Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist who, while conducting fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago, independently arrived at a theory of evolution by natural selection. His 1858 manuscript on the subject, sent to Charles Darwin, prompted the joint Darwin-Wallace paper presented to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, before either man had separately published on the subject. Darwin's On the Origin of Species followed in 1859 and became the work chiefly credited with establishing the theory, but Wallace's independent discovery is a genuine, well-documented instance of simultaneous discovery in the history of science. Wallace also made major contributions to biogeography, including the boundary between Asian and Australian faunal regions now called the Wallace Line.