Whether it’s Archimedes or Einstein, Curie or Hawking, Tesla or whoever, we celebrate them as extraordinary individuals who bucked convention and made momentous advances. The story of Wallace and Darwin is a prime example of how time and again we take collaborative, iterative achievements and present them as the work of lone geniuses with Eureka flashes of insight. And the theory they both independently devised and jointly published is that of evolution through natural selection. But in this case the other guy is Charles Darwin. This might not seem so unjust if the same fate had befallen the other guy. Yet he has spent most of the century since his death in relative obscurity. Wallace was feted during his lifetime, and has had hundreds of species, various buildings and even craters on the Moon and Mars named after him. And in case that’s not commemoration enough, a newly discovered genus of wasps has been named Wallaceaphytis in his honour. Sir David Attenborough unveiled the statue, and I’m hosting a fundraising event for it on Saturday, featuring evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and comedian Bill Bailey. The first ever statue of Alfred Russel Wallace was erected outside the Natural History Museum in London last week.
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