Alfred Russel Wallace

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe

by Johnjoe McFadden  · 27 Sep 2021

, Baron Hermann von Walde-Waldegg.1 The expedition is described in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative,2 a book that later inspired both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Their guides led the white men to a stream, which, in the dry season, had shrunk to a muddy pool ‘surrounded by fine trees, the

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on which it rests – though excessively numerous individually, and coextensive with the entire organic world – yet come under a few simple and easily understood classes. Alfred Russel Wallace (1889)1 The necessity of nature brings it about that the parts in some animals are conveniently arranged for the health of the whole. For

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off and sold to museums and wealthy naturalists. The letter that arrived at Down House in June 1858 was from one of those fly-men, Alfred Russel Wallace. The name was known to Darwin as, a few years earlier, Wallace had written to his London agent, Samuel Stevens, describing his latest shipment, noting

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may tell him what you say’. He also promised to write to Wallace and pass his paper on to a scientific journal. Butterflies and beetles Alfred Russel Wallace had been born in 1823, one of nine surviving children. His mother, Mary Anne, came from a well-to-do Hertford family. However, according to

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written to Darwin by Wallace, Hooker, Huxley or Lyell during that crucial year of 1858, including Wallace’s original Ternate paper manuscript, have been lost. Alfred Russel Wallace continued writing papers on a variety of scientific and social topics. In his book Man’s Place in the Universe, published in1903, he introduced the

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; it can only select variants that already exist within a population. On its own, it cannot make new variants nor create new species. FIGURE 30: Alfred Russel Wallace’s tombstone in Broadstone, Dorset. The next step in the unravelling of biology’s biggest secret was to discover a simple source of novel variation

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, Flies and Blind Rodents There is no more convincing proof of a theory than its power of absorbing and finding a place for new facts. Alfred Russel Wallace, 18671 Around the same time as George Campbell highlighted the absence of a way of generating variation in the theory of natural selection, Fleeming Jenkin

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, in the nineteenth century, no one could answer a question commonly posed by children. Why do I look like Daddy? Between them, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were survived by ten children. I have not been able to find any pictures of the young Wallaces but there are many photographs of Darwin

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to the peripatoi or covered walkways of his Lyceum school. But I’m sure he must have done. v All from the island of Sulawesi (Alfred Russel Wallace’s Celebes) or its surrounding waters. 18 Opening Up the Razor The maxim which inspires all scientific philosophising… [is] ‘Occam’s razor’: Entities are not

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is not quantum mechanics, or general relativity or even the laws of mathematics. It is the law of natural selection discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett insisted, it is ‘The single best idea that anyone has ever had.’12 It may also be the simplest idea

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-resources/collections/library-collections/wallace-letters-online/index.html. 4. Wallace, A. R., ‘On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species (1855)’, Alfred Russel Wallace Classic Writings, Paper 2 (2009), http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlps_fac_arw/2 5. Ereshefsky, M., ‘Some Problems with the Linnaean Hierarchy’, Philosophy of Science

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(Penguin, 2002). 7. Ibid. 8. Goodhue, T. W., Fossil Hunter: The Life and Times of Mary Anning (1799–1847) (Academica Press, 2004). 9. Raby, P., Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton University Press, 2002). 10. Bowler, P. J., Evolution: The History of an Idea: 25th Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface (University of

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California Press, 2009). 11. Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace. 12. Van Wyhe, J., ‘The Impact of AR Wallace’s Sarawak Law Paper Reassessed’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in

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Wallace Connection’, Journal of the History of Biology, 21.1, 1–68 (1988). 16. Shermer, M., In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (Oxford University Press on Demand, 2002). Cowan, I., ‘A Trumpery Affair: How Wallace Stimulated Darwin to Publish

The Kingdom of Speech

by Tom Wolfe  · 30 Aug 2016

this transmutation, this evolution, was supposed to have taken place. Nobody could figure it out—until now, a few moments ago, inside my brain! Mine! Alfred Russel Wallace’s! He is still in his wet, reeking bed, trying to endure the endless malarial paroxysms, when another kind of fever, an exhilarating fever, seizes

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one nanny and a governess—from day one.e Where did this, the eternally Daddy-paid-for life of a British Gentleman, leave someone like Alfred Russel Wallace? His father, a lawyer, had undertaken a legal career and a business career—and a family and a half, namely, a wife and nine children

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. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky, and Richard C. Lewontin. c This experience is recounted by Ernest H. Rann, who interviewed Wallace for the article “Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace at Home,” The Pall Mall Magazine (March 1909). d Sir Charles Lyell was knighted in 1848 and made a baronet in 1864. He received the

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! let alone Ahuras! within the field, however. Quite the opposite. Noam Chomsky and his Chomskyites were the field. Everett struck them as a born-again Alfred Russel Wallace, the clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers. Look at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard

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ed., The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 13 (January–April 1854), 438. 13 Ibid., 427. 14 Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), 361–63. 15 Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” Journal of the Proceedings of the

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King-Hele (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141–143. 20 Ibid., 25. 21 Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace; A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14–15. 22 Charles Darwin, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of

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Orang: Darwin, Wallace and the Natural History of Orangutans,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 51 (June 2015), 53–63. 47 Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1871), 370

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., 344. 50 Ibid., 344–49. 51 Ibid., 334. 52 Ibid., 352. 53 Ibid., 359–60. 54 Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow, 161. 55 Darwin to Alfred Russel Wallace, March 27, 1869. Available from the Darwin Correspondence Project database at https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-6684. 56 For more on how spiritism emerged

The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee  · 16 May 2016  · 824pp  · 218,333 words

1855, more than a decade and a half after Darwin had first read Malthus’s essay and crystallized his ideas about speciation, a young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, published a paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History that skirted dangerously close to Darwin’s yet-unpublished theory. Wallace and Darwin had

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, The Foundations of the Origin of Species, Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844, ed. Francis Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), “Essay of 1844.” Alfred Russel Wallace, published a paper: Alfred R. Wallace, “XVIII.—On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species,” Annals and Magazine of Natural History 16

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): 184–96. Wallace had been born to a middle-class family: Charles H. Smith and George Beccaloni, Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10. but on the hard-back benches of the free library: Ibid., 69. Like Darwin, Wallace had also embarked: Ibid

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., 12. Wallace moved from the Amazon basin: Ibid., ix. “The answer was clearly”: Benjamin Orange Flowers, “Alfred Russel Wallace,” Arena 36 (1906): 209. In June 1858, Wallace sent Darwin a tentative draft: Alfred Russel Wallace, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, ed. James Marchant (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 118. On July 1, 1858, Darwin’s

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester  · 1 Jan 2003  · 582pp  · 136,780 words

. 33) Jan Pieterszoon Coen (p. 38) Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie logo (p. 43) A milliner weaving topis and bonnets from alang-alang grass (p. 56) Alfred Russel Wallace (p. 61) Charles Darwin (p. 65) The Wallace Line (p. 71) Alfred Lothar Wegener (p. 74) Pangaea beginning its division into Laurasia and Gondwanaland (p

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he may not once pass out of sight of land, the traveller will have most decidedly left one world and entered another one utterly different. Alfred Russel Wallace. It would be forty more years before Sclater, working then with his son, would draw a map with the formal delineation, as the pair saw

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their meeting-place, excited the interest of a much older, bolder and less well-educated Briton who was then living in the Indies. It was Alfred Russel Wallace who came swiftly to understand that it was not simply birds who inhabited two quite different worlds: plants and animals did also. And, just like

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the birds, they all met – collided, even – somewhere among the maze of jungles of the myriad islands of the Dutch East Indies. Alfred Russel Wallace – who at the time was collecting, studying and living on the spice-rich island of Ternate in a grass hut – would take the observations of

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Usk in south Wales, remembered today mainly for having imagined and then drawn this vast and invisible line in the sea. Mainly, but not solely: Alfred Russel* Wallace has a trench off Java named after him too, as well as a 13,300-foot peak in the Sierra Nevada, a garden in Wales

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Krakatoa, any account of Wallace himself must make mention of the more important reasons for such fame as he still has – and that is that Alfred Russel Wallace, alongside Charles Darwin but always as his satellite, is the other true but largely unremembered pioneer of the science of evolution. His birth in Usk

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had observed and measured and catalogued the tens of thousands of living creatures from his years aboard HMS Beagle. And he was well aware of Alfred Russel Wallace – not least because in 1855 Wallace, then in Sarawak, wrote a paper entitled ‘On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’, which

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unveiled in what is now the Royal Society's Reynolds Room, noting that a century and a half beforehand the papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been read there, which formally set in motion a whole new science of evolutionary studies. In recent years there have been kindly new biographies

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, or hop, or live half in and half out of water, have webbed feet, lay eggs and suckle their young, and flightless birds, and cockatoos. Alfred Russel Wallace enjoys such fame as he has because he observed all of this bewildering profusion with great care, noted with exactitude where each animal or bird

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that had brought about Indonesia's reputation as the volcanic cockpit of the world, with its notoriously dangerous volcano, Krakatoa, a classic of the kind. Alfred Russel Wallace knew none of this. But his papers, discoveries and still surviving Line prompted others to begin thinking and pondering too, and to start asking why

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less follow the invisible line of biology and botany that was first hinted at by Philip Sclater in 1857 and drawn a year later by Alfred Russel Wallace. On one side: Australia, cassowaries, emus and kangaroos. On the other: cows, monkeys, thrushes and elephants. On one side: the Indo-Australian Plate; on the

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-bourne, F. W. Cheshire, 1944) Quammen, David, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (New York, Scribner, 1996) Raby, Peter, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001) Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley, The History of Java (London, Black, Parbury & Allen, 1817) Read, Donald, The

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, Carroll & Graf, 1997) Shepard, Jim, Batting against Castro (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) Shermer, Michael, In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002) Sigurdsson, Haraldur, Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) Sitwell

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in beeld en woord (The Hague, Van Stockum, 1941). Straw-hat maker from H. J. de Graaf, Batavia in oude ansichten, Zaltbommel (Europese Bibliotheek, 1970). Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (© Natural History Museum, London). Alfred Wegener and ‘Agamemnon Laying Cable' (by permission of Mary Evans Picture Library). John Webber's drawing (by

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time

by Allen Gannett  · 11 Jun 2018  · 247pp  · 69,593 words

to Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin drawn mostly from “Charles Darwin,” Encyclopedia Britannica (2017), https://www.britannica.com/​biography/​Charles-Darwin; “Alfred Russel Wallace,” Encyclopedia Britannica (2017), https://www.britannica.com/​biography/​Alfred-Russel-Wallace; “Charles Darwin,” Famous Scientists (2017), https://www.famousscientists.org/​charles-darwin/; and “Biography of Wallace,” Wallace Fund, 2015, http://wallacefund.info

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

by Barbara Oakley Phd  · 20 Oct 2008

clued in to the central ideas underpinning genetics some thirty-five years earlier than they did. Mendel makes an interesting contrast with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverers of evolution and variation with natural selection, who superficially appeared to share Mendel's lack of self-esteem. Darwin was an inhibited man

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and evidence for evolution. Much of the twenty years Darwin spent tucked away at his country estate preoccupied with puzzling out the secrets of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace spent puzzling at the same problem in his adventures studying and collecting the flora and fauna of both the Amazon River basin and the Malay

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–38. 9. Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980), p. 124. 10. Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 159. 11. Brackman, Delicate Arrangement, p. 34. 12

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. Michael Shermer, In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13. James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of

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personality. See nurture envy, 269 a DSM-IV trait of narcissistic personality disorder, 244 is possibly a useful, genetically linked trait, 269 lack of in Alfred Russel Wallace, 292 in Mao's China—creates danger and induces people not to be creative, 215 Epstein, Brian, manic-depressive “drama queen” who launched Beatles, 291

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death

by John Gray  · 11 Apr 2011  · 232pp  · 67,934 words

and Henry Sidg-wick, founders of the Society for Psychical Research, arrange to send messages after they have died – Automatic writing and the cross-correspondences – Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection and convert to Spiritualism – Sidgwick on the search for an afterlife and a black hole in ethics – Darwin on the

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sweet scent of death in Casablanca – The fall of a leaf Acknowledgements Permissions Notes Illustrations 1. Henry Sidgwick (Getty) 2. F. W. H. Myers 3. Alfred Russel Wallace (Corbis) 4. Balfour with George V (Lady Kremer) 5. Mary Lyttelton 6. Winifred Coombe-Tennant with Henry (Lady Kremer) 7. Street scene in Petrograd (from

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, search for meaning in life – a quest that attracted the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, author of a study of ethics that is still read today, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection and a convert to Spiritualism, and Arthur Balfour, at times British prime minister and president of the Society

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a powerful challenge to scientific materialism. Darwin was in no doubt about the threat. The man he acknowledged as the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, had concluded that the human mind could not have developed simply as a result of evolution. Wallace’s response to Spiritualism was in some ways

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, ‘On the Automatic Writing of Mrs Holland’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 21 (1908), 374–7. p. 17 Alfred Russel Wallace …my views as to the origin and nature of human faculty: Alfred Russel Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, Three Essays, London: James Burn, 1875, vii–viii. Wallace’s statements about Spiritualism are cited

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in Michael Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 199. p. 18 I shall be intensely curious to read the Quarterly: I hope you have not murdered too

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: See ibid., 161. p. 18 Though they admired and respected one another …only increased with time: See Martin Fichman, An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. p. 18 man is divided by an insuperable barrier from all the lower animals in his mental

1491

by Charles C. Mann  · 8 Aug 2005  · 666pp  · 189,883 words

-off happened amazingly fast, much of it in the few centuries between 11,500 and 10,900 B.C. And when it was complete, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, the Americas had become “a zoologically impoverished world, from which all of the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms [had] recently disappeared.” The extinctions

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who created the petroglyphs, I thought, must have done about the same thing. Painted Rock Cave has attracted scientists since the mid-nineteenth century, when Alfred Russel Wallace visited it. Wallace, a naturalist, was more interested in the palm trees outside the caves than the people who had lived inside them. The latter

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert  · 11 Feb 2014  · 308pp  · 94,447 words

Proceedings of the Linnean Society, had—with Lyell’s help—been published in a rush soon after Darwin had learned that a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace was onto a similar idea. (A paper by Wallace appeared in the same issue of the Journal.) Newton read Darwin’s essay very soon after

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the last several thousand years. The diversity as a function of time theory was first advanced by Darwin’s rival, or, if you prefer, codiscoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, who observed that in the tropics “evolution has had a fair chance,” while in glaciated regions “it has had countless difficulties thrown in its way

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relatively short amount of time? “We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared,” Alfred Russel Wallace observed. “And it is, no doubt, a much better world for us now they have gone. Yet it is surely a marvellous fact, and one

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Dimorphism in New Zealand Giant Moa (Dinornis) and Other Ratites,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280 (2013). “We live in a zoologically impoverished world”: Alfred Russel Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals with a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth’s

A Short History of Nearly Everything

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from the Far East in the early summer of 1858 in the form of a packet containing a friendly letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace and the draft of a paper, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, outlining a theory of natural selection that

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