Infinite Tropics : An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology

Alfred Russel Wallace; Andrew Berry; Stephen Jay Gould
VERSO
 9781859844786
1-85984-478-2

Alfred Russel Wallace's reputation has been based on the fact that, at age thirty-five and stricken with malaria in the Moluccan Islands, he stumbled independently upon on the theory of natural selection..

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Andrew Berry's anthology rescue's Wallace's legacy, showing Wallace to be far more than just the co-discoverer of natural selection. Wallace was a brilliant and wide-ranging scientist, a passionate social reformer and a gifted writer. The eloquence that has made his The Malay Archipelago a classic of travel writing is a prominent feature too of his extraordinarily forward-thinking writing on socialism, imperialism and pacifism. Wallace's opinions on women's suffrage, on land reform, on the roles of the church and aristocracy in a parliamentary democracy, on publicly funded education--to name a few of the issues he addressed--remain as fresh and as topical today as they were when they were written.