Alfred Russel Wallace O.M., F.R.S. (Born January 8, 1823 - died 7 November 1913 at age 90 years) is known as a naturalist, explorer, wanderer, anthropologists and biologists from the United Kingdom. He is famous as the man who proposes a theory of natural selection, which later makes Charles Darwin even more famous than he is with his own theory. He did a lot of field research, which for the first time carried out in the Amazon river in 1846 when he was aged 23 years and later in the archipelago.


Him when it collected various insects of the Amazon expedition. Then the collection he brought home to Europe are infatuated to new findings from other parts of the world. Insect collection was sold and the capital was a starting point for exploration of Wallace in the archipelago. On the journey between the years 1848 to 1854, he arrived in Singapore. For eight years later (1854 - 1862) he was exploring various areas of the archipelago. Of exploration, he membukukannya to in a note entitled The Malay Archipelago. During his expedition in the archipelago, estimated he has traveled a distance of not less than 22,500 miles, do 60 or 70 separate trips, and collecting specimens of fauna includes 125 660 8050 specimens of birds, 7,500 specimens of skeletons and bones of various animals, 310 specimens of mammals, reptiles and 100 specimens . The rest, reaching 109,700 specimens of insects, including butterflies he likes best.

Habit of recording the trip and save the records by sending to the UK by post European merchant ships, including when stopped at the island of Ternate between January 8, 1858 and March 25, 1858, when he was stricken with malaria and forced himself to write a letter sent to scientists hero, Charles Darwin in England.

In the exploration in the archipelago he found an imaginary line that divides the flora and fauna in Indonesia into two major parts. This line later known as the Wallace Line, which on the one part, the forms of flora and fauna still has an relationship with the flora and fauna of Australia and have characteristics very similar. While in other parts very similar to the flora and fauna of Asia. He is regarded as a leading expert in the 19th century in the areas of deployment spesied animals and sometimes known as the Father of Biogeography Evolution, a study of what species, living where and why. He was one of revolutionary thinkers in the 19th century and gives a lot of input to the development of "theory of evolution" as well as one of the founders of the "theory of natural selection". Including the concept of color diversity in the world fauna, and also "Wallace Effect", a conclusion about how natural selection can contribute to the diversity of fauna.

Wallace's letter from Ternate for Darwin was then known as the Letter from Ternate. The letter became known for with a paper entitled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitelty from the Original Type. From that paper, Wallace suggests thinking about the process of natural selection to maintain a species in the world. Species that are able to survive is called Wallace as a result of the continuity of the best or most have the ability to survive will not be extinct.

That's the basic framework for understanding natural selection is put Wallace at the time. Finally, supporting the idea that Darwin's theory of evolution popularized through his book The Origin of Species in 1859, one year after Wallace's writing paper. On July 1, 1858, friends of Darwin, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, to engineer a scientific meeting at the Linnean Society and declared Darwin and Wallace as the inventor of the evolutionary basis.

Awards, honors, and memorials
* Some of the awards he received include the Order of Merit (1908), the Royal Society's Royal Medal (1868) and Copley Medal (1908), the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal (1892) and also the Linnean Society's Gold Medal (1892) and Darwin -Wallace Medal (1908).

* Selected as the head of the anthropology division of the British Association in 1866.
* Elected as chairman of the Entomological Society ("Entomological Society"), based in London in 1870.
* Elected as chairman of the biology of the British Association in 1876.
* Awarded as the civilian pensioners of £ 200 per year, which is a service of Darwin and Huxley to the British government, which was awarded in 1881.
* Selected as a member of the Royal Society in 1893.
* Gaining confidence as a leader of the International Congress of spiritualists (which was meeting in London) in 1898.
* In 1928, a house at Richard Hale School (then named as Hertford Grammar School) was named Wallace. He is a student at Richard Hale School in the years 1828 to 1836.
* On 1 November 1915, a medal with his name inscribed there, placed in Westminster Abbey.
* His name is also immortalized as one of the names on Mars and craters on the Moon .* A research center for biodiversity research in Sarawak named with his name in 2005.