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  • Essay / The Ideas of Alfred Wallace and the Theory of Charles Darwin

    It was years later that Charles Darwin was finally prompted to tell the world about his work that had been hidden for so long. This event could not have happened without the amazing works of a man named Alfred Wallace in which chapter 2 of Into the Jungle describes his challenges and observations that generated his ideas about animal species. Wallace's travel history had the most disadvantages, starting with yellow fever, which made him eager to return to England. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay However, he would not return alone, he had many living animals, including insects, monkeys and other species that he had collected in the Amazon. . The real misfortune began when his journey on the ship named Helen came to an end as it caught fire, meaning all of his work would also perish. Despite this event, it did not alter his spirit of returning to the world and collecting new species. Wallace's new destination would be the islands of the Malay Archipelago where he arrived in 1854. In his new destination he witnessed many new insects and larger animals such as monkeys and birds. The collection of such animals was accompanied by the difficulty of dealing with Singapore's tigers and natives. However, this did not lead to his observations as he eventually came into contact with the diversity of butterflies he found on one of the islands he visited. These butterflies would lead Wallace to introduce a new species law similar to Darwin's in which new species came from an old ancestor. Wallace named this new law the Sarawak Law, which suggested the idea that animals evolved due to changes on earth. He did not propose this law without the testimony of his observations through butterflies and many other species. With this in mind, Wallace published a paper on this idea, but without any acknowledgment it went unnoticed. However, it was only during an unsuspected detour that he noticed that between the western and eastern islands there was a large and noticeable difference in the species of birds and mammals. This observation led him again to the Sarawak law which concluded that all animals in the Western Islands would be similar due to the fact that all these islands were connected at some point in history, while all the Eastern Islands were also once connected. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Therefore, the Western and Eastern Islands, even if the physical conditions were similar in the species inhabiting the island, would be radically different as new species were created to adapt to the environment. His final idea for solving this problem would be survival of the fittest, for which he wrote a paper and sent it to Darwin. Wallace's ideas would eventually be published surprisingly alongside Darwin's theory. Although Darwin received most of the recognition, one of Wallace's goals was to be accepted into the society of scientists that contained this pioneering vision..