The Ideas of Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin Theory

It was years later that Charles Darwin was finally prompted to tell the world about his work that had been hidden for so long. This event could not have taken place without the amazing works of a man named Alfred Wallace in which chapter 2 of Into the Jungle describes his challenges and observations he made that generated his ideas on species of animals. Wallace’s background on his voyages was that which had more disadvantages starting with contracting yellow fever, which made him eager to get back to England.

However, he would not be going back alone, he had many live animals which included insects, monkeys and other species that he collected from the Amazon. The real misfortune started when his voyage on the boat named Helen would come to an end as it went up in flames, signifying all his work would also perish. Despite this event, it did not wither his spirit of going back out into the world and collect new species. Wallace’s new destination would be The Malay Archipelago islands which he arrived to in 1854.

In his new destination, he witnessed many new insects and larger animals such as monkeys and birds. Collecting such animals came with the hardship of dealing with tigers and the native people in Singapore. Yet, this did not yield his observations as he eventually came into contact with the diversity of butterflies he found on one of the islands he went to. These butterflies would cause Wallace to present a new law on species that was similar to Darwin’s in which new species came from an old ancestor. Wallace named this new law the Sarawak Law, which suggested the idea that animals evolved due to the changes on earth. He did not propose this law without the evidence of his observations through the butterflies and many other species. With this in mind, Wallace published a paper on this idea, but to no recognition, it wasn’t noticed. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until he went on an unsuspected detour that he noticed that between the western and eastern islands there was a big noticeable difference in the species of birds and mammals. This observation led him again to the Sarawak Law that concluded that all the animals in the western islands would be similar due to once all those islands being connected at some point in history while all the eastern islands were also once connected.

Therefore, the western and eastern islands, even if the physical conditions were similar in the species inhabiting the island would be drastically different since new species were created to adapt to the environment. His final idea for this problem would be survival of the fittest, which he created a paper for and sent to Darwin. Wallace’s ideas would finally be published surprising next to Darwin’s theory. Although Darwin received most of the recognition it was one of Wallace’s goals to be accepted into the society of scientist that contained this forward thinking.