An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles. The Hero’s Journey of Alfred Russel Wallace

Abstract

Alfred Russel Wallace was a self-taught (he left school at 13) British naturalist, a self-described “beetle collector” who explored 4 years in the Amazon and 8 years in Southeast Asia. During his Asian sojourn in the mid-nineteenth century he covered some 22,500 km through territories which are now Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Wallace made his voyages without formal government support, without a floating base camp (like Charles Darwin had with HMS Beagle), without infrastructure, and without much cash. During his epic journey Wallace caught, skinned and pickled 125,660 specimens of “natural productions” including 212 new species of birds, 900 new species of beetles and 200 new species of ants. Consider just the logistics – how could one man, on a tight budget and without organizational support, often living rough in rainforests, collect, identify, mount, preserve and transport 8,000 bird skins and 100,000 insects? If Wallace did nothing more than collect and identify new species he would have left an important scientific legacy. But the breadth of his interests raised him to the top tier of scientists.

His travels through the Malay Archipelago, supported by his knowledge of geology, helped him develop his understanding of the dynamics of island biology. He observed that the “natural productions” he found in western Indonesia and Peninsular Malaysia were different to those in eastern Indonesia, due to changing sea levels and a combination of shallow seas and deep oceanic trenches. By studying these differences he developed a west-east boundary which came to be known as the “Wallace Line,” the dividing point between (western) Southeast Asian fauna (elephants, tigers, monkeys and apes, hornbills) and fauna of the (eastern) Austro-Malayan realm (kangaroos, birds of paradise, marsupials). He campaigned against: vaccination, vivisection, “flat earth,” gambling, foreign aid, welfare state, “junk” food, sweatshops, “red-tapism,” child labor, and women’s labor in coal mines. He promoted: women’s liberation, food and drug controls, income tax, labor unions, food stamps, and a minimum wage.

And what led Wallace to develop his contributions to the theory of natural selection, first the Sarawak Law (written during the period he spent in Sarawak as the guest of the White Rajah of Sarawak, James Brooke), and then the famous Ternate Paper in which he outlined the concept “the fittest would survive.”? Wallace sent the Ternate Paper to Charles Darwin (who up to that point had not published one word on evolution) and at that point the conspiracy theorists get involved. Did Darwin and Wallace arrive at their similar ideas independently? Did Wallace get sidelined in the quest for priority by the more prominent and well-placed Darwin?