ALFRED RUSSELL WALLACE

Alfred Russell Wallace Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) developed a theory of evolution the same time as Darwin but failed to win the same recognition as Darwin. He made a historic journey through Malaysia, Borneo and Spice Islands about 20 years after Darwin made his voyage in the Beagle. Wallace was a much more colorful character than Darwin. He was one of nine children in a poor family and dropped out of school at fourteen. His interest in the natural sciences blossomed during beetle-hunting expeditions with a close friend.

Wallace spent fours years collecting specimens in the Amazon. He wrote a paper entitled On Monkeys in the Amazon but lost his specimens when the ship he was on caught fire and sunk on the voyage back to Europe. Later in life he became a vocal supporter of women's rights and was a firm believer in Spiritualism. He disputed a theory that the canals on the planet Mars were used by irrigation in his treatise “Is Mars Habitable?”

Wallace was a professional specimen collector. He spent much of his life far from civilization, in remote jungles and isolated islands. He collected 125,000 species of flora and fauna, many of them new to science, during his five years in Amazon basin and eight years traveling alone in Indonesia. The idea of survival of the fittest came to him while he was suffering from a malaria fit. Austen Layard, a contemporary of Wallace, said "one of the results of fever is a considerable excitement of the brain."

Wallace Line

The Wallace Line is an invisible biological barrier described by and named after the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace (See Below). Running along the water between the Indonesia islands of Bali and Lombok and between Borneo and Sulawesi, it separates the species found in Australia, New Guinea and the eastern islands of Indonesia from those found in western Indonesia, the Philippines and the Southeast Asia.

The Wallace Line was drawn in 1859 by Wallace and named by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. It separates the biogeographic realms of Asia and 'Wallacea', a transitional zone between Asia and Australia formerly also called the Malay Archipelago and the Indo-Australian Archipelago (Present day Indonesia). To the west of the line are found organisms related to Asiatic species; to the east, a mixture of species of Asian and Australian origins is present. Wallace noticed this clear division in both land mammals and birds during his travels through the East Indies in the 19th century. [Source: Wikipedia]

Because of the Wallace Line Asian animals such as elephants, orangutans and tigers never ventured further east than Bali, and Australian animals such as kangaroos, emus, cassowaries, wallabies and cockatoos never made it to Asia. Animals from both continents are found in some parts of Indonesia.

Wallace came up with the idea of a dividing line for animals after conducting surveys in the 1850s in Borneo and Sulawesi, where he was struck by how different the wildlife was on the two islands despite their close proximity to one another and their similar climates and geography. His letters to Darwin on the subject prompted Darwin to take a look as his own travels and make similar observations on some of the places he visited. In 1859 Wallace expanded on his observations and drew a line between Borneo and Bali to the west and Sulawesi and Lombok to the east and theorized that areas to the west — including the islands of Indonesia the Philippines — were part of a great Asian landmass and areas to east were connected to a greater Australian landmass, with Sulawesi containing elements of both the Asian and Australian landmass.

Studies of geology, ice ages and rising and falling sea levels conducted after Wallace’s death — that among other things found that Indonesia, the Philippines and the Southeast Asia were all connected by land bridges when sea levels dropped during ice ages — proved that his theories were largely correct. Further studies on the matter placed the furthest extent of Australian type fauna further east between the Moluccas and Timor.

Darwin and Alfred Russell

Joel Achenbach wrote in the Washington Post: “During a malarial fever in February 1858, Wallace had a revelation about a mechanism that could cause certain traits among species to be favored over time — what would become known as the survival of the fittest. He jotted down his thoughts and mailed a paper outlining his theory to the foremost naturalist of his era: Charles Darwin. [Source: Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, February 8, 2009]

Darwin was aghast. He had been developing his theory of evolution since the 1830s but never published it, fearing that it would cause a great public tumult and undoubtedly upset his extremely devout wife. Now he feared he had been scooped by an obscure bug collector.Darwin's friends came to his rescue. They arranged for a gathering of the Linnean Society of London, where they presented a "joint communication" by Darwin and Wallace, even as the latter was still on the other side of the world. A scientist read an unpublished essay and a private letter written by Darwin that outlined his theory. Then another scientist read Wallace's paper. The event established evolution as a powerful scientific theory; it also established Darwin as having scientific priority. With Wallace's breeze at his back, Darwin quickly finished his masterpiece, "On the Origin of Species," published in 1859.

In his initial letter to Darwin, Wallace wrote: "Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies the strongest and swiftest, or the most cunning...Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race , because in every generation the inferior would be killed off and the superior would remain — that is the fittest would survive ." Upon reading the letter Darwin wrote his works "were badly written. Mr. Wallace's essay, on the other hand was admirably expressed and quite clear.”

The Linnean Society investigated the matter on who should be given credit for the discovery of evolution. On July 1, 1858, the society announced that "two indefatigable naturalists, Mr Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace...independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perturbation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet." This was the first public statement about the theory of evolution.

Russell eventually gave up on evolution and turned to spiritualism and its weird ideas to explain the human mind. Darwin secretly helped finance the prosecution of a spiritualist con man supported by Wallace. Achenbach wrote: “Wallace was a bit of an eccentric, dabbling in fringe science even after he had made his signal contribution to the revolutionary theory of evolution. Unlike Darwin, he did not believe that natural selection could explain human consciousness. By the end of his life, he was sometimes dismissed as an oddball; only in recent years have scholars come to appreciate his achievements and his centrality in the discovery of evolution.

Wallace never begrudged his fate, and he became Darwin's friend, even using the term "Darwinism" to describe the theory of evolution. At the 50th-anniversary celebration of the 1858 joint communication, Wallace said Darwin deserved the glory. He noted that Darwin had spent two decades developing the theory, while Wallace had spent a week. "I was then, as often since, the 'young man in a hurry'; he, the painstaking and patient student, seeking ever the full demonstration of the truth that he had discovered, rather than to achieve immediate personal fame," Wallace said.

Wallace in Ternate

Theodora Sutcliffe of the BBC wrote: The Indonesian island of Ternate, like its neighbour Tidore, is almost all volcano. It sprouts from the sea, an almost-perfect, yet truncated cone, wreathed in steamy clouds and fringed with a narrow strip of flatlands and beach that house an airport, a city and an around-the-island road. [Source: Theodora Sutcliffe, BBC, June 6, 2017]

It seems an implausible location, all in all, for one of science’s great eureka moments When 35-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace arrived in Ternate in January 1858, he’d been exploring the vast and sprawling mass of islands he called the Malay Archipelago for almost four years. Travelling thousands of miles by steamer, sailing ships and native boats, on horseback and on foot, he and his assistants had killed, skinned or pinned tens of thousands of specimens, from orangutans to birds of paradise to the sloth-like marsupial known as the cuscus, not to mention thousands of species of beetle. [Source: Theodora Sutcliffe, BBC, June 6, 2017

By then, Ternate’s glory days were over, swept away by colonisation. For millennia, cloves had grown only on Ternate, Tidore and a handful of nearby islands. Today the piney, mulled-wine scent of drying cloves sweeps across the island during harvest time, and clove trees clothe the volcano’s lower slopes: small boys in nylon football shorts wait by the roadside to escort you to the towering tree that is, they claim, the oldest in the world. But first the Dutch, then the British broke the sultans’ clove monopoly. By 1858, the island that had attracted the pirate-navigator Francis Drake and the explorer Ferdinand Magellan was a backwater.

Wallace took a tumble-down house surrounded by fruit trees, five minutes’ walk from the market on the outskirts of what is now Ternate City. Although local guides promote several different houses as the spot where Wallace lived, it’s almost certainly long gone. “There were two roads that it could have been along, given the information he gave us,” said Wallace expert John Van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore. “There are no houses even half the age they should be.”

Wallace had barely moved in to his shady house with its cool, freshwater well when he fell sick, most likely with malaria. Cold sweats alternated with hot fits, and Wallace had to lie down for hours at a time, with nothing to do but think. Far from home, freezing or sweltering in the shadow of the volcano, quite likely in fear for his life, Wallace’s mind turned to Thomas Malthus, the Georgian-era intellectual who had argued that nature kept human populations down by disease, famine, war and accidents — and realised a similar logic could apply to animal species.

Ternate — Where Wallace Had His Great Eureka Moment

Theodora Sutcliffe of the BBC wrote: During his travels through what is today mostly Indonesia, Wallace had seen thousands of thought-provoking creatures. There was the flying frog, which demonstrated how toes already adapted for swimming and climbing could be used to soar through the air. There were orangutans, which perhaps had their own ancestors, like chimpanzees and gorillas; Wallace had tended a baby as a pet. Sickness — and perhaps with it the prospect of his own extinction — concentrated his mind. [Source: Theodora Sutcliffe, BBC, June 6, 2017]

“Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live?” he later wrote. “And the answer was clearly, that on the whole, the best fitted live.” Natural selection was, Wallace realised in a flash, the mechanism by which species evolved and came to be.

Inspired, Wallace waited anxiously for his fever to pass, and quickly noted down the outline of a paper. Over the next couple of evenings, he worked his theory up, and sent it to Charles Darwin, already a respected scientist.

When the letter arrived in England, on 18 June 1858, it threw Darwin into something of a panic. He had been working on his own theory of evolution by natural selection for almost 20 years, and was about a year off finishing what would have been a massive, three-volume epic on the subject. Nonetheless, he did the right thing, and the men’s colleagues presented both ideas of natural selection together a fortnight later.

If it hadn’t been for Wallace interrupting Darwin, he’d have carried on and written this big book which probably no one would have read “Then everyone said, ‘Gosh, this is really interesting, can you tell us about your theory? We can’t wait for this big book to be finished,’” Wyhe said. “That book became On the Origin of Species. If it hadn’t been for Wallace interrupting Darwin, he’d have carried on and written this big book which probably no one would have read.” As it is, Darwin published the book in November 1859, shaking the world of religion and shaping the world of science.

And Wallace? He continued his travels. In 1859, he laid down a landmark in the field of biogeography, tracing a line that delineates the boundaries of Southeast Asian and Australian fauna: the Wallace Line. In 1862, he returned to England, having collected no fewer than 125,660 natural history specimens, including more than 83,000 beetles. In 1868, he published an endlessly readable memoir of his travels, The Malay Archipelago. He would live till the age of 90, writing in support of causes as diverse as women’s rights and spiritualism, and never failing to extend his colleague Darwin the respect that he deserved.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: “Encyclopedia of World Cultures Volume 5: East/Southeast Asia:” edited by Paul Hockings, 1993; “Culture and Customs of Indonesia” by Jill Forshee, Greenwood Press, 2006; National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Encyclopedia.com, Library of Congress, Indonesia Tourism website (indonesia.travel), Indonesia government websites, Live Science, The Conversation, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Google AI, Wikipedia, The Guardian and various websites, books and other publications.

Last updated May 2026