![]() After neglecting his medical studies, Darwin was sent by his father to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to become a clergyman. Robert Darwin’s influence on his son prompted Charles Darwin to attend medical school at the University of Edinburgh, where he learned taxidermy, a skill that would be useful in his search for the origin of species. Additionally, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, constructed one of the pioneering theories on evolution called Zoonomia, which he wrote about in his poetic essay entitled The Temple of Nature. His upper-class status in society allowed him to pursue varied kinds of study as advised by his father, who wanted him to become either a physician or a clergyman. Charles Darwin’s DiscoveryĬharles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, to a wealthy doctor named Robert Darwin and his wife, Susannah Wedgwood Darwin. Their relationship as fellow scientists was a friendly one despite speculation by the journalist Arnold Brackman and the evolutionary biologist John Langdon Brooks that Darwin stole part of his theory from Wallace’s paper. Darwin and Wallace released books on Natural Selection the former published On the Origin of Species in 1859, while the latter released Darwinism in 1889. All acknowledged that Darwin formulated the theory first, and Wallace was credited as a co-discoverer. Wallace’s essay, as well as portions of Darwin’s writings regarding the divergence of species, were read on July 1, 1858, at the Linnean Society of London. They decided that both should be acknowledged for their groundbreaking findings. ![]() Having already shared his thoughts on natural selection with his naturalist colleagues, Darwin was advised by Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell on how to deal with the similarities between both scientists’ discoveries. The essay was entitled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type. As Darwin was already an established naturalist at the time, Wallace sent his paper detailing his ideas to the famous scientist while Darwin was still gathering more evidence for his book on the topic. While Charles Darwin was the more well-known proponent of the theory of evolution by natural selection as he was the first to collect data for the idea, Alfred Wallace was a junior who had almost simultaneously theorized about the transmutation of species as a reaction to environmental factors. In addition, there are excellent websites with extensive information about the life, scholarship and collections of Wallace: The Alfred Russel Wallace Page, The Alfred Russel Wallace Website, and the Wallace Collection.Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace were both British naturalists from the 1800s they independently investigated the phenomenon, which is now called natural selection. There are many recent biographies of Alfred Russel Wallace. ![]() There are also portraits that were used for cartes-de-visite (as is the case for the center portrait above). Some were published in his books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are many photographic portraits of Alfred Russel Wallace, spanning his extremely long life. The other papers, "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan of Borneo" (1856), "Attempts at a Natural Arrangement of Birds" (1856), "On the Natural History of the Aru Islands" (1857), "Note on the Theory of Permanent and Geographical Varieties" (1858) represent the most important published scholarship on evolution in the decade leading up to the Wallace and Darwin publications on the process of natural selection. The first of these papers (1855) "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species" was to have an enormous impact on the thinking of Charles Lyell. Beyond his remarkable insights into evolutionary biology, he would also be widely known for his ardent advocacy of spiritualism, land nationalization, anti-vaccinationism, and for much of his later life, a highly teleological view of evolution.īefore Charles Darwin published his first clear (and public) statements on evolution in 18, Alfred Russel Wallace had already published a series of brilliant papers that bear on the process of evolution and species formation. ![]() Wallace would live a long life (1823 - 1913). And like Charles Darwin, he too would credit the reading of Malthus' On Population as a central stimulus for the key insight of natural selection. Like Charles Darwin, he too had a vast experience of field work in South America (four years of professional collecting from 1848 - 1852). Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of the principle of natural selection was also the founder of the field of biogeography.
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