The list has been arranged, as possible, in reverse chronological order. I should note that the contents have been lightly edited to reduce entry length; almost all of these edits have removed references to recent sources in the outside literature which are not further identified. My apologies for this to the authors, but readers should of course consult the original sources to get the full picture, often extending well beyond Wallace studies per se.

      [concerning the organization of a forest preserve] . . . Although Wallace's proposal is controversial and raises environmental concerns, it is important to recognize that he was focused on key ecological issues. He fought to preserve in an unsullied state the forests that had not been cleared. He also recognized that severe ecological destruction had been wrought on the state of nature. And in this, he contributed to a philosophy of ecological restoration by raising the issue of how we are to address anthropogenic environmental problems. In "Epping Forest," Wallace documented that environmental degradation had taken place, as profiteers and lords of manors had destroyed whole areas of the forest. He provided a reasoned discussion of the different temperate forests in the Northern Hemisphere and an argument that recognized how the species found in a particular location are, in part, influenced by the much longer, geological, and climate history of the earth. In this, Wallace provided important insights and helped open a realm of debate . . . --Brett Clark & Richard York, June 2007. Organization & Environment 20(2): 231.

      Wallace found fault with two aspects of domestication as a heuristic for understanding adaptation in nature. He argued first that the analogy was flawed: artificial selection requires an intelligent selector, whereas no such force acts in natural systems. Additionally, he insisted that the selection itself was fundamentally different, leading to intrinsically different kinds of variation. Domesticated species, he wrote, "are abnormal, irregular, artificial; they are subject to varieties which never occur and never can occur in a state of nature: their very existence depends altogether on human care; so far are many of them removed from that just proportion of faculties, that true balance of organization, by means of which alone as an animal left to its own resources can preserve its existence and continue its race." Both Wallace's lines of argument find modern audiences, from those who see a fundamental difference between the conscious selection of humans and natural processes to those who argue that variation in domesticated species differs from that in nature . . . --Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, Peter L. Morrell & Brandon S. Gaut, 15 May 2007. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, Suppl. 1: 8641-8642.

      The coloration of this genus of weevils is among the most astonishing visual effects displayed in nature. Many animal species that are distasteful to predators have evolved aposematism (they have a distinctive, conspicuous coloration, which functions as a warning signal, advertising their inedibility to potential predators). Wallace notes in a passage on the genus Pachyrrhynchus that many weevils have excessive hard integuments, which render them inedible to most birds, and our own dissections of this species confirm their extremely tough exoskeleton. It seems likely, therefore, that the stark coloration of this species is a form of aposematism. Further evidence in support of this comes from the finding that a number of edible species, such as the longicorn beetles Doliops curculionides and Doliops geometrica and the cricket Scepastus pachyrhynchoides mimic various Pachyrrhynchus species weevils . . . --Victoria Welch et al., 30 April 2007. Physical Review E 75(4): 7.

      Several features of the results give some reassurance because they support plausible notions and other evidence that most nonsynonymous mutations and many nonsynonymous polymorphisms are deleterious. Our analysis implies that some 19 of 20 new amino acid replacements are deleterious with an average fitness reduction on the order of five times the reciprocal of the effective population size. These estimates pertain only to the subset of nonsynonymous mutations whose effect are not so severe as to preclude their becoming polymorphic, but they support other evidence that selection against deleterious mutations plays in key role in shaping patterns of genetic variation in Drosophila. Likewise, we estimate that [about] 7 of 10 amino acid replacements that are polymorphic in samples are deleterious. One feature of our results that might animate some surprise is the high proportion of amino acid fixations between species that show positive selection, [about] 95% in our data. This finding seems to reflect what Wallace called the "overwhelming odds against the less fit" . . . --Stanley A. Sawyer et al., 17 April 2007. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104(16): 6509.

      Given that phenomena strive for reality--that is, to become distinct--then there must by default be a process whereby constitutive elements are demarcated as 'included' and, of course, an opposite process, whereby elements become the 'excluded'. According to [Charles] Fort: "It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called 'being' is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded." This process leaves a trace, however, in the sense that one cannot subsequently provide a full and comprehensive description of the thing in question. Even Darwin, Fort argued, 'was never able to tell what he meant by a "species".' Echoing Wallace's (1875) earlier concerns over the close-mindedness of modern science, Fort argued that this body of knowledge was itself but one instance of localization, wherein an attempt is made to separate out those explanations which are deemed acceptable and proper from those that are not. The raw material of the world becomes organized and interpreted to fit into preconceived notions of how things should work. Slowly but surely, this drive towards explanation causes a plethora of facts and events to emerge from this chaotic landscape, each of which is seen to form part of an overarching pattern. 'A theory feels its way through surrounding ignorance,' he suggested, like 'a wagon train feels its way across a prairie.' And yet, 'Science relates to real knowledge no more than does the growth of a plant, or the organization of a department store, or the development of a nation: that all are assimilative, or organizing, or systematizing processes that represent different attempts to attain the positive state--the state commonly called heaven, I suppose I mean' . . . --Deborah Dixon, April 2007. Cultural Geographies 14(2): 193.

      The conspicuous displays that warn predators of defenses carried by potential prey have been of interest to evolutionary biologists from the time of Wallace and Darwin to the present day. Although most studies implicitly assume that these "aposematic" warning signals simply indicate the presence of some repellent defense such as a toxin, it has been speculated that the intensity of the signal might reliably indicate the strength of defense so that, for example, the nastiest prey might "shout loudest" about their unprofitability. Recent phylogenetic and empirical studies of Dendrobatid frogs provide contradictory views, in one instance showing a positive correlation between toxin levels and conspicuousness, in another showing a breakdown of this relationship. In this paper we present an optimization model, which can potentially account for these divergent results . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, March 2007. Evolution 61(3): 623.

      In his extensive monograph of the genus, Talbot, building on the earlier work of Wallace (1867), Dixey (1894) and others, originally divided Delias into twenty species-groups, according to differences in form of the androconia, male genitalia and, to a lesser extent, wing pattern. Talbot noted, however, that the Australian endemic D. aganippe, provisionally placed in the belisama group, 'seems somewhat isolated' on structural grounds and is 'placed doubtfully in this group'. Wallace (1867: 349) similarly remarked that, 'It is difficult locate this common Australian species', and placed D. aganippe in the belladonna group . . . --Michael F. Braby & Naomi E. Pierce, January 2007. Systematic Entomology 32(1): 6.

      . . . In his notes, essays and correspondence from the field, Wallace consistently emphasized species and genera, and separated these descriptions from his rarer and briefer discussions of individual organisms. The first passage above, from an 1857 article describing collecting in the Aru Islands, is typical: Wallace provides an enthusiastic litany of species, families and genera. It is easy to miss his distinction at the end of the passage, between families, species and individuals, in terms of "abundance." Yet this too is characteristic of Wallace's writings from the field. At a given locality, families contain more or fewer species, and species contain more or fewer individual organisms. Wallace did not collapse or confuse these levels, but carefully distinguished between different sorts of abundance. In general, his natural history writing emphasized species, with clear distinctions between individual organisms and groups . . . --Melinda B. Fagan, 2007. Journal of the History of Biology [electronic file].

      The contrast in the two naturalists' writings from the field thus has two aspects. First, Wallace emphasized groups of organisms, while Darwin described many details of individual organisms. Second, Wallace clearly distinguished between groups and individuals, while Darwin was more ambiguous. Both aspects can be explained by differences in natural history practice. Wallace and Darwin's contrasting habits and working routines in the field were shaped in turn by their different circumstances and motivations. The two naturalists went to the field with different training and social connections, different finances and responsibilities, and different theoretical interests . . . --Melinda B. Fagan, 2007. Journal of the History of Biology [electronic file].

      The use of soil animals as protein source in human nutrition is still widely represented in indigenous populations in most regions of the world and was first reported by Wallace (1853, 1889) more than 100 years ago . . . --T. Decaëns et al., November 2006. European Journal of Soil Biology 42 (Suppl. 1): S26.

      Here I present a critical review of the literature which, when combined with the results of some comparative analyses, suggests that just a few selective agents can explain much of the variation in egg appearance. Ancestrally, bird eggs were probably white and immaculate. Ancient diversification in nest location, and hence in the clutch's vulnerability to attack by predators, can explain basic differences between bird families in egg appearance. The ancestral white egg has been retained by species whose nests are safe from attack by predators, while those that have moved to a more vulnerable nest site are now more likely to lay brown eggs, covered in speckles, just as Wallace hypothesized more than a century ago. Even blue eggs might be cryptic in a subset of nests built in vegetation. It is possible that some species have subsequently turned these ancient adaptations to new functions, for example to signal female quality, to protect eggs from damaging solar radiation, or to add structural strength to shells when calcium is in short supply. The threat of predation, together with the use of varying nest sites, appears to have increased the diversity of egg colouring seen among species within families, and among clutches within species. Brood parasites and their hosts have probably secondarily influenced the diversity of egg appearance. Each drives the evolution of the other's egg colour and patterning, as hosts attempt to avoid exploitation by rejecting odd-looking eggs from their nests, and parasites attempt to outwit their hosts by laying eggs that will escape detection . . . --R. M. Kilner, August 2006. Biological Reviews 81(3): 383.

      Wallace's hypothesis for egg colouring is intuitively appealing because it can explain why so many bird eggs are white or speckled or some shade of brown in colour, and because it is consistent with observations that more cryptic offspring are less vulnerable to attack by predators. Furthermore, Lack (1958) found that a species' nest site could explain some of the variation in egg patterning and colouring amongst the Turdinae. He found that hole-nesters were more likely to lay white immaculate eggs, whereas about 80% of birds whose nests were placed in exposed sites covered their eggs in red or brown speckling, which he interpreted as an adaptation for concealment. However, experimental evidence in support of Wallace's hypothesis is rather mixed . . . --R. M. Kilner, August 2006, Biological Reviews 81(3): 385.

      Why do organisms age and die? This question has long vexed biologists. Alfred Russel Wallace first suggested that ageing and death might be adaptive (Weismann 1882, Wallace 1889). In the 1860s Wallace wrote "Natural selection . . . in many cases favours such races as die almost immediately after they have left successors." Despite some early support, this adaptive view of ageing and death was soon dismissed, to such an extent that in the 1920s it was labelled a "perverse extension of the theory of natural selection" (Pearl 1922). This has remained the case since with almost all biological gerontologists believing that "longevity determination is under genetic control only indirectly," and that ". . . ageing is a product of evolutionary neglect, not evolutionary intent." Today, there are three largely competing theories used to explain ageing; mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy and disposable soma . . . --Calvin Dytham & Justin M. J. Travis, June 2006. Oikos 113(3): 531.

      During his collecting expedition in the Rio Negro and tributary Rio Uaupés basins (1850 to 1852), Wallace collected and sketched a specimen that was most likely Tetranematichthys wallacei. His pencil sketch of the specimen (Wallace, 2002: fig. 122) clearly illustrated the elongate dorsal-fin spine, the ossified, curved maxillary barbels, the elongation of the anterior rays of the anal fin, and the overall form of the head and body characteristic of nuptial males of Tetranematichthys (note: the orientation of the fish in the illustration is such that the mandibular barbels are not apparent). Given that T. wallacei is the only species of the genus known to occur in the Rio Negro and Rio Uaupés basins, we identify Wallace's specimen as that species . . . --Richard P. Vari & Carl J. Ferraris, Jr., May 2006. Copeia 2006(2): 176.

      . . . It was not just that science was monoparadigmatic; its monoculturalism extended beyond the surveillance of the gaze to the fact that the creation of the object had to deny the subjective self and its knowledge. In relating to the other, modern western science either eliminated, assimilated, ghettoized or museumized them. Science had no place for defeated knowledges; the idea of an alternative science arose as a charter to challenge the current politics of knowledge. It was that great dissenting scientist Alfred Wallace who formulated the problem long before Thomas Kuhn. In his Wonderful Century (Wallace, 1898), a portrait of the achievements of 19th-century science, Wallace begins with a celebration of western science and then observes that a science at its moment of dominance tends to be coercive and to ignore competing theories and hypotheses. Wallace believed that the success of science made it ethically and cognitively imperative for the scientist to invent and explore alternatives . . . --Shiv Visvanathan, March-May 2006. Theory, Culture & Society 23(2-3): 166.

      Wallace's field practices fit best into the survey tradition, which flourished during the shift from the 19th-century armchair to intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the early 20th century . . . Both survey and intensive ethnography were attempts to shift knowledge production into the field. Long before researchers gave field ethnography rather than armchair theorizing the highest prestige, Wallace was developing a greater role for regional survey work . . . --Jeremy Vetter, March 2006. Journal of the History of Biology 39(1): 98.

      For more than a century, a debate has raged as to whether death constitutes an intentional ontogenetic program, the so-called Wallace-Weismann hypothesis, or the passive result of an inexorable accumulation of defects. By accounting for benefits to kin, the former assertion becomes more plausible. The inability to identify definable discreet mechanistic pathways for programmed death has provided a major source for criticism of this theory. Although evolutionary dynamics and pluralism may both contribute to the Darwinian value of phenoptosis, intuitive appeal persists in the notion of an oligarchy of functional hubs underpinning the many proximate mechanisms of phenoptosis. Indeed, given its processes' central roles in apoptosis, the mitochondrion may represent an ideal candidate to serve as one such hub on the level of the organelle. The induction of cellular damage by reactive oxygen species has been noted to be a mechanism of self-termination that encompasses all scales of biology. However, we believe that identification of hubs that operate on the level of systems as opposed to that of subcellular components may afford greater potential utility for modification and correction. Endocrine pathways, particularly those involving reproduction and circadian rhythms, have already been implicated in this regard . . . --Anthony J. Yun, Patrick Y. Lee & John Doux, 2006. Medical Hypotheses 67(5): 1082.

      Whewell (1853) was the first to propose that the Solar System has a habitable region comparable to the modern conception of the CHZ [Circumstellar Habitable Zone]. He termed it the "Temperate Zone." In an impressive treatise for the period, Wallace (1903) enumerated several planetary habitability factors, including obliquity, mass, distance from the Sun, atmospheric composition, and proportion of water to land . . . --Guillermo Gonzalez, December 2005. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 35(6): 556.

      . . . In this paper, we describe individual-based evolutionary model of aposematism and defense in spiny and poisonous species. We show that with spines, aposematism is easy to explain by a route in which predator biases are not out of sequence. Thus, aposematism evolves in our simulations if predators: (1) can recognize spines as dangerous (because they are common in prey populations anyway), (2) can use conspicuous markings to better notice and evaluate the significance of spines (resulting in cautious handling), and (3) can use conspicuousness as a cue for distinctiveness such that animals with colourful spines are less easily confused with nonspiny edible prey (as Wallace, [1867], originally suggested for the general function of aposematism). . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, December 2005. Evolution 59(12): 2501.

      . . . In the past, applying the logic of adaptationism to such central and seemingly unique human capacities has often triggered strong resistance. Wallace himself, although the co-creator of natural selection theory, considered self-consciousness as too complex to be one of its outcomes (Wallace, 1889). Note that his main argument was that the sense of self seemed to constitute a radical departure from other forms of phenomenal awareness. But this argument itself relied on the assumption that there is an integral self-system. Given that assumption, it seems indeed difficult to consider the self as the result of a slow, incremental process of natural selection, each step of which is conducive to better reproductive potential. It is by contrast more tractable to evaluate the potential evolutionary background of separate self-relevant systems . . . --Pascal Boyer, Philip Robbins & Anthony I. Jack, December 2005. Consciousness and Cognition 14(4): 653.

      As is often the case in evolutionary ecology, mathematical models have outpaced empirical data and the theoretical basis of the Wallace Effect has been established in more than 100 mathematical models. Supporting field data are less common, however, and are rarely unambiguous. Part of the problem is in not knowing the origin of the supposedly split populations: the only way properly to test the basis for sympatric speciation would be to experimentally manipulate a population, but the timescales of speciation are too long for such a study to observe incipient speciation within the lifespan of a single research project . . . --Jeff Ollerton, 3 August 2005. Heredity 95: 181.

      In between Mill and Edgeworth, the classical economists' notion of sympathy was attacked, and was largely overcome. The co-discover of the Law of Natural Selection, A. R. Wallace, had argued in 1864 that the doctrine of natural selection did not apply to humans because of ethical concerns generated by human sympathy. Our morals do not allow us to let the infirm perish (Wallace, 1864, clxii). In response, the co-founder (with Francis Galton) of eugenics, W. R. Greg, insisted that if sympathy blocked the 'salutary' effects of the survival of the fittest, such sentiments should be suppressed. So, when the 'law' of 'natural selection' failed for humans--because of sympathy and ethics--the eugenic thinkers who so influence post-classical economics proposed to rid humanity of sympathy. --Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy, August 2005. Canadian Journal of Economics 38(3): 950.

      Another English socialist of a very different temper, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of natural selection, took a different tack. The humane Wallace was a reformer but also a stout defender of Darwinian inheritance. So, although he believed that English society was increasingly dysgenic, Wallace rejected compulsory eugenics as elitist and barbarous. Wallace proposed that eugenic ends could be realized by an expansion of women's education and their political and economic freedom. Like Mill, he believed that the law could reduce women's economic dependency, which, he argued, would work to reduce the incentive for women to make dysgenic marriages. "Progress is still possible, nay, is certain," said Wallace, "by . . . that mode of selection which will inevitably come into action through the ever-increasing freedom, joined with the higher education of women" (1892). He envisioned selection as "effected through the agency of female choice in marriage" (1890). In leaving "the improvement of the race to the cultivated minds and pure instincts of the Women of the Future" (1890), the idealistic Wallace partly anticipates the eugenic feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman . . . --Thomas C. Leonard, July 2005. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64(3): 782.

      . . . At present, this genus of tropical and subtropical America, distributed from the central part of Mexico to the north of Argentina, including the West Indies, consists of ca. 350 species and is confined mainly to humid forests or grows along the edges of rivers. Its accumulated species diversity may be explained by gradual addition through geological time. This process was proposed by Wallace (1878) and turned out to result in greater accrual of species in tropical zones than in temperate regions. This, as explained by the "museum model," suggests that a stable tropical climate permitted the buildup of species through time . . . --L. Calvillo-Canadell & S. R. S. Cevallos-Ferriz, July 2005. International Journal of Plant Sciences 166(4): 688.

     Wallace (1878) was among the first to argue that the low diversity of the polar regions is largely a reflection of past episodes of glaciations and climatic change that repeatedly drove many high-latitude taxa to extinction, leaving little opportunity for diversity to recover, and this idea has had subsequent proponents . . . --Emma E. Goldberg et al., June 2005. American Naturalist 165(6): 628.

     The conditions under which aposematism, the conspicuous coloration of unpalatable or otherwise defended prey, could evolve have long been a topic of speculation (Wallace 1867; Poulton 1890). A perceived roadblock to the initial establishment of rare, aposematic mutants is the intense predation to which they would be subjected by naive predators. Conspicuous prey, albeit defended, are much more likely to be seen by predators, and if predators are unaware of their defence (and do not show neophobia), then such prey are more likely to be attacked on encounter. This means that rare conspicuous mutants of defended prey should, on average, be attacked more frequently than their cryptic conspecifics. A possible solution to this problem, first suggested by Fisher (1930), is that gregariousness could facilitate the evolution of distastefulness (and hence aposematism). Thus, if prey are warningly coloured and aggregated, then an attack on one individual by a naive predator could lead to subsequent avoidance of others in the group, often relatives, that share the same trait (this proposal was the initial inspiration for Hamilton's (1963) theory of kin selection) . . . --Christopher D. Beatty, Roderick S. Bain & Thomas N. Sherratt, 23 May 2005. Animal Behaviour 70: 199.

      The Darwinian theory and Wallace's original theory can be formalized in terms of what is called today the carrying capacity of the environment, usually denoted by K; in Wallace's words, this is the level at which "the population must have reached its limits, and have become stationary." Suppose that the carrying capacity of the parental form on its own is K, and that the carrying capacities of the parental form and the advantageous variation when they coexist are K₁ and K₂ respectively. Under Darwin's theory K₁Z0, whereas K₂ is equal to or perhaps slightly greater than K, so that the parental form eventually becomes extinct even in a constant environment. Under Wallace's theory both carrying capacities are greater than zero, with K₁!K₂, so that both forms can coexist; if the environment deteriorates, both carrying capacities decrease, and if the deterioration is severe K₁ becomes 0, so that the parental form becomes extinct. When the environment recovers, the carrying capacities return to their original values so that both types can again coexist . . . --Michael Bulmer, 22 May 2005. Notes & Records of the Royal Society 59(2): 130.

      It was Wallace (1855) who was the first to recognize the correlation between geographic distribution and evolutionary relationship. Wallace (1855) in fact described how a process akin to what is now called vicariance might have produced modern faunal differences in the Galapagos Islands if these now distinct islands were once joined. In effect, Wallace (1855) was arguing that one way the geological world impinges on the biological world is through the mechanism we now refer to as allopatric speciation. If speciation is allopatric, species can disperse over geographic barriers (that have geological or climatic causes) and become isolated, or geological or climatic changes can cause populations of species to become isolated from one another by creating barriers within formerly continuous ranges; the latter is termed vicariance. In either case, the isolated populations diverge and eventually speciate . . . --Bruce S. Lieberman, 11 April 2005. Palaeogeography, Palaeocimatology, Palaeoecology 219: 25.

      Although these definitions vary, the common emphasis is on the provision of a more stimulating environment. Historically Alfred Russel Wallace may have been one of the first individuals to provide enrichment to captive animals (Wallace 1869). Upon receipt of an orphan orangutan in his camp, he fashioned an artificial mother from a buffalo skin that appeared to comfort the animal, served as a surrogate mother, and thereby enriched the animal's environment. Shortly afterward, Wallace received another animal in camp, a cynomolgus monkey, and the two animals were successfully paired. Thus Wallace's earliest attempts at enriching the animal's environment included the provision of both inanimate and animate exemplars of enrichment . . . --James L. Weed & James M. Raber, March 2005. ILAR Journal 46(2): 118.

      A. R. Wallace originally invented the concept now known as aposematism to describe prey that combine warning displays with secondary defences (Wallace 1867, 1889). More than a century later, the evolution of aposematism remains a remarkably fertile and controversial area of research. Warning displays are still of interest to researchers, in part, because the proximate mechanisms by which they operate tell us much about predator behaviour and predator-prey coevolution. As originally envisaged by Wallace (1867) and Poulton (1890), warning displays function to enhance discrimination, to accelerate learning and perhaps slow down forgetting . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, 21 February 2005. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 272: 431.

      . . . aposematic displays remain the focus of considerable attention because, for many researchers, their initial origins contain at least two important evolutionary paradoxes. First, it is generally assumed that before the first aposematic traits evolved, prey were both highly cryptic and had effective secondary defences. If secondary defences are costly (and they often are), then their presence in prey already highly protected by crypsis is paradoxical: why pay for repellent secondary defences if your enemy rarely finds you? Second, there is a better-known paradox of warning signals, which also emerges from commonly held assumptions about initial conditions. Ever since the seminal theoretical model of Harvey et al. (1982), it is widely taken that aposematic mutants must emerge from defended cryptic species. When this is the case, new aposematic forms suffer combined and highly effective barriers to survival because of their rarity and their conspicuousness . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, 21 February 2005. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 272: 431.

      . . . as Wallace originally envisaged, warning displays might be conspicuous so as to be "very distinct from the protective tints of the defenceless animals allied to them" (Wallace 1889, p. 232). Hence a good reason that aposematism may evolve initially is to prevent confusion with undefended prey. On its own, behavioural conspicuousness itself may not be a sufficiently reliable signal of non-profitability to function as an aposematic display. As we found . . . prey can evolve some heightened levels of behavioural conspicuousness even when they do not evolve adaptive secondary defences. Hence, some additional discriminative cue may be necessary for defended prey to minimize erroneous attacks by educated predators . . . --Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, 21 February 2005. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 272: 436.

      The language faculty is one component of what the co-founder of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, called "man's intellectual and moral nature": the human capacities for creative imagination, language and symbolism generally, mathematics, interpretation and recording of natural phenomena, intricate social practices, and the like, a complex of capacities that seem to have crystallized fairly recently, perhaps a little over 50,000 years ago, among a small breeding group of which we are all descendants--a complex that sets humans apart rather sharply from other animals, including other hominids, judging by traces they have left in the archaeological record. The nature of the "human capacity," as some researchers now call it, remains a considerable mystery. It was one element of a famous disagreement between the two founders of the theory of evolution, with Wallace holding, contrary to Darwin, that evolution of these faculties cannot be accounted for in terms of variation and natural selection alone, but requires "some other influence, law, or agency," some principle of nature alongside gravitation, cohesion, and other forces without which the material universe could not exist. Although the issues are framed differently today within the core biological sciences, they have not disappeared . . . --Noam Chomsky, Winter 2005. Linguistic Inquiry 36(1): 3.

      . . . Rohde (1978, 1992) expanded earlier suggestions that high-energy levels may increase speciation rates (Wallace, 1878). Relationships between speciation/extinction rates and energy may arise directly through the influence of solar energy on mutation rates, and most literature on the diversification rate mechanism focuses on this relationship. Alternatively, both solar and productive energy availability may influence speciation/extinction rates indirectly through variables such as body size and reproductive rates . . . --Karl L. Evans, Philip H. Warren & Kevin J. Gaston, February 2005. Biological Reviews 80(1): 14.

      . . . adaptationism is usually traced back to Alfred R. Wallace, one of the two great biological revolutionaries, who was also one of the forefathers of modern astrobiology with his intriguing and remarkably prescient 1903 book Man's Place in the Universe. This view is the scientific foundation of Schroeder's solution to Fermi's paradox. Intelligence is an adaptive trait, like any other. Adaptive traits are bound to disappear once the environment changes sufficiently for any selective advantage which existed previously to disappear. In the long run, the intelligence is bound to disappear, as its selective advantage is temporally limited by ever-changing physical and ecological conditions . . . --Milan M. Cirkovic, January-February 2005. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) 58(1-2): 65.

      The first report of a tool-using parrot in the wild was in 1869, by Wallace (2000). He described a black palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus) in New Guinea using a piece of leaf as a wedge while feeding from kanary nuts (Canarium commune). According to the author, after starting to groove the nut with its lower mandible, the bird held it in its foot and bit off a piece of leaf. This was retained in the deep notch of the upper mandible while the bird started to seize the nut once again, fixing the edge of the lower mandible in the notch and braking off a piece of shell by a powerful nip. Wallace suggested that the nut was prevented from slipping by the elastic tissue of the leaf (Wallace 2000) . . . --Andressa Borsari & Eduardo B. Ottoni, January 2005. Animal Cognition 8(1): 48.

      . . . the Wakatobi Marine National Park includes all coral reefs, islands, and communities within its boundaries and is centered around the main islands in the Wakatobi archipelago. The area is considered "a geological and biological anomaly" and is located at a zone of transition between the two distinct faunas associated with the Asian and Australian continents. Wallace (1869) postulated that the islands of Sulawesi had been isolated far longer than the surrounding islands, giving evolution a much greater opportunity to shape a unique fauna . . . --Benjamin P. Horton et al., January 2005. Journal of Foraminiferal Research 35(1): 4.

      Wallace's rhetorical world was as remote from Darwin's as their social worlds--they wrote up their theories differently. Although a colonial infrastructure made much of Wallace's fieldwork possible, the solitary English collector, living alongside natives and dependent on their knowledge and skills, eschewed the rich imperial language in which Darwin depicted evolving life. Wallace thought spatially and described his theories in ways appropriate to the Welsh mapmaking enterprise from which he first learned about native habitats. He wrote with artless clarity. One searches in vain for conquering colonial imagery in his major theoretical essays between 1855 and 1864. Here "organic beings" are continually "peopling" the earth and making it a "theatre of life." New species evolve under changed "physical conditions" in "an unbroken and harmonious system." The faunas of "neighboring countries" testify to their geological past, showing that new species were "gradually introduced" as the regions became isolated. The arrival of "chance immigrants" is often followed by "natural extinction and renewal of species," and those organisms with "greater powers of dispersion" and "a greater plasticity of organization" have "extended themselves" over continents. The "regular and unceasing extinction of species, and their replacement by allied forms" is an "established fact," contingent in every case on the quantity and quality of available food . . . --James Moore, 2005. In David N. Livingstone & Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Revolution (University of Chicago Press): 121-122.

      In The Malay Archipelago, Wallace's most popular and widely read book, the only "empire" is Austrian, "imperial" is a common species name, and only the Dutch, the Portuguese, and ants have "colonies." "Aborigines" are always human, "natives" are established residents (also marsupials in the Moluccas and flowers in the Himalayas), and people wage "war," "conquer," and "exterminate" one another (also the flying opossum). "Competition" too is a human prerogative, but no "invasion" crops up, nor any of its cognates. Districts may be "overrun" and indigenous populations "supplanted"; "inhabitants" and "enemies" of different species may "struggle" and "migrate." Yet Wallace is remarkably consistent--startlingly so compared to Darwin in the Origin of Species--in omitting to cast living organisms in imperial Britain's image. . . . James Moore, 2005. In David N. Livingstone & Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Revolution (University of Chicago Press): 124.

      What role, if any, natural selection itself plays in reproductive isolation in the earliest stages of speciation when populations first begin to diverge has been a contentious issue since the late 19th century when Alfred Russel Wallace (1889) advocated the idea that the low fitness of hybrids should select for reproductive isolation between diverging populations. This selective mechanism has been called the Wallace effect or (more frequently) reinforcement. Support for reinforcement waxed and waned throughout the 20th century, enjoying increasing popularity after Dobzhansky elaborated the theory in the 1940s, going out of favor in the 1980s when theory discounted it, only to recover more recently when new theoretical models turned in its favour. Prezygotic isolating mechanisms have now been investigated in over 100 mathematical models, firmly establishing a theoretical basis for the evolution of reinforcement under the right conditions . . . --J. Silvertown et al., 2005. Heredity 95: 198.

      Accordingly, we summarize four macroevolutionary patterns exhibited by venomous snake mimicry as the Savage-Wallace Effects: First, mimicry is more likely among closely related organisms that share a common body plan (e.g., among lepidopterans, among fishes, and thus their specific similarities (e.g., wing color patterns in butterflies) are representative of evolutionary parallelism . . . Second, mimicry spanning distantly related organisms, representative of evolutionary convergence, is more likely to involve planarians, myriapods, fishes, snakes, and other groups with relatively simple body forms . . . Third, among vertebrates, snake mimicry is unusually widespread because of (1) and (2), and because venomous species can severely injure or kill predators . . . Fourth, the origin of noxious attributes can markedly increase diversity within a clade beyond that encompassed by unpalatable species; dangerous models thereby make otherwise "unprotected niches" possible for harmless relatives, and even for lifestyles not used by the models themselves . . . --Harry W. Greene & Roy McDiarmid, 2005. In Maureen Donnelly et al., eds., Ecology and Evolution in the Tropics: A Herpetological Perspective (University of Chicago Press): 205-206.

      Proposed originally by A. R. Wallace in the mid 19th century (Wallace 1852), the riverine barrier hypothesis states that major Amazonian rivers significantly reduce or prevent gene flow between populations inhabiting opposite river banks, hence promoting speciation. In a phylogeographic framework, the main prediction of the riverine barrier hypothesis is that sister intraspecific clades and species will exist across major rivers rather than within major Amazonian interfluves; furthermore, phylogeographic and population genetics data can distinguish between primary divergence across rivers (predicted by the riverine barrier hypothesis) versus secondary contact along rivers between nonsister taxa that diversified elsewhere. A second prediction of the riverine barrier hypothesis comes from the observation that the upper reaches of all major Amazonian rivers are narrower than the lower reaches; therefore, a gradual reduction of the "river-barrier effect" is expected to take place from the lower to the upper part of the river's course . . . --Alexandre Aleixo, June 2004. Evolution 58(6): 1303.

      . . . the possibility that at least some instances of similarity among distasteful species may have evolved through selection to deceive predators has been frequently raised. Even before the publication of the theory of Mullerian mimicry, Wallace (1871) proposed that "distasteful secretion is not produced alike by all members of the family and that where it is deficient, protective imitation comes into play" . . . -- Thomas N. Sherratt, Michael P. Speed & Graeme D. Ruxton, May 2004. Journal of Theoretical Biology 228: 217-218.

      Alfred Russel Wallace was the first to suggest that aging and death might be evolved traits. In the 1860s, he suggested that individuals are programmed to die so that they do not compete with their offspring. His idea had some early support, notably from the influential German biologist August Weismann, but by the 1920s it had been dismissed as a "perverse extension of the theory of natural selection". By the middle of the last century, the focus of evolutionary theory on senescence had shifted to other theories such as mutation accumulation and antagonistic prejotropy . . . Recent discoveries in nematodes, insects, and mammals of genes that, when mutated, increase life span, have increased interest in the evolution of aging. In this article, I show that within a spatially structured population, programmed death does evolve and suggest that it is time to reconsider the "perverse" theories of Wallace and Weismann . . . --Justin Travis, April 2004. Journal of Gerontology A: Biological Sciences 59(4): 301.

      Conspicuous and simple color patterns (often red, yellow, or white in combination with black) are common among animals that are distasteful, noxious, or otherwise potentially dangerous to their predators ( . . . Wallace, 1867). The common view is that conspicuousness has evolved because it constitutes a strong visual signal that is easy for receiving predators to detect, learn, and associate with unpalatability. However, conspicuous coloration may provide protection against predators even if the prey lacks chemical or structural defense mechanisms, because coloration may elicit spontaneous avoidance behaviors in naive predators. It has been suggested that bilateral asymmetry also may play a role in communication, but this has been studied primarily within the context of mate choice . . . --Anders Forsman & Joakim Herrström, January-February 2004. Behavioral Ecology 15(1): 141.

      Although we have many species from most of the major species groups and subgroups related to D. melanogaster in our analysis, speciation patterns for independent species groups and subgroups need to be examined with a number of genes to generalize these inferences. Nevertheless, if the observed correspondence between the time of species divergences and paleoclimate changes is true, it supports Wallace's hypothesis for a rapid species change resulting from climatic change (Wallace 1870a, b). In the present case, the factor is postulated to be climatic cooling in the Cenozoic. A major consequence of this cooling was an extensive increase in aridification in the middle to low latitude regions, which lead to expansions of savannas and grasslands as well as the fragmentation of forests that were primary habitats of ancestral fruit fly species and populations. The adaptation to the newly arisen dry environment and the allopatry caused by the forest fragmentation are potential causes for stimulating fruit fly speciation. The former adaptation is supported by the distribution patterns of D. teissieri and D. yakuba, which are adapted to forests and savannas, respectively . . . --Koichiro Tamura, Sankar Subranmanian & Sudhir Sumar, January 2004. Molecular Biology and Evolution 21(1): 42.

      For Wallace, the mind overarched natural selection. He believed there was a more daring, vertical movement that boosts life toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness. After all, if evolution were merely a matter of survival by adaptation, we might still be a planet of hearty bacteria. Those bacteria would have their history, an eons-long series of variations and adaptations, all responsive to selection, but without movement toward greater complexity. For that matter, if complexity beyond the unicellular level were rare and episodic, coming and going over the eons, we would still have evolution as Darwin explained it. But in the only example we have of evolving life--our own Earth--we see something more dramatic. We see a steady undeterred thrust toward a net gain in complexity. The microbes continue, but life has branched out into an amazing array of new species. It has been building itself up into ever more delicate, sentient forms. To ignore that fact would be to ignore the defining feature of evolution. . . . --Theodore Roszak, 2004. In David Rothenburg & Wandee J. Pryor, eds., Writing the Future: Progress and Evolution (MIT Press): 3-4.

      Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works) and Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea) speak for mainstream evolutionary theory when they insist that the mind was built up incrementally by way of small, selective advantages in the same way as a bird's wing. They see the growth of intelligence as wholly a matter of problem solving and toolmaking--practical talents to which natural selection easily applies. They simply ignore Wallace's dilemma, offering no reason why the mind should ever have developed beyond simple counting, toolmaking, and enough verbal ability to coordinate a hunting expedition . . . --Theodore Roszak, 2004. In David Rothenburg & Wandee J. Pryor, eds., Writing the Future: Progress and Evolution (MIT Press): 5.

      One could argue that males can survive better by being smaller and more cryptic than females. The importance of predation to the evolution of sexual dimorphism was first stressed by Wallace (1889), who suggested that crypsis in females is favoured because bright colours potentially attract nest predators. Recent comparative studies, such as that undertaken by Martin & Badyaev (1996), seem to confirm this point. In tinamous, reversed sexual roles and predation risks incurred by incubating males may explain why they are less colourful than their conspecific females. Small size and cryptic coloration are probably complementary strategies to avoid predators . . . --P. L. Tubaro & S. Bertelli, November 2003. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 80(3): 526.

      To understand why small monitor species have radiated so dramatically through Australia, New Guinea, and their adjacent islands, but not elsewhere, we examined the possible role of Wallace's Line . . . In contrast to its influence on the mammals, Wallace's Line is not a barrier to monitors--or is it? That depends on the adult size of the species . . . Large monitor species (in which adults are greater than four feet long) are just as diverse on lands east of Wallace's Line as they are to the west, or for that matter in mainland Asia and Africa. Small monitor species, however, occur only to the east of the line . . . --Samuel S. Sweet & Eric R. Pianka, November 2003. Natural History 112(9): 44.

      It has long been recognized that prey that possess significant defenses against predators tend to be conspicuous in some way (Wallace 1867; Darwin 1871; Poulton 1890). The contemporary explanation for this phenomenon, termed "aposematism" (Poulton 1890), is that there is "something special" about the educational properties of conspicuous traits as a signal of defense. For example, it has been repeatedly shown that predators learn to avoid unpalatable prey more quickly when they are conspicuous than when they are cryptic. This theory for the evolution of aposematism is plausible, but there is an important caveat. Whatever the underlying cause of aposematism, it is likely that predators would evolve an enhanced psychological predisposition to learn to avoid conspicuous prey precisely because such prey tend to be defended . . . --Thomas N. Sherratt & Christopher D. Beatty, October 2003. The American Naturalist 162(4): 377.

      'The Darwinian theory is wrong because random variations tend to worsen performance'. Thus wrote Fred Hoyle in his famous book 'The intelligent universe'. Hoyle pointed out three important things in this book. First, that the idea of natural selection had been around for several decades before Darwin wrote The Origin. Secondly, that it was Wallace's clear letter of 1858 that really clarified Darwin's mind on the matter. Thirdly, and more important, natural selection as conceived by Darwin and Wallace just won't work mathematically. The odds are stacked hugely against random change producing even one new protein . . . --Anthony K. Campbell, July 2003. Astrophysics and Space Science 285(2): 571.

      With respect to the theory of sexual selection, Darwin (1859, 1872) developed this novel concept but did not describe the function of this behaviour (for instance, the role of the male peacock's tale). As Dawkins has pointed out, it was Wallace who speculated that a male with brightly coloured tail feathers is showing that he is a high-quality individual. Subsequent studies have shown that this idea is supported by experimental evidence. Hence, with respect to the second mode of selection in nature, Wallace developed the concept originally proposed by Darwin (1859, 1872) and did draw the correct conclusions . . . --U. Kutschera, 1 May 2003. Theory in Biosciences 122(4): 357-358.

      Why do we believe Wallace when he writes about evolution yet ignore him when he turns to spiritualism? Part of the reason is the context in which we receive his writings today. Spiritualism is now out of fashion, hoaxes have been exposed, and there is no longer a social context for the idea of spiritualism. The experiments, while repeatable in Wallace's day, are no longer repeatable, and thus they fail one of the hallmarks of the scientific method. But they were repeatable then! When one reads Wallace's works, one is struck by how he acted with complete warrant in exploring spiritualism scientifically. As Kuhn has demonstrated, Wallace was operating under the social constructs of his day . . . --Steven L. Peck, March 2003. Zygon 38(1): 11.

      As we shall show, the concept of the diorama emerged from the construction of biogeographical zones. Moreover, the concept of biogeographical zones not only triggered the vision of the diorama as its "musee imaginaire" but, from the very beginning, theorizing on biogeographical zones was captured by visual means such as maps and illustrations. These images had a strong impact on the emergence of dioramic displays by providing two-dimensional forerunners for what were later implemented as three-dimensional museum installations. As we show in this paper, the new mode of illustration introduced by Wallace in 1876 formed a crucial influence. In The Geographical Distribution of Animals Wallace elected to illustrate different biogeographical zones by the simultaneous display of animals from different taxa against an ecologically appropriate background. By and large, each animal was itself in some way unique to its zone and could potentially have been used as a surrogate for the zone . . . --Julia Voss & Sahotra Sarkar, February 2003. Philosophy & Geography 6(1): 61.

      Wallace insisted that none of these suggestions went to the heart of the problem. None of these people had suggested anything more than some 'force'--but force is a cause of motion, not a cause of organization. There must be something more than merely a force. There must be some agency that guides and coordinates the process which builds up that infinitely complex machine, the living organism. Wallace thought of the cell as being not only self-repairing, but also self-renewing, self-multiplying, self-adapting to its ever-changing environment, so as to be, potentially, everlasting . . . --Roger Steer, 2003. In his Letter to an Influential Atheist (Authentic Lifestyle): 27.

      The co-inventor of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, was aware of the significance of Darwin's views. In his book, Darwinism, (originally published in 1890) Wallace took pains to distance himself from Darwin on the question of human capacities. He pointed to the mistake that someone might make by conjecturing that all geological changes are due to factors such as flooding, volcanic activity, the action of the wind and the sun, and so on while overlooking the special contribution made by glaciation. Glaciation is an important cause of change, but is radically different from the other causes of geological change. By analogy, Wallace argues, "Because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature . . . has been developed by the same causes only (Wallace 1897: xx)." Our mental capacities and our morality, Wallace suggests, may be due to something quite different from natural selection . . . --Andrew Brennan, 2003. Worldviews 7(3): 276-277.

      In the second edition of Primitive Culture, Tylor's doubts about psychic phenomena were suppressed and Spiritualism roundly denounced as a survival of animistic beliefs (Tylor 1873). Yet, even the formulations used in Primitive Culture betray an ambivalence within its scheme of mental evolution that seems fundamental to contemporary scientific politics. Tylor felt forced to class modern Spiritualism with "primitive" animism--the kind of arbitrary classification that Wallace was up against in his critique of Primitive Culture and in his earliest writings on botany. But Tylor also had to acknowledge that Spiritualism was not just a survival but an extraordinary revival of animism. He even went as far as to recognize the anomalous status of Spiritualism within his progressionist scheme, because the former "is a truly remarkable case of degeneration" (1873), the possibility of which Primitive Culture was originally intended to argue out of existence . . . --Peter Pels, 2003. In Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revolution and Concealment (Stanford Univ. Press): 258.

      . . . In Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, the argument about perception was developed after Wallace denounced the theoretical fallacy of assuming that because Spiritualist phenomena ran counter to our knowledge of the laws of nature, they cannot exist. He argued that the physical phenomena that occur during a seance, can only be explained by presuming invisible intelligences, which was only "another and more striking illustration than any we have yet received of how small a portion of the great cosmos our senses give us cognisance" (1874). He compared the force exerted by these intelligences with light, heat, electricity, and magnetism (ala "modes of motion" of a space-filling "ether") to show how these "diffuse and subtle" forms of matter can act upon "ponderable bodies" and become known to us only by their effects. The fact that we do not know this higher sense is no argument, Wallace wrote, because likewise the "faculty of vision" would be "inconceivable" to a race of blind men. "It is possible and even probably that there may be modes of sensation as superior to all ours as is sight to that of touch and hearing" (1874). The subject of divination, in particular, allowed Wallace to elaborate on this? The clairvoyance that is at the basis of divination led him to suppose a "new sense" that amounts to "a kind of rudimentary perception, which can only get at the truth by degrees." . . . --Peter Pels, 2003. In Birgit Meyer & Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revolution and Concealment (Stanford Univ. Press): 262.

      . . . The lesson seems to be: if you think hard about species origins, then it does not matter how you travel, you will reach the theory of natural selection in the end. On closer inspection, however, the Wallace case offers at least a few openings to those sceptical about the independence of the theory from its history. One move would be to deny that Wallace did, in fact, 'co-discover' the theory of natural selection. Rather, he came up with a theory quite different from Darwin's, and Darwin's overreaction in 1858 has misled historians ever since . . . --Gregory Radick, 2003. In Jonathan Hodge & Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge Univ. Press): 150.

      Three features of Wallace's account of the evolution of human mind and morals stand out. First, he conceived the selective environment to be other proto-human groups--which would have an accelerating effect on the evolutionary process, since social environments would rapidly change through responsive competition. Second, he proposed that selection worked on the group, rather than the individual--which allowed him to explain the rise of altruistic behaviour, that is, behaviour perhaps harmful to the individual but beneficial to the group. In his original essay on the transmutation of species (1858), Wallace conceived of the struggle for existence as occurring among varieties instead of individuals. He continued to think in such group terms when considering the evolution of moral behaviour. Finally, in a note to the published version of his talk to the Anthropological Society, he mentioned that he was inspired to develop his thesis by reading Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. Spencer's own early brand of socialism had pulled Wallace to his side. In Social Statics, (1851), Spencer had envisioned a gradual and continual adjustment of human beings to the requirements of civil society, with individuals accommodating themselves to the needs of their fellows, so that eventually a classless society would emerge in which the greatest happiness for the greatest number would be realised. Spencer assumed that the inheritance of useful habits would be the means by which such evolutionary progress would occur, while Wallace believed natural selection to be the agent of that progress . . . --Robert J. Richards, 2003. In Jonathan Hodge & Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge Univ. Press): 102-103.

      On the basis of personal experiments and reliable reports from other scientists, Wallace concluded that the universe is populated with a hierarchy of spirit beings, some of whom are in contact with the human population on earth, usually through mediums. According to Wallace, the spirit beings lower in the hierarchy, acting through mediums, were responsible for a variety of paranormal phenomena, including clairvoyance, miraculous healings, communications from the dead, apparitions, materializations of physical objects, levitations, etc. More powerful spirit beings may have played a role in the process of evolution, guiding it in certain directions . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 102.

      . . . Hume appealed to uniform human experience in his refutation of miracles. For example, Hume observed "it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age of any country" Wallace noted two flaws in this argument. First, the appeal to uniform human experience, granting the truly uniform nature of the experience, insures that no really new fact could ever be established. Second, Wallace questioned the veracity of Hume's version of uniform human experience. "Reputed miracles abound in all periods of history," wrote Wallace (1896, p. 8). And they continued up to the present, thus nullifying Hume's assumption. . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 116.

      . . . The space-filling ether of nineteenth century physics is no longer with us. But there are modern scientific concepts that would allow Wallace's basic system to operate. According to deterministic chaos theorists, immeasurably small random perturbances of matter can rapidly propagate into large-scale effects that are not easily predictable. Scientists sometimes give the example of a Caribbean butterfly that by its wings sets off motions of air molecules. These movements might eventually amplify to steer a hurricane from open sea into the American coast. If the butterfly had flapped its wings slightly differently, the hurricane might not have hit land. According to this idea, Wallace's spirit beings might make infinitesimal adjustments on the subatomic level that would quickly propagate into observable spiritualist effects. One might also propose that they are somehow capable of manipulating the curvature of Einstein's space-time continuum. They could thus produce gravitational effects, for gravity is said to be the result of curvature in the continuum. Or one might propose that the spirit beings induce slight changes in the quantum mechanical vacuum, which in some ways resembles an ether. Of course, this approach is limiting, and rather than straining to find ways to explain spiritualist phenomena in conformity with currently accepted physical laws, it may make more sense to come up with a new theoretical system that more naturally incorporates both the normal and paranormal phenomena . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 128.

      . . . Wallace favored the latter course, but his system has certain puzzling features. Although a dualist, he does not appear to accept the existence of individual conscious entities before their earthly embodiment. According to Wallace, there is an original spiritual mind from which matter is generated. Individual spiritual minds, associated with spiritual bodies (souls), are only developed from and in material bodies, as they come into existence (Wallace 1885; in Smith 1991, p. 100). After death, the individual minds, as above stated, go to "the first grade of spirit life," where they experience progress or the lack of it based on their earthly habits. But if individual spirit souls can exist after earthly embodiment, why not before? And why is there any need at all for earthly embodiment, which is not an altogether pleasant experience? Why not skip that and go directly to the highest grade of spiritual life? . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 129.

      . . . Here is another problem with Wallace's system. In his works, Wallace details reports of varied spiritualistic phenomena, such as levitation, apparitions, and clairvoyance, from his own time and throughout history. But he ignores reports of transmigration of souls, which occur widely in almost all times and places. The reports of transmigration are just as credible as any other category of evidence he considers. The existence of this phenomena requires, however, certain modifications in Wallace's system. At death, souls would pass not necessarily into the first phase of spiritual existence but perhaps into new material bodies. According to religious systems that incorporate transmigration, such as the Vedic system, some souls, because of their strong attachment to their last embodiment, do not attain new material bodies, but remain for some time as ghosts. This actually fits in quite well with the observations of Wallace and other spiritualists, who found that the spirits they contacted often desired to communicate with living friends and relatives . . . --Michael A. Cremo, 2003. In his Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin's Theory. (Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing Inc.): 129.

      Instead of unthinkingly placing English society at the top of the evolutionary tree, he argued that the evolutionary process had gone awry. In Wallace's hands evolutionary theory ceased to act as a rationalization of what was and became a promise of what could be. The key here was to hold up so-called savage societies as occasionally more civilized and more advanced than the West. Thus towards the end of his popular travel book The Malay Archipelago (1869), Wallace favourably contrasted primitive morality with the 'social barbarism' of Victorian England. If a savage society could attain a higher level of morality, then something must have disturbed England's evolutionary progression. The villain was laissez-faire individualism. Human evolution--the development of man's moral and intellectual faculties--depended upon the extent to which man was exempted from an individualist, physical struggle. Yet Victorian society celebrated individualism . . . --David A. Stack, 2003. In his The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859-1914 (New Clarion Press): 28.

      Historians of science have raised the suggestion that Wallace's version of natural selection was not quite so Darwinian as Darwin himself believed. Wallace persistently used the word 'variety' as the level of entity at which natural selection acts. You heard an example in the long passage I have just read out. And some have suggested that Wallace, unlike Darwin who clearly saw selection as choosing among individuals, was proposing what modern theorists rightly denigrate as 'group selection'. This would be true if, by 'varieties', Wallace meant geographically separated groups or races of individuals. At first I wondered about this myself. But I believe a careful reading of Wallace's paper rules it out. I think that by 'variety' Wallace meant what we would nowadays call 'genetic type', even what a modern writer might mean by a gene. I think that, to Wallace in this paper, variety meant not local race of eagles, for example, but 'that set of individual eagles whose talons were hereditarily sharper than usual.' . . . --Richard Dawkins, October 2002. The Linnean 18(4): 20.

      . . . Modern Wallaceans accept that peacocks' tails and similar bright organs are advertisements to females. But they want the males to be advertising genuine quality. A male with bright coloured tail feathers is showing that he is a high quality male . . . The late W. D. Hamilton, of Oxford University, was a prime example of a Wallacean in this sense. He believed that sexually selected ornaments were badges of good health, selected for their capacity to advertise the health of a male--bad health as well as good. One way to express Hamilton's Wallacean idea is to say that selection favours females who become skilled veterinary diagnosticians. At the same time, selection favours males who make it easy for them by, in effect, growing the equivalent of conspicuous thermometers and blood-pressure metres. The long tail of a Bird of Paradise, for Hamilton, is an adaptation to make it easy for females to diagnose the male's health, good or bad. An example of a good general diagnostic is a susceptibility to diarrhoea. A long dirty tail is a give-away of ill-health. A long clean tail is the opposite. The longer the tail, the more unmistakeable the badge of health, whether good health or poor . . . --Richard Dawkins, October 2002. The Linnean 18(4): 22-23.

      . . . A significant positive correlation between the proportion of range area above 100 m and total range size for each species is used to suggest that past sea-level rises may explain smaller range sizes in low-lying regions and that riverine barriers have been important in shaping the current distribution of C. cleonus group species . . . Unfortunately, it is not clear exactly how important rivers have been or continue to be in the current distribution of C. cleonus group species because some of the central and lower Amazonian material is historical and the label data probably generalized; in such cases, uncertainty remains as to which bank specimens were really collected from, especially with the possibility of subsequent shifts in river course. Having said this, several lines of evidence do suggest that rivers have been influential in shaping the current distributions of C. cleonus group species . . . --Jason P. W. Hall & Donald J. Harvey, July 2002. Evolution 56(7): 1489, 1493-1494.

      Some cosmologists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies, have formed the opinion that, in the words of Fred Hoyle, "the universe is a put-up job". They are expressing their marvel that the values of its constants and the forms of its laws are just those which allow such phenomena as the formation of planets, complex chemistry, life and intelligence. Some of them--including Paul Davies--go further than this. They argue that the laws of the universe were somehow legislated with purpose so that planets, chemistry and life could develop . . . Wallace, Hoyle, Dyson and others have made the point that even slight changes in some values of fundamental or cosmological constants, or even in the laws of physics themselves, would imply a universe in which life as we know it would not exist. Here are a few examples: If the Universe were much less dense, then stars and planets might not form. If the universe were much more dense, then it would have stopped expanding and contracted back into a hot big crunch long ago, possibly before any supernovae had had time to generate the elements needed for life. What if the laws of physics were different? If the strong nuclear force were much weaker than it is, then the electrostatic repulsion between protons would prevent the formation of large nuclei--hydrogen might be the only element. If gravity were different, or if the geometry of space-time were different, then stars might not form or planets might not have stable orbits . . . --Joe Wolfe, http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/danish.html (accessed 3 March 2002).

      The check that 'human nature' placed upon hopes of social improvement is illustrated by Malthusianism. This was popularly conceived of as an argument about the limits human nature--in particular the impulse to procreation--placed upon progress. Thus the transformation sought by Owen in social relations was predicated upon the malleability and educability of the individual. Human nature can be improved beyond the limits set by present-day social relations, and education and environmental reform both play a role in this. Did these ideas influence Wallace's views on nature? In one important respect they did. Wallace's views on instinct and its role in animal and human behaviour are different from those of Darwin and contradict much of what passed for Darwinian psychology after the publication of the Origin. When Wallace talks about instinct in nature, whilst not denying its existence, he tends to discount the role of preformed, inherited behaviour and to talk up the notion of learning. Moreover, he returns throughout his life to the same proposition: the role of instinctive behaviour is small, that of learning relatively greater . . . --Greta Jones, March 2002. British Journal for the History of Science 35(1): 81.

      . . . Wallace saw many instances of mismatch between existing faculties and the environment. The natural world, like the social, was a site of dissonance between wants and the environment. The wants were relatively fixed points--the need for food and so on--but the behavioural responses to these were malleable. He noted a species of bird which in Africa and India 'eat only insects' whilst those in South America 'in great measure live upon fruits which they capture on the wing as they do insects. There is no difference in their structure but being in different countries surrounded by different circumstances they are led to adopt different habits'. In downgrading instinct Wallace introduced the idea there was always space for change, a potential for specialization or variability in behaviour even among individuals from the same species. Nature was not filled up with all that was possible for its full exploitation. The potential spaces in it were not necessarily occupied nor all the forms of behaviour found in natural organisms perfectly matched to their environment. Wallace constantly repeated this. In the case of the anatomy of birds wants and habits were limited by their structure, not structure by wants and habits, but even with the same structure behaviour differed. There is always room for modification and change. This contributes to the unsettled and evolving natural world . . . --Greta Jones, March 2002. British Journal for the History of Science 35(1): 83.

      . . .The difference in approach between Darwin's and Wallace's views on population is discernible in their respective contributions to the Linnean Society in 1858. Darwin introduces Malthus almost immediately and proceeds to litter his text with phrases and analogies from the Essay on Population. For Darwin, nature at war is 'the doctrine of Malthus applied in most cases with tenfold force'. Along with the struggle for mates introduced in his closing paragraphs, death is a major selective factor and death is the consequence of this 'enormous multiplying power'. In contrast Wallace begins with the question of varieties and the instability of species. He does not mention Malthus in his paper but he does quickly turn to the 'struggle for existence' and to population. However, in Wallace's hands the force of population increase loses that all-encompassing ontological character it displays in Darwin's first public exegesis of his theory. Malthus is certainly present in Wallace's paper but it is Malthus read by an Owenite . . . --Greta Jones, March 2002. British Journal for the History of Science 35(1): 93.

     Selection in favour of individuals that resemble the background has been invoked as the probable cause of cryptic coloration in prey species for over a century and there have been numerous demonstrations that predators preferentially feed on more conspicuous prey items. Our study is, however, the only work other than Endler's research on colour-pattern selection in guppies that has shown significant directional selection by predators over multiple successive prey generations when compared with a non-select control . . . --Alan B. Bond & Alan C. Kamil, February 2002. Nature 415(6872): 612.

      The evolutionism of Darwin (1859) and Wallace (1875) is radically different from all previous lines of thought in that it uses the notion of contingency applied to living beings. Francois Jacob writing about this issue stated: "with the theory of evolution, as with statistical thermodynamics, the notion of contingency became established in the very heart of nature. Since Newton (1934), physics had been based on a rigid determinism, which extended to all sciences. Evolutionary theory and statistical thermodynamics completely transformed the way of looking at nature, mainly because they brought together and gave the same status of related and measurable quantities to order and chance--two concepts which until then had been incompatible." . . . --Bernardo Dubvrovsky, January 2002. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry 26(1): 2.

      The theories he worked out during and after his travels in the East Indies dwelled essentially on spatial relationships, the reason to consider Wallace as being, fundamentally, a geographer. Consequently, geographical information was instrumental for Wallace both for his biogeographical as well as evolutionary contributions to biology. In several seminal papers and books he developed innovations in the historical reconstructions of faunas and, thus, implemented zoological geography as a biological discipline within the framework of evolutionary theory. It is, as Smith correctly stated, usually little appreciated how strongly natural processes are constrained by the necessity of having to take place in a three-dimensional space, and Wallace's skill at spatial analysis is best illustrated by his contribution to the biogeography of the Australasian region . . . --Matthias Glaubrecht, 2002. Verhandlungen zur Geschichte und Theorie der Biologie 9(2): 265.

      From Darwin's publication of Origin of Species until Wallace's publication of his autobiography in 1905, Wallace was perhaps the most influential critic of the idea that the bright coloration of animals could be the outcome of female mate choice. Wallace saw no reason to invoke what to him was an unsubstantiated assumption that females of non-human animals were capable of and inclined to discriminate among males based on the quality of their ornaments (Wallace 1878, 1889). Instead, Wallace searched for explanations of colorful plumage that would allow such traits to be understood as utilitarian, not ornamental and extravagant. In his studies of bird coloration, Wallace did not focus exclusively or even primarily on gaudy plumages. Rather Wallace focused much of his research on the subtle differences among species and individuals in explicitly non-ornamental traits like the buff, brown, gray, and green plumage of birds (Wallace 1878, 1889) . . . --Geoffrey E. Hill, 2002. In his A Red Bird in a Brown Bag: The Function and Evolution of Colorful Plumage in the House Finch (Oxford University Press): 7.

      . . . Far more convincingly than Darwin, Wallace showed how most plumage coloration supported the theory of evolution by natural selection. Most species, most of the time, are colored in ways that appear to enhance their survival and fecundity. Wallace provided an explanation for sexual dichromatism and drab female plumage that stands today as a triumph of the power of the comparative method in addressing evolutionary questions. Through his knowledge of the nesting biology of birds, Wallace showed that species with exposed nests in which the female alone incubates almost invariably have drab female plumage whether the male is colorful or not. Retesting and confirmation of this idea have only lately occurred. Wallace also was the first to set forth the idea that colorful plumage functions as a signal of species recognition. This became the most widespread explanation for colorful plumage for over seventy years, and it remains a too-often-ignored hypothesis in modern treatments of plumage coloration. Wallace also foreshadowed the now popular and well-supported idea that ornamental plumage could serve as a reliable signal of condition in his discussions of vital energy (Wallace 1878, 1889) . . . --Geoffrey E. Hill, 2002. In his A Red Bird in a Brown Bag: The Function and Evolution of Colorful Plumage in the House Finch (Oxford University Press): 10.

      Wallace never seems to have suffered from the abstract doctrine of Philosophical Necessity. Charting his intellectual progress toward science, he notes that Robert Owen provided his introduction to "advanced views." Owen's "fundamental principle, on which all his teaching and all his practice were founded, was that the character of every individual is formed for and not by himself, first by heredity . . . and second by environment." Here, as with Martineau, Mill, Galton, and Darwin, philosophy intersects moral vocation, for this view requires restructuring the moral and legal system, which is based on the view that "all men could be good if they liked." In a determinist system, people cannot be "deterred from future aggression" unless the conditions in which they develop are changed. Hence Owen's "successful" New Lanark. For Wallace, implicitly, the vocation of science and, one might hazard, the nature of his theory, grow from this insight into hereditary and environmental determinism . . . --George Levine, 2002. In his Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press): 110.

      . . . While Wallace defers to chance in amusing ways and exhibits a Darwinian modesty in relation to his career, he sees a pattern of happy accident that implies something other than mere material causation. For himself, he can argue that: "many of the conditions and circumstances that constitute our environment, though at the time they may seem unfortunate or even unjust, yet are often more truly beneficial than those which we should consider more favourable. Sometimes they only aid in the formation of character; sometimes they also lead to action which gives scope for the use of what might have been dormant or unused faculties (as, I think has occurred in my own case)." But often, he says, those circumstances are not favorable, and if they consistently lead to bad consequences, "the system of society" is at fault. Wallace's willingness to accept inconsistency, to refuse the totalizations of a system making, marks his autobiography and his scientific life, and surely was consistent with--either as cause or effect--his own strong leanings toward socialism . . . --George Levine, 2002. In his Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (University of Chicago Press): 111.

      Abstract: An annotated facsimile of those pages of Alfred Russel Wallace's notebook recording his consignments from the Malay Archipelago to his London agent, Samuel Stevens, is provided. Records of individual consignments are linked with the stages of Wallace's and Charles Allen's itineraries to which they relate and are amplified from data provided by Wallace elsewhere; wherever possible, dates and places of the despatch of consignments and of the dates of their receipt in London are noted; and the dates of material becoming available for study are established, chiefly from British Museum accessions registers. It is intended that this should provide readier access to scattered collection data and should in particular assist in determining what specimens may properly be regarded as types or syntypes of the many taxa described by numerous contemporary authors from Wallace's material . . . --Daniel B. Baker, December 2001. Zoologische Mededelingen 75(16-25): 251.

      It was precisely this latter characteristic, and the way in which Wallace's radical positions intertwined--his faith that some kind of willpower or spirit, lying outside or beyond natural selection, was responsible for moral evolution in the human species; his rejection of the more crude, social Darwinian deductions from biological theory; and his attack on the wastage of nature caused by rampant industrialism--that make him a valuable exponent of both the potentialities and the limitations of evolutionism as a philosophy. I am particularly interested here, of course, in Wallace as a tropicalist, especially the concern he articulated for the despoliation of tropical nature, a theme that emerged in his mature consideration of his tropical experiences and which, though connected to the new evolutionary outlook, was not a necessary outcome of it (Darwin, for example, did not share Wallace's concerns about the consequences of tropical destruction). This is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Wallace's multifaceted contributions (most histories of environmentalism make no mention of him). In this chapter, then, I approach Wallace as arguably the most interesting student of tropical nature in the second half of the nineteenth century, a writer of popular natural-history books who was also a philosopher of nature, someone whose evolving representations of tropical nature take us into the post-Humboldtian, evolutionary era, and into the beginnings of the ecological era properly speaking . . . --Nancy Leys Stepan, 2001. In her Picturing Tropical Nature (Cornell University Press): 59.

      . . . It was in the tropics, especially the islands of the East Indies, that Wallace first became aware of the ambiguities of the human presence in nature, the fragility of the evolutionary balance and the threat posed to it by overweening domination for purposes of commerce and gain. In his mature writings, he expressed the ideas that nature had not, in fact, been created just for human appreciation or consumption; that plants, animals and human beings formed a network of mutual interdependence; and that it was Europeans' actions that had the most profoundly negative effects on nature and culture, effects which could not be repaired easily . . . --Nancy Leys Stepan, 2001. In her Picturing Tropical Nature (Cornell University Press): 80.

      Wallace's Line, essentially based on information about birds and larger mammals, with later attempts to delimit the Oriental from the Australian realm, has had enormous heuristic value and may even have triggered much of the biogeographic research which has been carried out in the region. Even today, as exemplified by the conference from which this volume arose, interest in the Wallacean region persists and may even have increased. With the availability of new data in geology and new methods, in particular for phylogeny reconstruction and for the measurement of genetic distinctiveness, the area has become even more interesting for biogeographers . . . --W. R. Erdelen, 2001. In Ian Metcalfe et al., eds., Faunal and Floral Migrations and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (A. A. Balkema Publishers): 129.

      . . . there was undeniably an 'individualist' accent to Wallace's program of interventionist egalitarianism. Wallace was not a collectivist. His socialism was never an attraction to a great and organising state. "Socialism" was to Wallace 'the use by everyone of his faculties for the common good, and the voluntary organisation of labour for the equal benefit of all' (Wallace, 1905). The use of the word 'voluntary' in his definition of socialism is surely significant. Under Wallace's socialism industry would be run by enterprises composed of capital-owning workers. Land nationalisation would not amount to a system of state farms or agricultural collectives. Rather, the state would be the sole owner of land, and would rent out its land to a throng of individual tenants . . . --William Coleman, 2001. In John Laurent & John Nightingale, eds., Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics (Edward Elgar): 42.

      . . . The previous sections have used the case of Alfred Russel Wallace to scrutinise the proposition that natural selection was a projection onto nature of a political economy apologetic for a dominant class interest. This proposition is just one manifestation of a general and familiar vision of science . . . Alfred Wallace's scientific achievement, we have argued, makes for a jarring disconfirmation of this theory. Rather than seeking to inscribe norms justifying the dominance of one class, one race, one genera, Wallace sought to overturn such conventional dominance: of the wealthy, of the white race and (we may add here) of men. And, rather than being 'organically connected' to science's ruling elite, few could be less connected than Wallace to the elite and its social formations . . . --William Coleman, 2001. In John Laurent & John Nightingale, eds., Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics (Edward Elgar): 44.

      Our results find that Wallace's Line is supported by the data he collected in the field and suggest that Wallace's Line does indeed demarcate a major faunal break. These results are in keeping with modern geological evidence on the origins of the region, and hence with Wallace's original contention. Wallace's data conform with his suggestion that the modern distribution of species reflects the geological history of the land masses. Modern geological knowledge indicates that the islands west of Wallace's Line comprised the single land mass of Sundaland connected to mainland Asia until the Eocene. Similarly, many islands on the Sahul shelf were also connected to New Guinea/Australia. The central islands, however, have a far more complex and isolated history. Sulawesi, for example, seems to be an amalgam of a number of different islands with different biogeographic origins. Similarly, the northern Moluccan islands seem to have been very recent arrivals for the eastern Pacific Arc which may have had closer contact with Australia and New Guinea than their present location suggests . . . --D. Clode & R. O'Brien, 2001. In Ian Metcalfe et al., eds., Faunal and Floral Migrations and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (A. A. Balkema Publishers): 118.

    . . . With the complex geological history of this region increasingly being understood, we now stand a far better chance of assessing Wallace's real legacy--the extent to which species distributions are limited by underlying geological history. This is a far more interesting question than arguing over the placement of arbitrary and illustrative lines. Different taxonomic groups (with different histories and different dispersal abilities) will undoubtedly differ in the extent to which they adhere to different biogeographic boundaries (as foreshadowed in Wallace, 1877) including Wallace's Line. Such variations merely reflect our expanding knowledge of both the species and the effect their geographical history has had on them . . . --D. Clode & R. O'Brien, 2001. In Ian Metcalfe et al., eds., Faunal and Floral Migrations and Evolution in SE Asia-Australia (A. A. Balkema Publishers): 119.

      The Amazonian tropical rainforest harbors a species diversity that is vastly disproportionate to its geographic area. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to account for this, tending to emphasize aspects of the maintenance or origins of the megadiversity. The oldest such hypothesis has its roots in the works of Alfred Russel Wallace, who observed that the ranges of some closely related neotropical vertebrate species (primates, birds) abut at major rivers. Indeed, Wallace defined distinct areas within South America, bounded by major Amazonian rivers like the Negro, Madeira, and Amazon, which differed in species composition of communities. These and similar observations have prompted the suggestion that lowland Amazonian rivers, of which there are many, may function as effective barriers to the dispersal of organisms. This may have a variety of consequences for patterns of species diversity on the Amazonian landscape. First, major Amazonian rivers may have played a significant role in species generation by impeding gene flow between populations with the eventual evolution of sister species on opposite banks. Second the expansion of species from their centers of origin may be halted by the presence of large watercourses; therefore, they may be restricted to only one bank. Finally, compared with a species distributed across landscapes without barriers, the probability of subsequent recolonization of a species that has gone locally extinct on one bank will be lower because immigration from the opposite bank is less likely . . . All of these factors might be expected to accentuate differences in species composition of opposite-bank communities . . . --Claude Gascon et al., 5 December 2000. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97(25): 13672.

      Whether the great rivers of Amazonia have something to do with species origins or are simply biogeographic sutures, the biotas of opposite banks ought to differ if the riverine barrier hypothesis is correct. Characteristically, in Wallace's monkey paper, he not only presented his data on primate distributions in relation to major rivers in the Amazon basin, but also suggested a testable, quantitative hypothesis: that the composition of species assemblages would differ in relation to the width of the river, the difference thus increasing from headwaters toward the mouth . . . --Robert K. Colwell, 5 December 2000. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97(25): 13470.

      The part that natural selection plays in the origin of species has long been debated. It is easy to see that if two populations are kept separate--by mountains or ocean, for example--they will eventually become so different that they can no longer interbreed successfully. Their differences may have evolved by natural selection, but their reproductive isolation is merely a side effect of changes that emerged for other reasons. This view seems unsatisfactory to those who emphasize the positive aspect of selection in evolution. Both Alfred Russel Wallace and Theodosius Dobzhansky argued that natural selection would reinforce reproductive barriers between diverging populations. There has been little evidence, however, that selection has in fact contributed directly to the formation of new species (speciation) in this way. Reports by Higgie et al. and Hendry et al., on pages 519 and 516 of this issue, provide examples from fruit fly and sockeye salmon populations showing that selection can produce the kind of isolation that separates species in the wild, and moreover, that it can do so within a very short time (a dozen or so generations) . . . --Nick Barton, 20 October 2000. Science 290(5491): 462.

      What is less explicable is why the differences between Wallace and Darwin over the origin of distributional patterns have been confounded. Apart from a single chapter in The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote little on biogeography, yet his views on the efficacy of dispersal dominated biogeographical theory until relatively recently. I think the answer lies in Wallace being too far ahead of his time. I have often wondered what Wallace would have thought about modern geological evidence concerning the origin of Indonesia, and I am convinced it would have given him the key to understanding the distributional patterns he described in Malay Archipelago. The problem, of course, was that this evidence was not available until a century later. Given the lack of credible alternative explanations and the pressure from Darwin to conform to accepted ideas, Wallace was unable to develop his own theory fully. Over time his original thoughts were lost and his name became associated with Darwin's idea of dispersal. A reappraisal of Wallace's work on its own terms seems long overdue and would be a fitting millennial tribute to an outstanding scientist . . . --B. Michaux, January 2000. Journal of Biogeography 27(1): 221-222.

      . . . Florence Clemens was the first to show how Conrad made use of Wallace's work in his fiction. She demonstrated how, in Lord Jim, Conrad used Wallace's account of his visit to the Rajah of Goa as the basis of his description of Doramin's household; how he used Wallace's account of his friend, Mr. Mesman, in describing Stein; how he drew on Wallace's own experiences for his presentation of Stein's activities as a naturalist. She argued that Conrad used The Malay Archipelago, in particular, 'for backgrounds with which he was unfamiliar'. Conrad, for example, had never visited Bali or Timor: 'all the information which Dain Maroola of Almayer's Folly gave Nina Almayer about his country on Bali could have been gleaned' from Wallace; similarly, 'all that is told in Victory of the Timor scene and government' in the account of Morrison's experiences in Delli derives from Wallace also. The Malay Archipelago was acknowledged by Conrad as one of the sources for his Malay fiction . . . --Robert Hampson, 2000. In his Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (Palgrave): 73.

      The lowland forests of the Amazon Basin contain a disproportionately large fraction of global species diversity. A number of vicariant speciation mechanisms have been presented to explain this high diversity. These hypotheses share the idea that historical and geographically pervasive barriers to gene flow have facilitated speciation in allopatry across much of Amazonia, but obviously differ with respect to the identity, location and duration of these barriers. The oldest of these, the riverine barrier hypothesis, derives from observations of animal distributions made by Wallace (1849, 1876). It posits a role for major Amazonian water courses in impeding gene flow between populations on opposite banks. The predictions for this hypothesis include that (i) many recently evolved sister taxa occupy opposite banks of large rivers, (ii) levels of genetic differentiation between populations on opposite river banks increases with increasing river width and flow rate and (iii) taxa of the upland terra firme forest show higher levels of differentiation across rivers than taxa of the seasonally flooded varzea forests found adjacent to the river. This last prediction assumes that the strength of the barrier to gene flow is greater for exclusively terra firme species because it consists of both the river itself plus the varzea forests of both river banks . . . --S. C. Lougheed et al., September 1999. Proceedings of The Royal Society of London B 266: 1829.

      . . .the "pan-selectionist" view that variation is potentially available in all directions from any given phyletic starting-point, and that selection determines which subset of variants prevails. The alternative is the "developmental constraint" view that many of the gaps we observe between different morphologies do not arise from the non-adaptiveness of the absent forms but rather from the difficulty of making them through an ontogenetic process. The pan-selectionist view can be traced back to Wallace (1870), who considered variation to be omnipresent and available in all phenotypic directions imaginable, apparently without even a quantitative bias in any direction. He refers to "Universal variability--small in amount but in every direction", and Mayo (1983) boldly states that "The major constraint on natural selection as an agent of change is natural selection as a stabilizing force", apparently relegating any kind of developmental constraint to a minor role at best . . . --Wallace Arthur & Malcolm Farrow, June 1999. Journal of Theoretical Biology 200: 183-184.

      Under Wallace's scheme, the event that concerns Romanes--the initiation of the speciation process--already has taken place. Wallace deals with events subsequent to the process of reproductive isolation. The idea that the infertility he notes might relate to what Romanes proposed does not occur to Wallace. In a separate section of his book he describes physiological selection as "another form of infertility," and then proceeds to attack the theory . . . --Donald R. Forsdyke, Spring 1999. Queen's Quarterly 106(1): 121.

      Wallace's first essay on the origin of the colour sense was published simultaneously with, but independently of, Gladstone's paper. He had presented a possible evolutionary route for animal colour vision, starting with perception of degrees of brightness, ending with perception of colours according to wave length. In his view, green and blue would have been the first colours to which the eye became specially adapted, in accord with their universal presence in foliage and sky, as well as their soothing influence. Reds, yellows and violets would follow, as present in small amounts, offering great contrast, and useful to animals hunting for food and mates. This essay was revised and republished a year later, with specific response to Gladstone (and through him, to Magnus and Geiger). 'These curious facts' wrote Wallace, with regard to Gladstone's Homeric data, 'can not, however, be held to prove so recent an origin for colour-sensations as they would at first sight appear to do'. He pictured brightly coloured structures as having evolved in response to an already present and well-developed ability of animals, especially birds, to see colour, long before the arrival of man. Wallace concluded that 'Man's perception of colour in the time of Homer was little if any inferior to what it is now . . . owing to a variety of causes, no precise nomenclature of colours had become established . . . --Elizabeth Henry Bellmer, 1 January 1999. Annals of Science 56(1): 38.

      As the new century ripened and imperialist rivalries increased, Wallace became convinced that a vast civilizational crisis was at hand and that the very survival of the human species demanded the rapid overthrow of capitalism. A few months before his death in 1913, he wrote (The Revolt of Democracy), "There must be no further compromise, no mere talking. To allow the present state of things to continue is a crime against humanity." How ironic to recall his warnings today when billionaire arsonists have set almost the entirety of Wallace's Malay Archipelago ablaze with their greed . . . --Mike Davis, March 1998. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 9(1): 77.

      Wallace's major contribution to the literature of reform is his corrosive criticism of nineteenth-century society, through which he offered a human vision of social reformation. He advocated recognizing racial equality, nationalizing land, giving women equal opportunity for education and employment, decreasing military expenditure, and saving the environment. His friend James Marchant wrote in Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (1916) that "his greatest ambition was to improve the cruel conditions under which thousands of his fellow-creatures suffered and died, and to make their lives sweeter and happier." . . . --Charles Blinderman, 1998. Alfred Russel Wallace. In Gary Kelly & Edd Applegate, eds., British Reform Writers, 1832-1914 (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 190; Gale Research): 326-327.

      . . . With other socialists Wallace believed that neither genetic endowment nor divine prescription was responsible for the behavior of men and women, that instead the prime agent of social discord was bad government. He argued that the state ought to provide equality of opportunity and that no one should get a head start through inheritance: "To secure equality of opportunity there must be no inequality of initial wealth. To allow one child to be born a millionaire and another a pauper is a crime against humanity." Andrew Carnegie would later share this view on the inheritance of wealth. Wallace further argued that the state ought to own and manage railways and pay the doctors. He envisioned a Ministry of Public Health, its doctors acting as servants of the state, that is, of people--and he added, perhaps mischievously, "they should be paid according as they keep people well and not ill." . . . --Charles Blinderman, 1998. Alfred Russel Wallace. In Gary Kelly & Edd Applegate, eds., British Reform Writers, 1832-1914 (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 190; Gale Research): 330.

      It is possible that the initial condition in the pheasant was plumage monomorphism, with the cryptic female-type plumage subsequently having evolved under natural selection from predators. In fact, this hypothesis, formerly defended by Wallace (1889), is generally applicable to those birds, like pheasants, with a polygynous mating system without male parental care, that nest on the ground in open habitats, and are sexually dimorphic in plumage throughout the year. Also, it has not yet been proven that maintaining a colourful and bright plumage is costly, nor that it is a handicap for survival . . . --Concha Mateos & Juan Carranza, November 1997. Animal Behaviour 54(5): 1211.

      The approach taken by Gregorius for modelling and analyzing the population genetic basis of Wallace's theory of speciation will be extended to allow analysis of the opposite case, where speciation is prevented by the reinforcement of genetic coherence. In this approach, a mutant gene modifies the current mating preferences without implying any advantage or disadvantage in fitness (including mating success). The latter assumption is indispensable in order to avoid confusion of the secondary effects of mating systems on fitness with their primary recombinational effects. It also reduces the analytical problems resulting from having to disentangle effects of fitness and mating preference on the evolution of mating behaviour . . . --Wilfried Steiner & Hans-Rolf Gregorius, November 1997. BioSystems 43(2): 139.

      In 1881 Wallace took the lead. He formed The Land Nationalization Society on his own lines, with himself as President. In Land Nationalization (1882) he laid out his program. The state was to assume title to all land. To meet a conservative debating ploy, he would compensate present landowners. However, he ingeniously minimized the amount in a manner that tells us he knew the nuts and bolts of his subject. Compensation was to be an annuity limited to the duration of lives in being. It was to be based only on the net income actually being derived from the land before nationalization--i.e. not from the highest and best use, and not from future higher uses. All men and women (Wallace, like Mill, was also a feminist) could bid to lease parcels from the state for actual use. In the socio-biological terms in which he thought, this would consummate the natural relation of man to nature. It would also let men alternate between industry and agriculture as Wallace, a loving gardener, himself did. Wallace's Land Nationalization was individualist, not collectivist. Individual lessees were to have secure tenure, and tenant-rights to improvements. Rents to the state would be used, not to engross the state, but to obviate taxes. These rents would be based on the assessed "inherent value" of land, dependent only on natural and social conditions. As a surveyor and a biogeographer, Wallace readily distinguished "inherent value" from man's improvements to land, which he saw as transitory. Tax assessors in most American