his journey, The Malay Archipelago: The Land
of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise (1869), and wrote Contributions to the Theory of

Natural Selection (1870). In the latter volume and in several articles from this period on human
evolution and spiritualism, Wallace parted from the scientific naturalism of many of his friends
and colleagues in claiming that natural selection could not account for the higher faculties of
human beings.
Wallaces two-volume Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) and Island Life (1880)
became the standard authorities in zoogeography and island biogeography, synthesizing
knowledge about the distribution and dispersal of living and extinct animals in an evolutionary
framework. For the ninth edition of Encyclopdia Britannica (187589), he wrote the article
Acclimatisation (adaptation) and the animal life section of the article Distribution. He also
lectured in the British Isles and in the United States and traveled on the European continent. In
addition to his major scientific works, Wallace actively pursued a variety of social and political
interests. In writings and public appearances he opposed vaccination, eugenics, and vivisection
while strongly supporting womens rights and land nationalization. Foremost among these
commitments was an increasing engagement with spiritualism in his personal and public
capacities.

Jean-Baptiste Lamark

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in full Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck

(born August 1, 1744, Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, Francedied December 18,
1829, Paris), pioneer French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are
inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted
by modern genetics and evolutionary theory.

The inheritance of acquired characters

In 1800 Lamarck first set forth the revolutionary notion of species mutability during a lecture to
students in his invertebrate zoology class at the National Museum of Natural History. By 1802
the general outlines of his broad theory of organic transformation had taken shape. He presented
the theory successively in his Recherches sur lorganisation des corps vivans(1802; Research
on the Organization of Living Bodies), his Philosophie zoologique (1809; Zoological
Philosophy), and the introduction to his great multivolume work on
invertebrate classification, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertbres (181522; Natural
History of Invertebrate Animals). Lamarcks theory of organic development included the idea
that the very simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation.
Life became successively diversified, he claimed, as the result of two very different sorts of
causes. He called the first the power of life, or the cause that tends to make organization
increasingly complex, whereas he classified the second as the modifying influence of particular
circumstances (that is, the effects of the environment). He explained this in his Philosophie
zoologique: The state in which we now see all the animals is on the one hand the product of the
increasing composition of organization, which tends to form a regular gradation, and on the other
hand that of the influences of a multitude of very different circumstances that continually tend to
destroy the regularity in the gradation of the increasing composition of organization.

With this theory, Lamarck offered much more than an account of how species change. He also
explained what he understood to be the shape of a truly natural system of classification of the
animal kingdom. The primary feature of this system was a single scale of increasing complexity

composed of all the different classes of animals, starting with the simplest microscopic
organisms, or infusorians, and rising up to the mammals. The species, however, could not be
arranged in a simple series. Lamarck described them as forming lateral ramifications with
respect to the general masses of organization represented by the classes. Lateral ramifications
in species resulted when they underwent transformations that reflected the diverse, particular
environments to which they had been exposed.

By Lamarcks account, animals, in responding to different environments, adopted new habits.

Their new habits caused them to use some organs more and some organs less, which resulted in
the strengthening of the former and the weakening of the latter. New characters thus acquired by
organisms over the course of their lives were passed on to the next generation (provided, in the
case of sexual reproduction, that both of the parents of the offspring had undergone the same
changes). Small changes that accumulated over great periods of time produced major differences.
Lamarck thus explained how the shapes of giraffes, snakes, storks, swans, and numerous other
creatures were a consequence of long-maintained habits. The basic idea of the inheritance of
acquired characters had originated with Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, and others, but Lamarck was
essentially the first naturalist to argue at length that the long-term operation of this process could
result in species change.

Later in the century, after English naturalist Charles Darwin advanced his theory
of evolutionby natural selection, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters came to be
identified as a distinctively Lamarckian view of organic change (though Darwin himself also
believed that acquired characters could be inherited). The idea was not seriously challenged in
biology until the German biologist August Weismann did so in the 1880s. In the 20th century,
since Lamarcks idea failed to be confirmed experimentally and the evidence commonly cited in
its favour was given different interpretations, it became thoroughly discredited. Epigenetics, the
study of the chemical modification of genes and gene-associated proteins, has since offered an

explanation for how certain traits developed during an organisms lifetime can be passed along to
its offspring.

Lamarck made his most important contributions to science as a botanical and zoological
systematist, as a founder of invertebrate paleontology, and as an evolutionary theorist. In his own
day, his theory of evolution was generally rejected as implausible, unsubstantiated, or heretical.
Today he is primarily remembered for his notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Nonetheless, Lamarck stands out in the history of biology as the first writer to set forthboth
systematically and in detaila comprehensive theory of organic evolution that accounted for the
successive production of all the different forms of life on Earth.

Henry Walter Bates

Natural History.
In addition to numerous activities, Bates was an avid entomologist and, with his brother
Frederick, scoured the woods of nearby Charnwood Forest for specimens during his holidays.
His earliest scientific work, a short paper on beetles (1843), was published in the first issue
of The Zoologist when he was eighteen years old.
In 1844 (or 1845) Bates befriended Alfred Russel Wallace, a mutually beneficial act that
profoundly influenced both their lives. Wallace was then a master at the Collegiate School at
Leicester and in his spare time enthusiastically pursued his own amateurish interests in botany.
Bates introduced him to entomology, and the two friends continued to correspond and exchange
specimens after Wallace moved from Leicester early in 1845.
While exchanging specimens in 1847, Wallace audaciously suggested to Bates that they should
travel to the tropical jungles to collect specimens, ship them home for sale, and gather facts
towards solving the problem of the origin of speciesa frequent topic of their conversations
and correspondence. Wallaces attention had been directed to South America by the vivid prose
of William H. Edward Voyage up the River Amazon, Including a Residence at Par(1847);
conversations with the author increased their interest, as did Edward Doubleday of the British
Museum, who showed them some exquisite new species of butterflies collected near Par
(Belm), Brazil, and offered other encouragement. Arrangements were soon made, and after a
swift voyage of thirty-one days, the two amateur naturalists disembarked on 28 May 1848 at
Par, near the mouth of the Amazon River. Although Wallace returned to England in July 1852,

Bates remained for a total of eleven years, exploring and collecting within four degrees of the
equator. Frequently discouraged by his chronically destitute condition and his isolation, he was
nevertheless held there by an intense passion for collecting: the exquisite pleasure of finding
another new species of these creatures supports one against everything. Bates conservatively
estimated that he had collected 14,712 animal species (primarily insects) while in South
America; more than 8,000 of these were new to science. Despite the richness of his collections,
he received a profit of only about 800 for his effortsor about 73 a year.
After arriving in England in the summer of 1859, Bates began work on his enormous collections
under the influence of a specific biological concept. In the previous year the now famous papers
of Charles Darwin had been presented to the Linnean Society of London, and in November 1859
Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Bates was an
immediate convert, and had some substantial and impressive evidence of his own to contribute to
Darwins arguments. (Batess Unitarian religious views did not hinder his acceptance of natural
selection.) On 21 November 1861 Bates first expounded his ideas on mimicry in his famous
paper Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley. Lepidoptera:
Heliconidae, which he read before the Linnean Society. With typical enthusiasm for works by
his followers, Charles Darwin commented that Batess article was one of the most remarkable
and admirable papers I have ever read in my life.
Responding to Darwins exhortations, Bates published early in 1863 a two-volume narrative of
his travels in South America. The Naturalist on the River Amazon. This splendid work was one
of the finest scientific travel books of the nineteenth century. The Naturalist went through many
editions and was translated into several languages; nevertheless, popular and remunerative as it
was, Bates remarked that he would rather spend another eleven years on the Amazon than write
another book.
Bates was the first naturalist to venture a comprehensive scientific explanation for the
phenomenon that he labeled mimicry (Batesian mimicry). Batesian mimicry should here be
differentiated from Mllerian mimicry, According to Cott:
One therefore leads to deception of enemies and the other to the education of enemies by
warning colors. Bates, and others, at first confused the two kinds of mimicry.

Granted that mimics are adaptations to their environment, the important question was why such
remarkably close analogies exist, Bates ruled out direct action of physical conditions because in
limited districts where these conditions were the same, the most widely contrasting varieties may
be found co-existing. Likewise, sports (mutations) did not explain mimicry. To Bates in was
quite clear that natural selection had produced these phenomena, the selecting agents being
insectivorous animals which gradually destroy those sports or varieties which are not sufficiently
like [the protected species] to deceive them. The closer the resemblance of the mimic to the
original, the greater will be its protection. Imperfect copies will be eliminated slowly, unless they
have some supplementary protection of their own. (In fact as V. Grant observed, most animals
in general have several alternative means of defense against their enemies [The Origin of
Adaptations, p. 112].) By observing the different forms of the mimic as it approximated (or
diverged from) the original, species change itself could be carefully observed: Thus, although
we are unable to watch the process of formation of a new race as it occurs in time, we can see it,
as it were, at one glance, by tracing the changes a species is simultaneously undergoing in
different parts of the areas of distribution,; As Bates so aptly observed, it was a most beautiful
proof of natural selection.
Darwin was thoroughly delighted with Batess paper, for it fully corroborated his theory and
presented him with an excellent opportunity to rebut his critics in a short, unsigned review in
the Natural History Review for 1863. He confronted the creationists with the embarrassing case
of the mimicking forms of Leptalides (Dismorphia) butterflies, which could be shown through a
graduated series to be varieties of one species; other mimickers clearly were distinct varieties,
species, or genera. To be logically consistentand they were not alwaysthe creationists had to
admit that some mimickers had been formed by commonly observed variations, while others
were specially created. They would further be required to admit that some of these forms were
created in imitation of forms known to arise through the ordinary processes of variation. The
difficulties of such a position were insurmountable, and the arguments for Batesian mimicry
were widely accepted. Moreover, A. R. Wallace soon extended these arguments in two excellent
articles: On the Phenomena of Variation and Geographical Distribution as Illustrated by
the Papilionidae of the Malayan Region (1865) and Mimicry and Other Protective
Resemblances Among Animals (1867). Thereafter, the literature was rich with references to
mimicry, reaching a high point toward the end of the century with extensive discussions by
Wallace, Poulton, and Beddard.

Charles Darwin
Naturalist Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in the tiny merchant town of
Shrewsbury, England. He was the second youngest of six children. Darwin came from a long line
of scientists. His father, Dr. R.W. Darwin, was as a medical doctor, and his grandfather, Dr.
Erasmus Darwin, was a renowned botanist. Darwins mother, Susanna, died when he was only 8
years old. Darwin was a child of wealth and privilege who loved to explore nature.
In October 1825, at age 16, Darwin enrolled at Edinburgh University along with his brother
Erasmus. Two years later, Charles Darwin became a student at Christ's College in Cambridge.
His father hoped he would follow in his footsteps and become a medical doctor, but the sight of
blood made Darwin queasy. His father suggested he study to become a parson instead, but
Darwin was far more inclined to study natural history.
Voyage on the HMS Beagle
While Darwin was at Christ's College, botany professor John Stevens Henslow became his
mentor. After Darwin graduated Christ's College with a bachelor of arts degree in 1831, Henslow
recommended him for a naturalists position aboard the HMS Beagle. The ship, commanded by
Captain Robert FitzRoy, was to take a five-year survey trip around the world. The voyage would
prove the opportunity of a lifetime for the budding young naturalist.

On December 27, 1831, the HMS Beagle launched its voyage around the world with Darwin in
tow. Over the course of the trip, Darwin collected a variety of natural specimens, including birds,
plants and fossils. Through hands-on research and experimentation, he had the unique
opportunity to closely observe principles of botany, geology and zoology. The Pacific Islands and
Galapagos Archipelago were of particular interest to Darwin, as was South America.
Upon his return to England in 1836, Darwin began to write up his findings in the Journal of
Researches, published as part of Captain FitzRoy's larger narrative and later edited into the
Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle. The trip had a monumental effect on Darwins view of
natural history. He began to develop a revolutionary theory about the origin of living beings that
was contrary to the popular view of other naturalists at the time.
Theory of Evolution
Darwin's exposure to specimens all over the globe raised important questions. Other naturalists
believed that all species either came into being at the start of the world, or were created over the
course of natural history. In either case, the species were believed to remain much the same
throughout time. Darwin, however, noticed similarities among species all over the globe, along
with variations based on specific locations, leading him to believe that they had gradually
evolved from common ancestors. He came to believe that species survived through a process
called "natural selection," where species that successfully adapted to meet the changing
requirements of their natural habitat thrived, while those that failed to evolve and reproduce died
off.
The experts findings sent Darwin to more-heretical depths. At the Royal College of Surgeons,
the eminent anatomist Richard Owen found that Darwins Uruguay River skull belonged
to Toxodon, a hippopotamus-sized antecedent of the South American capybara. The Pampas
fossils were nothing like rhinoceroses and mastodons; they were huge extinct armadillos,
anteaters, and sloths, which suggested that South American mammals had been replaced by their
own kind according to some unknown law of succession. At the Zoological Society,
ornithologist John Gould announced that the Galapagos birds were not a mixture of wrens,
finches, and gross-beaks but were all ground finches, differently adapted. When Gould

diagnosed the Galapagos mockingbirds as three species, unique to different islands, in March
1837, Darwin examined Fitzroys collection to discover that each island had its
representative finch as well. But how had they all diverged from mainland colonists? By that
time Darwin was living near his freethinking brother, Erasmus, in Londons West End, and their
dissident dining circle, which included the Unitarian Harriet Martineau, provided the perfect
milieu for Darwins ruminations. Darwin adopted transmutation (evolution, as it is now
called), perhaps because of his familiarity with it through the work of his grandfather and Robert
Grant. Nonetheless, it was abominated by the Cambridge clerics as a bestial, if not
blasphemous, heresy that would corrupt mankind and destroy the spiritual safeguards of the
social order. Thus began Darwins double life, which would last for two decades.

For two years he filled notebooks with jottings. There was an intensity and doggedness to it. He
searched for the causes of extinction, accepted life as a branching tree (not a series of escalators,
the old idea), tackled island isolation, and wondered whether variations appeared gradually or at
a stroke. He dismissed a Lamarckian force driving life inexorably upward with the cavalier joke,
If all men were dead then monkeys make men.Men make angels, which showed how little
the failed ordinand shared his Cambridge mentors hysteria about an ape ancestry. Indeed, there
was no upward: he became relativistic, sensing that life was spreading outward into niches, not
standing on a ladder. There was no way of ranking humans and bees, no yardstick of highness:
man was no longer the crown of creation.

In 1858, after years of further scientific investigation, Darwin publically introduced his
revolutionary theory of evolution in a letter read at a meeting of the Linnean Society. On
November 24, 1859, he published a detailed explanation of his theory in his best-known
work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.