Alfred Russel Wallace had the
most influence over Darwin’s development of his Natural selection theory because
Wallace and Darwin were working at the same theory and they both came up with
the same conclusion. Wallace was one of the scientists who came up with the
conclusion of Natural selection, but he did not get the credit for it because Darwin
published his theory before him.
Alfred Russel Wallace was born in the poor family, therefore
he has to work hard to go around the world and work on his theories. He is best
known for independently considering the theory of evolution through natural
selection. Wallace’s paper on the natural selection was jointly published with
some of the Charles Darwin’s writings. Later, Wallace’s paper prompted Darwin
to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Wallace is also known as
a “father of biogeography” because he helped others by discovering a hypothesis
on how natural selection produce new biological species.
From the bullet point, the most directly affected by
Darwin’s work was “If the environment
changes, the traits that are helpful or adaptive to that environment will be
different.” He concludes that the
individuals with heritable traits better suited to the environment will
survive. For example, imagine a population of green and brown color beetles.
There are more brown beetles and few green beetles. Day by day, green beetles
are dying, so the chances are that the surviving brown beetles are going to
have brown baby beetles because this trait has a genetic basis. The end result
gave us all the population in brown beetles.
I think
Darwin could not have developed his theory of natural selection without the
influence and ideas of Wallace because Wallace encouraged him to publish his
theory of Natural selection where he gets his first and big success. Wallace sent letters to Darwin to show him
the progress of theory of natural selection. Darwin got scared that Wallace and
he came up with the same conclusion. To get full credit, Darwin published his
theory before Wallace. But Wallace got the title of co-founder of the theory of
Natural selection.
Before
Darwin published “The Origin of Species,” the attitude of Catholic Church during
that time was impartial. After the “The Origin of Species” was
published, the attitude from the church was negative. Darwin went against the
religion by going against the idea of everything was created by God. During
this time, Darwin had some problem to published his book, but he was scared of
Wallace will get all the credit of the theory of natural selection. Therefore,
indirectly Wallace influence him to publish his book “On the Origin of Species.”
http://darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/index.php?page_id=d8
