July 11th, 2017

Alfred Russel Wallace was a naturalist who, in the 1850s, came up with the idea of Evolution through Natural Selection independent of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin and Wallace jointly published their findings in 1958, the two were quite different. While Darwin came from wealth, Wallace spent much of his life with little money. He didn't seem to care much for holding himself to standards of etiquette, and also pursued atypical theories without regard to loss-of-face amongst the scientific community. Wallace once took up a £500 wager that he could prove a flat-earth proponent wrong, which he did quite convincingly with the Bedford Level experiment. The experiment took advantage of a long stretch of uninterrupted calm water in Norfolk, called the Old Bedford Level. A boat with a flag in the rear sailed off into the distance, and an observer with a telescope observed the flag disappearing below the horizon. Wallace was declared the winner of the wager by a team of arbitrators, however the man who had made the wager accused Wallace of having cheated and sued him. Although Wallace won the case, he never saw the money, and in fact came out having lost money on the court fees. This aside, Wallace lived a good and long life, dying in 1913 at the age of 90, and after having traveled the world and fed many of his curiosities. Unlike Darwin, who died in 1882, Wallace also lived long enough to see Mendel's Theory of Inheritance begin to take root - a theory that would lay the foundation upon which Natural Selection operated.

-E

Note: I will be away for the next two months, largely without internet, and will therefore be taking a break. Updates will resume in September.