Bigging up Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) certainly doesn’t deserve to be forgotten. He came up with an identical theory for the mechanism of evolution at the same time as Darwin, but how many people now would know his name?

Fortunately things are changing a little and he is being brought out of the shadows to take his place in history once again. This is largely down to the work of George Beccaloni of the Natural History Museum, London who has been campaigning to give him the credit he is due. The campaign was given a huge boost by comedian Bill Bailey’s programmes on the BBC last year when he retraced Wallace’s steps in the jungles of Borneo.

Wallace was a dedicated and adventurous naturalist and spent his life studying the distribution of life around the globe and attempting to unravel the mysteries of evolution. He had two major trips to collect and study wildlife. The first was a four year exploration of the Amazon Basin. Unlike Darwin, he was not from a wealthy privileged background so needed to generate funds for himself and he did this by selling samples that he collected. The South American trip was a great success, but soon after they sailed for home a fire broke out in the ship and it was sunk. Luckily all on board were saved in the life boats, but a large part of Wallace’s samples and notes from the trip was lost.

His other major exploration was an eight year trip to the Malay Archipelago. It was during this trip in 1858 that his theory on evolution suddenly came to him – apparently when he was laid up in bed with a fever. He wrote up his ideas in a paper and sent it to Darwin back in Britain to see what he thought, asking him to pass it on to the eminent geologist Charles Lyell if he felt it was worthy. In Wallace’s absence, they decided to present the paper, along with some of Darwin’s writing on the same subject, at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Initially there was not a huge amount of interest, but Darwin was now spurred on. He had been developing his own ideas for some years but had been reluctant to publish, wishing to amass as much evidence as possible for what he knew would be a controversial theory. But now the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and he rushed out his first edition of The Origin of Species the following year.

Wallace and Darwin deserve equal credit for natural selection in my view. Wallace was a modest man from a modest background and perhaps that is largely why he has become sidelined in history – but it’s good to see him getting a little of the limelight once again. A painting of him was donated to the Natural History Museum in 1923 and displayed on the stairs at the head of the Central Hall, but it was removed in 1971. Last year it was restored to the same position and it was unveiled by Bill Bailey.

The Museum is also home to an ongoing project to digitise and make available online approximately 5000 letters to and from Wallace.

We now also have for the very first time a statue of Wallace. His grandson gave a speech at it’s unveiling at the Natural History Museum, which was performed by David Attenborough.

The statue captures the moment when he first saw what is now called Wallace’s Golden Birdwing butterfly. In his book he says “On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.”

Wow, he was certainly a dedicated and enthusiastic naturalist.