A quiz question · hard
On which Indonesian island was Alfred Russel Wallace lying in a malarial fever when he worked out natural selection in February 1858?
Wallace was on Ternate in the Maluku Spice Islands. Rereading Malthus during the fever, he saw natural selection in a few hours and posted the manuscript to Darwin, who had been refining the same theory privately for twenty years.
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The 35-Year-Old British Specimen Collector Who Independently Discovered Natural Selection While Lying in a Fever in the Spice Islands in February 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace, a self-funded specimen-collecting naturalist, was lying in a malarial fever on the island of Ternate in the eastern Dutch East Indies in February 1858 when he worked out the theory of natural selection. He wrote it up in two days and posted the manuscript to Charles Darwin. Darwin had been refining the same theory privately for twenty years. The two papers were read together at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858.
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