Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823-7 November 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist who was famous for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin, with whom he was co-credited for On the Origin of Species.
Biography[]
Alfred Russel Wallace was born in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire, Wales in 1823, and he taught drawing, mapmaking, and surveying at the Collegiate School in Leicester before deciding to take part in travels abroad as a naturalist. In 1848, he and Henry Walter Bates travelled to Brazil to collect insects and other animal specimens for pvitae collections, and he travelled to the East Indies from 1854 to 1862. During this time, he developed an insight on natural selection, and he shared his research with Charles Darwin, who had similar ideas, but had not yet published them due to fears of ostracization from Victorian society. Wallace's research motivated Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species, co-crediting Wallace for the discovery of natural selection. He also fathered the field of biogeography, becoming the leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species. He died in Broadstone, Dorset in 1913 at the age of 90.