Time to Care More about Wallace

Most of us know Alfred Russel Wallace as the ‘co-inventor’ of the process of natural selection, but not much more. However, as this edited volume shows he was so much more than that. He was a self-taught scientist who wrote no less than 22 books and published about 1000 articles in his lifetime. Needless to say, one book cannot cover all of his contributions, but this edited volume is a very good start. Based on his years of field observations while collecting in South America and Southeast Asia, he came up with ideas that hold even today and are widely studied, such as aposematism, mimicry, sexual selection including a handicap hypothesis, different modes of speciation, meta-population dynamics, island biogeography, evolutionary biogeography, and taxon cycles to mention a few. Many of his hypotheses and deductions predate well-known scientists such as Zahavi [ 1 Zahavi A. Zahavi A. The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. Oxford University Press, 1997 Google Scholar ], MacArthur and Wilson [ 2 MacArthur R.H. Wilson E.O. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press, 1967 Google Scholar ], and Mayr [ 3 Mayr E. Systematics and the Origin of Species. Columbia University Press, 1942 Google Scholar ] by almost a century. In short, he was an evolutionary ecologist in the very modern sense. Based on this alone he needs far more credit and reading than currently is the case and every evolutionary biologist with an interest in the history of their science should pay far more attention to Wallace. This book with its twelve chapters provides a very good introduction to a complex and brilliant scientist who is too neglected in our days.