Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century, working on warning coloration in animals and reinforcement (sometimes known as the Wallace effect), a way that natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species, and is sometimes called the 'father of biogeography', or more specifically of zoogeography. He then did fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, starting in the Amazon River basin. It spurred Darwin to set aside the 'big species book' he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie (1870)Īlfred Russel Wallace OM FRS (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator.
