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Alfred Russel Wallace: 3 ideas worth knowing

3 ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• Two men independently discovered evolution, and shared the announcement

  Alfred Russel Wallace, working in Indonesia, mailed Charles Darwin an essay describing natural selection — the same theory Darwin had quietly developed over twenty years. Rather th…

  — Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties

• A narrow strait splits Asian and Australian wildlife

  Crossing the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace noticed the animals change abruptly: tigers, monkeys and woodpeckers to the west, cockatoos and…

  — Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago

• An invisible line through Indonesia splits Asian and Australian animals

  While mapping species across the Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace noticed that islands only tens of kilometers apart had starkly different wildlife -- tigers and monkeys to…

  — Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago

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