Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology

Front Cover
Verso, 17. dets 2003 - 430 pages
"Alfred Russel Wallace was thirty-five and stricken with malaria in the Moluccan Islands when, in a feverish 'flash of light,' he stumbled on the theory of natural selection. It was his letter to Charles Darwin about the discovery that panicked Darwin into rushing out On the Origin of Species. Wallace was a towering figure of nineteenth-century science. Not only the co-discoverer of natural selection, he was also the founder of island biogeography, a significant contributor to the fields of evolution, glaciology and anthropology, and a great writer, author of Travels in the Amazon and The Malay Archipelago. But his international scientific reputation served also as a springboard for wide-ranging forays beyond science. A passionate socialist, he wrote on pacifism, on the environmental and social effects of imperialism, on city planning, on land nationalization, on votes for women, on public health, on spiritualism, on the possibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial life, and much else besides.Culled from his books, articles and letters, this collection comprises Wallace's best and most important writing, much of which has been out of print for over a century. Ranging from the scientific to the social, from the political to the spiritual, the selection captures the essence of a great thinker, brilliant, opinionated, often quirky, sometimes wrong, but always profoundly humane. Andrew Berry's anthology rescues Wallace's legacy, showing Wallace, through extracts from personal letters, his political writings, and scientific papers, to be far more than the co-discoverer of natural selection." -- Publisher.

From inside the book

Contents

Evolution
27
The Ternate Paper
46
Darwin and Natural Selection
58
Evolution by Natural Selection
65
Agreeing with Darwin
68
Disagreeing with Darwin
71
Genetics
75
Name Selection
80
Conversion
215
Spiritualism and Science
227
A World Viewed Through the Lens of Spiritualism
242
Travel
253
Expectations
257
City Life
262
Life in the Field
265
An industrious and persevering traveller
273

Beyond Natural Selection
81
Darwinism
99
Biogeography
102
The Amazon
103
Wallaces Line
106
Synthesis
111
Natural History and Conservation
119
The Amazon
121
Southeast Asia
126
Conservation
140
Geography Geology and Glaciology
148
Geology
150
Glaciology
158
Humans
161
Uncivilised people
163
Human Evolution
169
Human Improvement
204
Spiritualism and Metaphysics
213
Hazardous Voyages
282
American Travels
295
Social Issues
299
Evolution of a Socialist
301
The Land Problem
311
Public Health
325
Institutional Reform
332
Public Education
341
Capitalism and Empire
347
Globalization
358
War and Imperialism
360
Wallace and Darwin
369
Notes
375
Bibliography
403
A Selection of Publications on or about Wallace
408
Index
411
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Born in New York City in 1941, Stephen Jay Gould received his B.A. from Antioch College in New York in 1963 and a Ph.D. in paleontology from Columbia University in 1967. Gould spent most of his career as a professor at Harvard University and curator of invertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His research was mainly in the evolution and speciation of land snails. Gould was a leading proponent of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This theory holds that few evolutionary changes occur among organisms over long periods of time, and then a brief period of rapid changes occurs before another long, stable period of equilibrium sets in. Gould also made significant contributions to the field of evolutionary developmental biology, most notably in his work, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. An outspoken advocate of the scientific outlook, Gould had been a vigorous defender of evolution against its creation-science opponents in popular magazines focusing on science. He wrote a column for Natural History and has produced a remarkable series of books that display the excitement of science for the layperson. Among his many awards and honors, Gould won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His titles include; Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002, following his second bout with cancer.

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