Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was a man of many talents - an explorer, collector, naturalist, geographer, anthropologist and political commentator. Most famously, he had the revolutionary idea of evolution by natural selection entirely independently of Charles Darwin., Alfred Russel Wallace, Social Justice Advocate While Wallace is best known for his scientific contributions, starting in 1880 he became more and more involved in social issues., Alfred Russel Wallace was born in Wales in 1823. He has been described variously as a naturalist, a geographer, and a social critic. He even weighed in on the debate as to whether or not life could exist on Mars. However, what he is best known for is his work on the theory of natural selection., Explore the answers to these questions and more in Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, the acclaimed new biography of Wallace by Professor Michael A. Flannery of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.The provocative thesis of Prof. Flannery is that Wallace, in developing his unique brand of evolution, presaged modern intelligent , But in the mid-1800s, Darwin and the British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace independently conceived of a natural, even observable, way for life to change: a process Darwin called natural selection. Interestingly, Darwin and Wallace found their inspiration in economics., His best known zoological discoveries are Wallace's Golden Birdwing Butterfly (Ornithoptera croesus) and Wallace's Standard-Wing Bird of Paradise (Semioptera wallacei), both from Bacan island, and Rajah Brooke's Birdwing Butterfly (Trogonoptera brookiana) from Borneo..