An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion
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An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion
Although Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was one of the most famous scientists in the world at the time of his death at the age of ninety, today he is known to many as a kind of “almost-Darwin,” a secondary figure relegated to the footnotes of Darwin’s prodigious insights. But this diminution could hardly be less justified. Research into the life of this brilliant naturalist and social critic continues to produce new insights into his significance to history and his role in helping to shape modern thought.
Wallace declared his eight years of exploration in southeast Asia to be “the central and controlling incident” of his life. As 2019 marks one hundred and fifty years since the publication of The Malay Archipelago, Wallace’s canonical work chronicling his epic voyage, this collaborative book gathers an interdisciplinary array of writers to celebrate Wallace’s remarkable life and diverse scholarly accomplishments. Wallace left school at the age of fourteen and was largely self-taught, a voracious curiosity and appetite for learning sustaining him throughout his long life. After years as a surveyor and builder, in 1848 he left Britain to become a professional natural history collector in the Amazon, where he spent four years. Then, in 1854, he departed for the Malay Archipelago. It was on this voyage that he constructed a theory of natural selection similar to the one Charles Darwin was developing, and the two copublished papers on the subject in 1858, some sixteen months before the release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
But as the contributors to the Companion show, this much-discussed parallel evolution in thought was only one epoch in an extraordinary intellectual life. When Wallace returned to Britain in 1862, he commenced a career of writing on a huge range of subjects extending from evolutionary studies and biogeography to spiritualism and socialism. An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion provides something of a necessary reexamination of the full breadth of Wallace’s thought—an attempt to describe not only the history and present state of our understanding of his work, but also its implications for the future.
Wallace declared his eight years of exploration in southeast Asia to be “the central and controlling incident” of his life. As 2019 marks one hundred and fifty years since the publication of The Malay Archipelago, Wallace’s canonical work chronicling his epic voyage, this collaborative book gathers an interdisciplinary array of writers to celebrate Wallace’s remarkable life and diverse scholarly accomplishments. Wallace left school at the age of fourteen and was largely self-taught, a voracious curiosity and appetite for learning sustaining him throughout his long life. After years as a surveyor and builder, in 1848 he left Britain to become a professional natural history collector in the Amazon, where he spent four years. Then, in 1854, he departed for the Malay Archipelago. It was on this voyage that he constructed a theory of natural selection similar to the one Charles Darwin was developing, and the two copublished papers on the subject in 1858, some sixteen months before the release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
But as the contributors to the Companion show, this much-discussed parallel evolution in thought was only one epoch in an extraordinary intellectual life. When Wallace returned to Britain in 1862, he commenced a career of writing on a huge range of subjects extending from evolutionary studies and biogeography to spiritualism and socialism. An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion provides something of a necessary reexamination of the full breadth of Wallace’s thought—an attempt to describe not only the history and present state of our understanding of his work, but also its implications for the future.
416 pages | 12 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2019
Biological Sciences: Evolutionary Biology, Natural History
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Early Evolution of Wallace as a Thinker
Chapter 2 Wallace and the “Preter-normal”
Chapter 3 Field Study, Collecting, and Systematic Representation
Chapter 4 Wallace, Darwin, and Natural Selection
Chapter 5 Wallace on the Colors of Animals: Defense against Predators
Chapter 6 The Many Influences Shaping Wallace’s Views on Human Evolution
Chapter 7 Wallace as Social Critic, Sociologist, and Societal “Prophet”
Chapter 8 Land and Economics
Chapter 9 Physical Geography, Glaciology, and Geology
Chapter 10 Historical and Ecological Biogeography
Chapter 11 Wallace at the Foundations of Biogeography and the Frontiers of Conservation Biology
Chapter 12 Wallace and Extraterrestrial Life
Coda
by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa, and David Collard
Chapter 1 The Early Evolution of Wallace as a Thinker
by Charles H. Smith
Chapter 2 Wallace and the “Preter-normal”
by Charles H. Smith
Chapter 3 Field Study, Collecting, and Systematic Representation
by James T. Costa
Chapter 4 Wallace, Darwin, and Natural Selection
by James T. Costa
Chapter 5 Wallace on the Colors of Animals: Defense against Predators
by Hannah M. Rowland and Eleanor Drinkwater
Chapter 6 The Many Influences Shaping Wallace’s Views on Human Evolution
by Sherrie Lyons
Chapter 7 Wallace as Social Critic, Sociologist, and Societal “Prophet”
by Martin Fichman
Chapter 8 Land and Economics
by David Collard
Chapter 9 Physical Geography, Glaciology, and Geology
by Charles H. Smith
Chapter 10 Historical and Ecological Biogeography
by James T. Costa
Chapter 11 Wallace at the Foundations of Biogeography and the Frontiers of Conservation Biology
by Mark V. Lomolino
Chapter 12 Wallace and Extraterrestrial Life
by Robert W. Smith
Coda
References
List of Contributors
Index
List of Contributors
Index
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