 It is my pleasure to introduce zoologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian, Dr. George Becoloni. George's expertise lies in entomology, where he was curator of orthopteroid insects. That's grasshoppers, cockroaches, and their kin at London's Natural History Museum for more than 20 years. Dr. Becoloni is coming to us from London now. George earned his bachelor's degree, bachelor of science degree in zoology, and his PhD in entomology, both at Imperial College, London. Beyond his background in entomology, Dr. Becoloni's expertise also lies in the history of science, particularly regarding our understanding of evolution. He was the historical consultant for a multiple award-winning BBC series about Alfred Russel Wallace, and he is founding director of the Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project. As we just discovered, Dr. Becoloni, thanks to wondernaught Morali Sharma, who's with us today. Morali and George became friends during adventures in Indonesia and the Southwest Pacific. Please welcome entomologist, evolutionary biologist, and science historian, Dr. George Becoloni. Hello, everyone, and a very happy Wallace Bison to the old birthday to all of you. I'll just share my screen now. Can anyone see the PowerPoint? Or didn't I do that correctly? Not quite yet. There it comes. Okay, can you all see it? Okay, great. Before I start, I'd like to say a big thank you to Tucker for inviting me to do this talk, and also to Morali, who originally suggested the idea to Tucker. So thank you very much indeed. And let's begin. So although Wallace is not exactly a household name these days, he was probably the most famous scientist in the world when he died in 1913, age 90. During his long life, he wrote more than a thousand articles and 22 books on a very wide range of subjects. And in these he made very important contributions to a diverse range of fields, including biology, geology, geography, anthropology, and even astrobiology, study of life on other planets. His best known scientific books are the Geographical Distribution of Animals in Two Thick Volumes, a follow on book called Island Life, and an excellent book about evolution, which he generously entitled Darwinism. His most famous book is, however, is Travelogue, the Malay Archipelago, which was apparently Joseph Conrad's favorite bedside reading, and which hasn't been out of print since it was first published in 1869. Wallace's single most important scientific discovery was of course the process of evolution by natural selection, which has been called arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind. So who was Wallace? And now how did he come to make this a great discovery? Wallace was born on the 8th of January 1823 to a downwardly mobile middle class English couple, Thomas Vier and Mary Ann Wallace. Wallace's father was a qualified solicitor, but he had never practiced and had been living on inherited wealth, which dwindled as his family grew. Wallace was born in Kensington Cottage near Usk, which at that time was part of England and is now part of Wales. Wallace's father had moved the family to this area from London in an attempt to reduce living costs. When Wallace was five, he and his family relocated to Hartford, which is a town just north of London. And it was there at Hale's grammar school, this is the grammar school, that he received his only formal education. In about 1835, Wallace's parents fell on very hard times and Alfred was forced to leave school in 1837 when he was only 14 because they couldn't afford the very modest school fees. After a few months with his brother John in London, he got a job with his oldest brother William, who was a land surveyor. He would do this work with his brother for the next six and a half years, roaming all over the countryside of southern England and Wales. In the autumn of 1841, the brothers moved to the Neath area of Wales. This is a painting done by Wallace's brother of Neath as it was then, it's now rather bigger and not quite so attractive looking. And it was in Neath that several key events in Alfred's early life took place. To give you an idea of the work they were doing, this is one of the maps Wallace made of the parish of Lantwick juxtaneath. So he would have had to travel around all of these fields with his chain and various surveying equipment making extremely accurate calculations and drawings and observations of all these boundaries and then accurately mapping them. It's obviously a very skilled job. It was while living in Neath in 1841 that Wallace's interest in natural history really began. He started because he wanted to be able to identify the plants he saw out in the countryside while surveying. He bought his first books on the subject and began to form a reference collection of pressed specimens. In December 1843 paid land surveying work became scarce. So William suggested that Alfred to try to find another job. And early in 1844 Wallace obtained a position teaching junior classes in English surveying and elementary drawing at what's called the collegiate school in Leicester. This is what the building looked like at that time and it still looks more or less like that now. He also had a good library and Wallace was able to study several important books on natural history and travel, as well as crucially, as we'll see Malthus's book, Principles of Population, which he said he greatly admired for its masterly summary of facts and logical induction to conclusions. It was probably in this library that he first met amateur naturalist Henry Walter Bates, who you can see on the right there, obviously much later in his life. And Bates soon got Wallace passionate about collecting and studying beetles. Wallace was amazed by their many strange forms and often beautiful markings or coloring and the fact that about a thousand different species could be found within only 10 miles of the town. In March 1845 Wallace's brother William died unexpectedly from a chest infection and at Easter Wallace quit his teaching job and moved back to Neath with his brother John in order to wind up Williams affairs and continue the surveying business. Even with the help of John, this involved responsibilities such as feed collection, which he hated. Unfortunately, well fortunately, however, he still had enough free time to continue with his natural history related activities and also keep up correspondence with his friend Bates. It was in Neath in 1845 that Wallace first read Robert Chambers' controversial book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which had been published anonymously the year before. So this is the title page and Chambers. This book was extremely popular at the time. Apparently even Prince Albert read it out loud in daily installments to the young Queen Victoria. I wonder if she was amused. Although not a scientific work, Vestiges convinced Wallace of the reality of evolution, then called transmutation and in a letter that you see here to Bates in December 1845 you remarked, I have rather more favorable opinion of the vestiges than you appear to have. I do not consider it a hasty generalization, but rather as an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proved by more facts and the additional future researchers may throw upon the subject. A year or so after he wrote this he was inspired by a book by William Henry Edwards called A Voyage Up the River Amazon and in late 1847 or early 1848 he suggested to Bates that they went to the island to collect specimens of insects, birds and other animals for their private collections, selling the duplicates to collectors and museums in order to fund the trip. The primary aim of the expedition as far as Wallace was concerned was to seek evidence for evolution and attempt to discover how it worked. In a letter to Bates written around this time he says, I mean to feel rather dissatisfied with the mere local collection, little is to be learnt by it. I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species. So I remember this was a very very long time about 11 years before origin of species was published. Bates liked the idea of a tropical collecting trip and the two young men at the time Wallace was 25 and Bates 23, set off by ship from Liverpool to Perra, which is now called Belem in April 1848. At first they worked as a team but after a few months they apparently quarreled and split up to collect different in different areas. This is a woodcut from Bates's book that he wrote about his trip. He spent 11 years actually in the Amazon and it shows he shot one of these birds, an Arakari bird and the rest of the flock came down to attack him. Anyway that's what he would have looked like at the time. Wallace primarily collected butterflies and birds, two of which you can see here. So these are actual Wallace specimens from the Amazon. He sent to his activities in the middle Amazon and Rio Negro. So the red is Wallace's root. I'm journeying up the Rio Negro further than any other Westerner had up to that point. Using the skills he had learnt when he was at Land Surveyor, he produced the first detailed map of the Rio Negro and its tributaries. It was published by the Royal Geographical Society in London when he returned home and approved accurate enough to become the standard map of the region for many decades. So in the bottom left corner you can see a small portion of Wallace's hand drawn map and the Royal Geographical Society cartographers redrew it in a much smaller size and then published it as the map that you can see on the right hand side. By early 1852 Wallace was in poor health so he decided to return to England and began the long trip back down the Rio Negro and Amazon to Pará. Passing through Barra now called Manaus, Wallace found to his dismay that most of the specimens he had been sending down river during the preceding two years to be shipped on to England had been delayed by the officials there because they suspected that the boxes might contain contraband goods. After satisfying them that they didn't he collected the six large cases and set off for Britain on the sailing break Helen on the 12th of July. Tragically 26 days into the voyage when they were in the middle of the Atlantic, the ship caught fire and sank. Taking with it all the specimens he had collected during the last two years plus his large well his collection of live animals and most of his field notes. All he managed to rescue was a tin box containing a few shirts into which he quickly put his watch, some muddy drawings he had made of fishes and palms plus some notes and observations of the Rio Negro and Vapes rivers. So here are some of the drawings he managed to save. He was an excellent artist both in pencil and in watercolor and the fish drawings are now in the Linnaean Society of London and the sorry the fish drawings are now in the Natural History Museum in London and palm drawings are in the Linnaean Society. Wallace and his crew struggled to survive in a pair of badly leaking lifeboats, but very very luckily after 10 days drifting on the open sea, they were picked up by a passing cargo ship, making its way back to England. After a slow and harrowing journey, during which time they ran out of food and the ship nearly sank in the storm. They landed and deal in England on the 1st of October 1852. Luckily, Wallace's agent in London, Samuel Stevens, had had the foresight to ensure his collections for £200. Wallace estimated that they had been worth £500, but it was certainly a lot better than nothing. In the year after his return, Wallace was very busy writing two books, one on the palm trees of the Amazon and their uses. And another one about his travels, which he had to write largely from memory since most of his notes had been destroyed. He also published an important paper on the monkeys of the Amazon, in which he noted that big rivers were barriers to monkey species. One species was found on one bank of the river and another closely related species on the other opposite bank. To Wallace, this biojuve graphical pattern seemed to indicate that populations separated by water barriers had diverged from each other and evolved into different species. Wallace's riverine barrier hypothesis, as it's called, is still a topic of research today. Shortly after he returned to England, Wallace had vowed never to travel on a boat at sea again. But good resolution soon fade and about a year later in March 1854, he left Britain on a collecting expedition to what he called the Malay Archipelago, the area which is now the countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, East Timor and Indonesia. He spent nearly eight years in the region undertaking 60 or 70 separate journeys and visiting every major island at least once, resulting in a total of around 14,000 miles of travel, often in small native boats or on the Dutch mail steamers that plowed their way around the islands, collecting mail from the Dutch colonial regime that was then in place. So on this map, you can see Singapore is in the kind of top left. And then there's a black line in the sea going to the top of Borneo that shows his roots to Sarawak in Borneo. And all these black lines in the sea that you see are Wallace's roots around the huge Malay Archipelago, all the way from Singapore and Samatra in the West to the island of New Guinea in the East, the island of New Guinea being just above Australia. Wallace wrote that the main object of all my journeys was to obtain specimens of natural history both for my private collection and supplied duplicates to museums and amateurs. And unlike the Amazon, his trip to Southeast Asia was a resounding success. He and his paid assistants collected almost 110,000 insects, 7,500 shells, 8,050 bird skins, and 410 mammal and reptile specimens. Wallace personally collected about 80% of them. He focused on the delicate specimens such as insects, while his assistants collected most of the vertebrates. Wallace's collection included about 5,000 species new to science, and he personally named 295 of them in 21 scientific articles. Around 200 of the other species were named after him by other naturalists, usually as Wallaceae. Here are a few of his butterfly and moth specimens he collected during his expedition. It's just a random assortment including one of the world's largest moth, the Atlas Moth, in the centre there. The one right in the centre is the female. The Natural History Museum in London actually now has about 70% of everything that he collected. Here are three of the most iconic species he actually discovered. In the bottom left is Wallace's standard wing bird of Paradise, which is the only bird of Paradise he discovered. In the centre is Wallace's golden bird wing butterfly, a magnificent 7-inch wingspan butterfly found in the Malakas of Indonesia. In the bottom right is Wallace's flying frog, which he discovered on the island of Borneo in Sarawak, and this is his watercolor painting of it. Unfortunately, he didn't collect a specimen or if he did it was destroyed. He published a woodcut illustration in his book, the Malay Archipelago, and his observations of how the species could glide a very long way using the expanded membranes of its feet. But people didn't really believe that for quite a long time after his book came out, and it was only when the next lot of specimens were found and observed by other people that the species was finally named and people believed it. And now many more flying frogs have been found, including in South America. We now come to the first of the three most important scientific articles which Wallace wrote during his trip. In 1855, while staying in a tiny rest house owned by his friend the ruler of Sarawak, Roger James Brook, Wallace wrote what was to become one of the most important papers on evolution published by anyone prior to the discovery of natural selection. In his autobiography, he recounted how this paper was written during the wet season and during the evenings and wet days I had nothing to do but to look over my books and ponder over the problem, which was rarely absent from my thoughts. Having always been interested in the geographical distribution of animals and plants, it occurred to me that these facts had never been properly utilized as indications of the way in which species have come into existence. The great work of Lyle, i.e. his famous book Principles of Geology, had furnished me with the main features of the succession of species in time, so in geological time, and by combining the two, I thought that some valuable conclusions might be reached. I accordingly put my facts and ideas on paper and sent the paper to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. The title of the paper being On the Law that which has regulated the introduction of new species, which law was briefly stated as follows, every species has come into existence, coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species, closely related species. This clearly pointed to some kind of evolution, it suggested the when and the where of its occurrence, and that it could only be through natural generation, as was also suggested in the vestiges, but the howl was still a secret, only penetrated some years later. He continues, soon after this article appeared, Mr Stevens wrote me that he had heard several naturalists expressing regret that I was theorizing when what I had to do was to collect more facts. After this, I had in a letter to Darwin expressed surprise that no notice appeared to have been taken of my paper, to which he replied that both Sir Charles Lyle and Mr Edward Blythe, two very good men, especially called his attention to it. In fact, Wallace's Sarawak law papers, it's called, impressed Zoologist Edward Blythe so much that he wrote a long letter to Darwin about it. In it he asked, what do you think of the paper in question? Has it at all unsettled your ideas regarding the persistence of species, not perhaps so much from a novelty of argument, but by the lucid collation of facts and phenomena? What Blythe didn't know was that Darwin was already a transmutationist. He had even discovered the main mechanism of adaptive evolution, which he called natural selection, some 20 years before, but it told very few people about the idea. Curiously Darwin misinterpreted the argument in Wallace's paper, writing the following annotations in the margin of his copy. Nothing very new, uses my simile of the tree, it all seems creation with him. In a letter he wrote to Wallace about the essay he said, though agreeing with you on your conclusions in that paper I believe I go much further than you, but it is too long a subject to enter on my speculative notions. He couldn't have been more wrong. Charles Lyland contrast did grasp Wallace's argument and was indeed unsettled by it as it challenged his creationist beliefs. In November 1855, soon after reading it, he began writing the first of a series of species notebooks in which he began to contemplate the possibility of evolutionary change for the first time. Notes on Wallace's paper fill the first pages of the notebook. He wrote of the innumerable ways in which omnipotence might fit a new species to all the present and future conditions of its existence. There may be one which is preferable to all others. And if so, this will cause the new species to be in all probability allied to pre-existing and extinct or with many co-existing species of the same genus. So that was clearly taken from Wallace's paper. In April 1856, Lyall paid a visit to Darwin at Downhouse in the county of Kent. And Darwin divulged the idea, his theory of natural selection to him for the first time. So this is a slide showing Downhouse Darwin's house in the background and one of his greenhouses to the left. Soon afterwards Lyall sent Darwin a letter urging him to publish the theory, at least someone beat him to it. He almost certainly had Wallace in mind. So in May 1856 Darwin, eating this advice, began to write a sketch of his ideas for publication. Finding the sketch unsatisfactory, Darwin abandoned it in about October 1856 and instead began to write an extensive book on the subject, which people call his big species book. Which was destined not to be published during his lifetime as we'll see. In May 1856, about a year after he wrote to Sarawak Law Paper, Wallace took a boat from Singapore to Lombok Island. On the way they stopped for about two days on the neighbouring island of Bali, a fortuitous event which would lead to the second most important discovery of his trip. On Bali, Wallace found similar species of birds to the other islands he had visited to the west, including a weaver bird, a barbit, a starling, groups he had seen and collected in Borneo, Singapore and Peninsula, Malaysia. Here's a barbit specimen Wallace collected. But then and I quote, crossing over to Lombok separated from Bali by a straight less than 20 miles wide. I naturally appeared expected to meet with some of these birds again, but during a stay there of three months I never saw one of them. Instead Wallace found a completely different assortment, a yellow crested cockatoo like this, a loud fryer bird and a peculiar megapode, which used its big feet to make very large mounds of dead leaves in which to incubate its eggs. None of these groups of birds to which these species belong were known on the western islands of Java, Sumatra or Borneo. Now here was the puzzle. Why were the bird foreigners of two islands so close to one another so different? Wallace described the mystery in a letter to his agent Stevens in 1856. He wrote the islands of Bali and Lombok, though of nearly the same size of the same soil aspect elevation climate and within the insight of one another, yet differ considerably in their productions and in fact belong to two quite distinct zoological provinces, which they form the extreme limit. As an instance, I may mention the cockatoos a group of birds confined to Australia and the Malacca's are quite unknown in Java Borneo, Sumatra and Malacca. This species, however, is abundant in Lombok, but is unknown in Bali. The island of Lombok forming the extreme western limit of its range and that of the whole family. Many other species illustrate that same fact. The differences in the mammal fauna of the western and eastern islands were just as striking. On the large western islands, there were monkeys, tigers and rhinos, but in Australia and nearby islands, there were no primates, cats or ungulates. Most of the mammals were marsupials, kangaroos, cuscus and the like. So marsupials reach as far as the island of Sulawesi, which you can see in the middle of the map, and they don't go any further west than that. The line between Bali and Lombok signified something very profound to Wallace. He put his thoughts on paper again, publishing an article in 1857 entitled, On the Natural History of the Arrow Islands. Wallace explained that under Charles Lyle's centres of creation belief, one would expect to find similar animals in countries with similar climates and dissimilar animals in countries with dissimilar climates. This is not at all what Wallace saw. For example, in comparing Borneo in the west and New Guinea in the east, he observed that it would be difficult to point out two lands more exactly resembling each other in climate and physical features, but their birds and mammals were entirely different. Wallace reasoned further that some other law has regulated the distribution of existing species. That law Wallace suggested was the Sarawak law he had proposed two years earlier. Again, Wallace relied on geology to make his case. He surmised that New Guinea, Australia and Arrow Islands had been connected at some time in the relatively recent past and so shared a similar set of birds and mammals. Similarly, Wallace deduced that the western islands had once been connected to mainland Asia and so share the fauna of tropical Asia, monkeys, tigers, etc. The islands of Bali and Lombok and Borneo and Sulawesi had never been connected, however, or only connected an extremely long time ago because there was actually a deep oceanic trench between them. And in fact, Wallace's knowledge of geology was much more primitive, obviously than ours. He believed Charles Lyle's idea that they obviously didn't know about plate tectonics and Lyle just said that land went up and down. So if there was shallow seas, that meant the land had been sinking for a fairly short time. But if there was a very deep seas, that meant that the land had been sinking for much, much longer. Anyway, Wallace had linked the question on the origin of species to how species were distributed. And he had defined a dividing line between the fauna of Asia and Australia, which was later named by Huxley, the Wallace Line. Because of this and his later groundbreaking books on animal distribution, Wallace is considered to be the founder of modern evolutionary biogeography. For Wallace, the question then was not if species evolved, but how? In early 1858, when he was staying in a hut in the village of Dodinga, which you can see marked on the map here, on the huge and largely unexplored Indonesian island of Hau Mahira, he at last discovered the elusive mechanism which he'd been searching for during the last 10 long years. In his book, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, you recounted the story of his great discovery. He says, after writing the preceding paper by the Sarawak Law, the question of how changes of species could have been brought about was rarely out of my mind, but no satisfactory conclusion was reached till February 1858. At that time I was suffering from a rather severe attack of intermittent fever, and one day while lying on my bed during the cold fit, wrapped in blankets, the problem again presented itself to me and something led me to think of the positive checks described by Malthus in his essay on population, a work I'd read several years before and which had made a deep and permanent impression on my mind. These checks, war, disease, famine and the like, must, it occurred to me, act on animals as well as on man. Then I thought of the enormously rapid multiplication of animals, causing these checks to be much more effective in them than is the case of man, and while pondering vaguely on this fact, there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest, that the individuals removed by these checks must on the whole be inferior to those that survived. In the two hours that elapsed before my eighth fit was over, I had thought out almost the whole of the theory, and in the same evening I sketched the draft of my paper and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out in full and sent it by the next post to Mr Darwin. So here's Mr Darwin. Wallace decided to send his essay to Darwin because he knew from correspondence with Darwin that he was interested in the subject of evolution, although he had absolutely no idea that Darwin had already discovered the mechanism. He asked Darwin to pass the essay on to Lyle if Darwin thought it was sufficiently interesting. Wallace probably thought that Lyle, who he had never been in contact with, would be interested to learn about his new theory, because it explained the evolutionary law which Wallace had proposed in his 1855 paper. Darwin had, of course, mentioned in a letter to Wallace that Lyle had found his Sarawak law paper noteworthy. So this is Ternarte Island where he posted his famous essay and letter to Darwin from. It's an active volcano, Morali and I were there not so long ago. So, yeah, Wallace's letter was posted from this island off the coast of Helmahere in March 1858, and it almost certainly arrived at Darwin's house and down on the 18th of June, 1858. When Darwin read Wallace's essay he was understandably horrified and immediately wrote an anguished letter to Lyle asking for advice on what he should do. He exclaimed, I never saw more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Darwin asked Lyle to consult their friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, and to cut a long story short, Lyle and Hooker decided that the best course of action was to read Wallace's essay along with two unpublished excerpts from Darwin's writings on the subject, to a meeting of the Linane Society of London on the 1st of July 1858, only a mere 14 days after Wallace's essay had arrived in England. Darwin and Wallace's writings were published together in the Society's journal about a month later as the paper on the tendency of species to form varieties and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection. Darwin's contributions were placed before Wallace's essay, probably to emphasise that he had thought of natural selection first. Wallace had said nothing about the publication of his essay in his letter to Darwin and absolutely no attempt was made to get his permission to publish it. It would have taken quite some time to ask him and get a reply about what was the rush Darwin had been sitting on the theory for 20 years. Perhaps they were worried that he would object. Wallace actually later grumbled that his essay was printed without my knowledge and of course without any correction of proofs, contradicting Lyle and Hooker's fib in their introduction to it that both authors have unreservedly placed their papers in our hands. So that was obviously rubbish. There's a widespread myth that Darwin and Wallace's paper generated very little interest after its publication. In fact, it received far more attention than would be expected for theoretical scientific article of its type. This is what Darwin expert Janet Brown from Harvard University wrote regarding the reaction to the paper. During the next two or three months, it was reprinted either in full or in part in several popular natural history magazines of the day. A number of people made their views known in letters, reviews and journals. There were more notices than usually assumed. For example, Richard Owen, the most revered naturalist of the time mentioned the paper in his presidential address to the British Association, the Advancement of Science in September, 1858, praising Wallace's explanation of the way varieties will replace one another, although hastily adding that there was no reason to think this accounted for the origin of species. He was a creationist. Sorry, let me just have a sip of water. Soon after Darwin and Wallace's paper was read, Hooker urged Darwin to publish his ideas on evolution in more detail in an academic journal. Darwin started to write, but soon realized it would take an entire book to do the subject justice. He therefore ended up condensing what he had written in his Big Species book. This abstract, as he called it, was published 15 months later in November 1859 as his famous On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a book which Wallace greatly admired and magnanimously said would live as long as the Principia of Newton. So as we have seen, Wallace was doubly responsible for Darwin's book Origin. His Sarawak essay was indirectly responsible for getting Darwin to start writing a book in the first place, and his Tanate essay spurred Darwin to rapidly condense the manuscript of that book and produce Origin. And interestingly, we know that Wallace was writing notes for his own book on evolution when he was in the Malay Archipelago, but he abandoned it when Origin was published. It is vaguely possible that if his 1855 paper hadn't from to Darwin to start writing a book, that Wallace may have beaten him to it. So Darwin had several very lucky breaks, the luckiest of all being that Wallace sent his essay to him and not directly to a journal for publication as he normally did. If Wallace had done that, then Darwin would have received very little credit for the theory, since science only gives credit for ideas when they are published. In spite of the theory's traumatic birth, Darwin and Wallace developed a genuine admiration and respect for one another, although Darwin once remarked and lettered to Wallace they were in one sense rivals. Wallace frequently stressed that Darwin had a stronger claim to the idea of natural selection than himself, as I mentioned previously, he even named his important 1889 book on evolution, Darwinism. Wallace spent the rest of his long life developing and defending the theory of natural selection, as well as working on a wide variety of other sometimes very controversial subjects. During his lifetime, he was widely acknowledged as being the theory's co-discoverer. Natural selection was often called the Darwin-Wallace theory, and the highest possible honors of Britain were bestowed on him for his role as its co-discoverer. These include the Darwin-Wallace and Linnaean gold medals of the Linnaean Society of London, the Copley Darwin and Royal Medals of the Royal Society, and the Order of Merit, which is awarded by the ruling monarch as the highest civilian honor of Great Britain. Only 22 people can hold the Order of Merit at any one time. It was only in the 20th century that Wallace's name faded into relative obscurity for a variety of reasons, and Darwin became to be seen by most people as a sole originator of the theory of natural selection. In fact, it is often called Darwin's theory, whereas as we have seen it is actually Darwin and Wallace's theory. And this letter on the left amuses me from the Royal Society. Sir, I have the pleasure to inform you that the President and Council of the Royal Society have awarded to you the Darwin Medal for your independent origination of the theory of the origin of species by natural selection. So, yeah, a bit ironic. So that's all I've got to say during my talk, and thank you very much indeed for attending. And if you have any questions, I would be very pleased to try and answer them. Thanks. Thank you, George. I think we do have some questions here and I've got a couple on my own, but I see that the man and help bring you to us. Holly here has a question that came up rather early. And that is, Wallace apparently had a connection to a then young California. Would you mind telling us a bit about that? Yes, sure. Wallace's brother, John, who I mentioned, his younger brother actually moved to California in 1849 during the gold rush. He wanted, obviously, to find gold like everyone else did. He wasn't very successful with that, but he ended up becoming a land surveyor and engineer and became actually really well known. He surveyed the line for the narrow gauge railway in Calveras County. And one of the kind of settlements along that line was actually named Wallace in his honor. He didn't actually live in Wallace, but he lived in Stockton. And many years later, about 50, 60, 60, 70, 78, about 40 years later, Wallace went on a 10 month long lecture tour of the United States and Canada, talking about evolution and also his interest in spiritualism. And he deliberately went to the San Francisco area to see his brother, who he hadn't seen for 40 years. And that was in 1887. And Wallace particularly wanted to see the giant redwood trees and met up with the famous conservationist John Muir and was taken on a tour of what's now the Muir Grove, I think, of redwoods there. Muir was very inspired by Wallace and in later life, he actually went to the Amazon and to Africa. And he said that Wallace had inspired him to go and see the tropics. So yeah, that's one connection Wallace. So Wallace actually gave two lectures, one on animal coloration and one on Darwinism or as he called it, evolution in San Francisco. And he knew he went supper with the Stanford's, found them quite boring and too religious for his liking. And interestingly, there's a peak in the Sierra Nevada mountains named after Wallace. So Mount Wallace, it's part of the evolution group of peaks. There's also Huxley, Darwin, Heckel and Stackel and someone else. But a curiosity is that for quite a while, Mount Wallace was actually miss mapped as just a ridge of Mount Darwin. But then years later, it was restored to its full importance as its own mountain. So I think that's going to be symptomatic of what happens with Wallace's reputation. He's been in clips for many decades, but he's making a comeback. Great. Thank you, George. Valerie Samson asks if Wallace had received a conventional education as a youth. Would that have hampered his ability to question and explore as he did. You have to be a psychologist here as well as a historian. I'm not sure because Darwin received a conventional education left school later than Wallace and then went to two universities to two universities to Ed and Brent to Cambridge. And, you know, he was full of curiosity and decided to go on on the Beagle voyage. So, you know, that that didn't affect him. You know, Darwin had been educated by some of the best, you know, lecturers then in Britain, whereas Wallace was almost entirely self taught. He was very, very highly driven to read and better himself. So, yeah. Great. All right. I want to ask another question from Morale. Yes, what is the Wallace correspondence project? What are its goals? What what has been done and what remains? How is it funded? Well, actually, it's not really funded at the moment. Sadly, we don't have a grant at the moment. It's been I set it up in 2010 in order to locate and digitize and transcribe and publish all of Wallace's letters and all the correspondence to and from him in all the world's libraries. And we have now found about five and a half thousand letters of which half are by Wallace and half are to Wallace, written by more than a thousand different correspondence. And we've had about 170 volunteers transcribe all the letters and they're now online in a system called Epsilon. If you search on Google for Wallace and Epsilon, you'll find the website or you could search for the Wallace correspondence project and you'll find the project's website. So our goal is to make this body of incredibly important information about Wallace's life and work available to scholars so that they can begin to understand Wallace's life and work in much more detail. And that's what was done for Charles Darwin. In fact, the Darwin correspondence project has been going for 50 years and they published Darwin's correspondence as a series of thick 600 page volumes. There's 30 of them were published and the project just ended last year. So we're hoping to do a similar thing for Wallace. The Darwin correspondence project has enormously facilitated the work of scholars and historians into understanding Darwin's life and work and as a result hundreds of books literally on Darwin have been published. There's relatively few books on Wallace because, you know, a lot of the information the letters hasn't been available. It is starting to become available now, but we've put preliminary transcripts of all the letters online. And just yesterday I released a catalogue of all of the letters. But the transcripts are not usually very high quality because they've been done by people who aren't, you know, can't recognize old Victorian handwriting very well and don't know many of the words that are being written in the letters, etc, etc. So the next thing we need to do is for myself and other researchers to meticulously go through the transcripts, comparing them with the actual letters and correcting them and then annotating them to facilitate the understanding of the letters by scholars. This is what's always done in these scholarly letter projects that you need to put in end notes explaining information in the letters like if Wallace says I saw Mr. Smith today, you have to do a lot of clever research to try and find out who Mr. Smith was and put an end note saying Mr. Smith, the famous botanist, lived and died, etc. And all of that work is extremely time consuming and quite difficult. So we need to edit all the letters and do end notes for them and then start publishing them. And we'd like to do it in chunks. So the first volume would be his early letters starting from his, the early letters from his childhood up to the time he came back from the Malay archipelago and publishing that as one volume. And just doing that I calculated will take two people, myself and one researcher, two years of hard work. So we need to find money basically so that that can happen. But the basic information in the letters is all available on the internet now and in fact one person's recently did a PhD study of Wallace's time in Amazonia and the development of anthropology partly thanks to Wallace. Using our letters and many scholarly books and articles have been published in the last few years that are drawing from the information in the letters, including I should add the best ever biography of Wallace called radical by nature by Jim Costa, which has just been released this month by Princeton University Press, and Jim drew extensively on the letters so without you know us having done all the work to compile the letters transcribe them would have been incredibly difficult for Jim to do the work because the letters he wouldn't have known what letters existed in the world. And the letters we found in 250 organizations and private collections around the world, and brought them all together. You know, it would have been incredibly difficult even if he knew a letter was in so and so archive you would have had to write and get scans of it, etc. And it would have just been a nightmare so. Hopefully our project is going to boost this scholarly study of Wallace and who, in my view was, you know, one of the most important scientists in history, I mean, how more important can you get them being the co discover of evolution by natural selection and laying the groundwork the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. Wallace made numerous other important contributions. In fact, on my, I got a page on Wallace's scientific contributions on the Wallace Memorial website, which is on on the internet. And I've been trying to list them and there's just a huge number of very fundamental ideas that he, he was the first to introduce in fact on balance I think there's actually more important contributions and. I'm sorry to say, then Charles Darwin. And in fact, I should just add here that when people refer to the theory of adaptive evolutionary change as Darwin's theory. It's completely wrong. For a start it's if they're talking about natural selection which is what we believe the modern theory of adaptive evolutionary change is it's pure natural selection. That would be Darwin and Wallace's theory because they published the idea together, but if they just call it Darwin's theory and they actually mean Darwin's theory Darwin's theory was actually different to Wallace's because Darwin believed that both natural selection and Lamarckian evolution worked side by side. So, Wallace's theory was pure natural selection and he rejected Lamarckian use and disuse inheritance right from the beginning in his 1858 essay. He was hated the idea, but Darwin believed in it throughout his life and introduced the whole theory of pan genesis to account for how it worked. But Darwin's theory of adaptive evolutionary change means natural selection plus Lamarckian evolution. So, yeah, it's wrong. All right, thank you George. A crucial part of evolution. Now, now we know is genetics and I'm Norton asked, did Mr Wallace make any intimations into genetics. So genetics was just being rediscovered at the end of Wallace's life and the as is often the case with scientists. As soon as something's just discovered for the first time like epigenetics has been in the last few years, they make a preposterous claims that it will, it's the theory of sort of everything. And the early mutationists or geneticists, as we call them now, after rediscovering Gregor Mendel's work, they basically came up with their own theories of how evolution worked, including Hugo de Vries, and his, what some people jokingly call his hopeful monster hypothesis, where he said that the parents of the mother of a particular organism could give birth to offspring, which had such big mutations that they could, they were an instant new species and they could only breed with each other and not the parental stock. So he believed that new species were born in one, one leap. And, and that that theory became pretty popular. Usually enough, it does occur with plants, and he was a, he was, he studied evening primrose plants. And so you can get chromosomal duplication in plants so the, the seeds are in effect a new species and they can't breed with the parental species but it doesn't happen with animals and it doesn't happen with most plants. So, it's believed that you know it's a rare thing that happens, but natural selection is is the driving force. Thank you George. Eric Gold writes that I've read he Eric Gold has read that one of the reasons Wallace's legacy is diminished in history is his espousal of several pseudo science beliefs in his later life. Is that the case. It's only partly the case because it didn't affect his reputation during his lifetime he was literally one of the most famous people in the world when he died in 1913. And if you look at the huge number of major victory notices in all the world's papers from Boston to Bombay, you can see how highly regarded he was. And he, at that time there wasn't a, you know, real separation between religion and science he, he was just living through that transition period and people, many scientists was believed in spiritualism and all kinds of phenomena which later people, you know, sort of who pood. And, but, but it didn't. A few people kind of grumbled from time to time about his work on anti vaccination for instance and spiritualism, but like for instance hooker Darwin's friend hooker grumbled that you know Wallace's spiritualism has probably damaged the scientific reputation but Huxley once remarked to Darwin that Wallace's spiritualism was no worse than the prevailing superstitions of the country. Huxley was a great friend of Darwin's actually. And Darwin, certainly, you know, put up with Wallace's beliefs and Wallace's beliefs by the way in spiritualism are not what people talk about spiritualism today. Wallace believed that spiritualism was a science and that the natural, the spiritual world was part of the natural world and could be scientifically investigated. It's difficult to understand his kind of conception of the spirit world but it's sort of like a parallel universe. And there's some interaction between the world of life and the world of spirit. But they isn't a supernatural. And his anti vaccination people have studied his stance against vaccination and found that actually he was largely correct because at the time, if you look at the statistics, a huge number of people died from being vaccinated because the instruments weren't sterilized properly. And Wallace picked up on this that there were lots of people dying from the vaccination, not, you know, so people didn't understand the germ theory of disease, you know, wasn't sort of recognized until later on. And, you know, the fact that you had to sterilize the instruments properly. Wallace, incidentally, due to his opposition of compulsory vaccination, he also didn't believe that governments should have the right to just, you know, dictate what people had to do. So that was one element in it. But in his defense of his position and stance on being anti vaccination, he was one of the pioneers of statistical epidemiology. So something good actually came from it because he started to use statistical methods to try and show from the data that there was, you know, a problem with the vaccination. And of course, there wouldn't be the problem today because diseases and viruses and bacteria are all very well known and the fact that you have to sterilize instruments, but it wasn't understood in Wallace's time. Great. I made the mistake of saying originally from the start here and letting you know that we'd have only one hour of your company here. I'm sorry, I would have to draw this to a close. Here's another question from Harold Hirsch, perhaps our last. There has been recent literature resurrecting Darwin's sexual selection theory as laid out in his dissent of man. Wallace apparently did not support this idea. How is this being received by scientists now? What is it standing? Well, it's a good question. I saw an interview with Richard Dawkins fairly recently and he said that some people still believe in Darwin's version of sexual selection, which is that it's female choice just because they prefer more beautiful males that they have a concept of beauty they can appreciate it. Wallace said that actually it wasn't, it was female choice, but the females were choosing the colors as a badge of something else, of greater fitness. So I won't go into the details now, but there's various theories which have been tested in fact that show that colors can indicate fitness of a male, so by choosing the males would say the longest tails or the brightest plumage, the females are getting stronger, better genes and that was Wallace's theory and until, well, most people that I know who have worked on sexual selection believe in Wallace's version of it. So again, that's not Darwin's theory of sexual selection. A lot of people believe in the Wallacean in Wallacean sexual selection and personally I find it very difficult to believe as Wallace did that the tiny little almost microscopic brain of a female butterfly has an appreciation of beauty for its own sake and is choosing males just because they think, wow, that's a gorgeous looking male. I personally don't buy it. I know it's been revived by, from, is it anyway, but yeah, I find it implausible but who knows. The importance of priority in establishing priority through by virtue of publication is a challenge. It was a challenge back then, but I imagine establishing priority and publication today because of publication on the internet. I want to come up with a great idea and put it in my Facebook page. I'm pretty sure it won't constitute publication, but we have a challenge and always challenge to figure out who has priority here. Maybe we should stop and just appreciate the great idea, the idea of evolution through natural selection and credit all we can, everyone who can. Thank you very much, George. I need not just to thank you though I want to thank the, the libraries are our zoom audience of course the library of Alameda and San Francisco Public Library, and I want to thank Wonderfest and it's donors and patrons for keeping the community of science alive. Our third though, thank you and most important is to you, Dr George becalone thank you perhaps a American sign language silent applause, how to be coming your way. Yes, thank you. Thank you and thank you know Morali and the libraries and science fest. Thank you very much. Great. All right, hope to see many of you at future library events, both in Alameda and San Francisco and of course at Wonderfest.