Alfred Russel Wallace: The Malaria Fever That Revealed Natural Selection

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Alfred Russel Wallace was born in Wales in 1823, the eighth of nine children in a family ruined by bad investments, and left school at 14. He worked as an apprentice surveyor and as a teacher of drawing and mapmaking in Leicester, and taught himself in the town library from Thomas Malthus, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin's Beagle narrative. The young entomologist Henry Walter Bates got him collecting insects, and Wallace funded his science by selling duplicate specimens to museums and collectors. After the Amazon, he spent 1854 to 1862 in the Malay Archipelago and gathered 125,660 specimens, more than 83,000 of them beetles, while mapping the boundary between Bali and Lombok now called the Wallace Line.

In February 1858, sick with malaria on Halmahera, he connected Malthus to the struggle for survival around him and mailed an essay on natural selection to Darwin, who had sat on the same theory for two decades. Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker arranged a joint reading at the Linnean Society in July 1858, and Wallace accepted it gracefully as an entry into British science. He later parted with Darwin on reinforcement, on whether evolution had direction, and on the human mind, argued that all humans share one ancestor, toured Yosemite with John Muir in 1886, and in 1904 published Man's Place in the Universe, judging Mars lifeless. He died in Dorset in 1913 at 90.

• He built drying ovens in the jungle and used camphor to protect specimens before shipping them to London.
• His Malay assistant Ali collected and prepared around 5,000 birds on his own.
• A deep ocean trench that never dried out during the Ice Ages kept Asian and Australasian animals apart on either side of the Wallace Line.
• The Wallace Effect holds that selection against weak hybrids builds barriers to mating between diverging populations.
• Craters on Mars and the Moon and the Wallacea region of Indonesia bear his name, as do a Peruvian spider and a Brazilian freshwater stingray.