Wallace, Alfred Russel

Welsh naturalist who collected animal and plant specimens in South America and Southeast Asia, and independently arrived at a theory of evolution by natural selection similar to that proposed by Charles Darwin.

Wallace and Darwin
In 1858 Wallace wrote an essay outlining his ideas on evolution and sent it to Darwin, who had not yet published his. Together they presented a paper to the Linnaean Society that year. Wallace's section, entitled ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’, described the survival of the fittest.

Although both thought that the human race had evolved to its present physical form by natural selection, Wallace was of the opinion that humans' higher mental capabilities had arisen from some ‘metabiological’ agency.