Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace was born in England on 8 January 1823 and began fieldwork in the Amazon basin before moving to the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide still called the Wallace Line — the boundary separating Asian and Australasian animal origins across Indonesia. His 1858 paper on evolution through natural selection was published alongside extracts from Darwin's work, spurring Darwin to abandon his larger manuscript and quickly write the abstract that became On the Origin of Species in 1859. Wallace became the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribu…