![]() ![]() This increase of individual wealth is most clearly shown by the rise and continuous increase of millionaires, who, by various modes, have succeeded in possessing themselves of vast amounts of riches created by others, thus necessarily impoverishing those who did create it. One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor - of those existing with a minimum of the bare necessaries of life - has enormously increased, and many indications that they constitute a larger proportion of the whole population than… in any earlier period of our history.īorn in an era when there were only a handful of millionaires in the world, he adds: Wallace, having lived far past his era’s life expectancy and watched generations claw at the rungs of so-called progress, writes: Available as a print and as a face mask benefiting The Nature Conservancy. ![]() Art from the 19th-century French science textbook Les phénomènes de la physique. Alfred russel wallace how to#In the final years of the nineteenth century, with Darwin long dead and the Earth newly laced with train tracks and telephone cables, fogged with factory fumes, and cratered with oil wells, Wallace published an extraordinary 426-page reflection on the promise and peril of what we so blindly call progress, titled The Wonderful Century ( public domain | public library) - a far-seeing cautionary yet ultimately optimistic vision for how to course-correct our civilization, so that the rise of capitalism as a global economic system based on exploitation and extraction would not corral our species into its own misery and threaten the survival of all species on an irreplaceable planet that is a miracle and not a resource. ![]() Writing not long after Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology in an obscure German scientific book and long before Rachel Carson made it a household word with the unexpected bestseller that awoke the modern ecological conscience, Wallace drew an unambiguous causal link between the economic and political decisions by which our society governs itself and the ecological consequences for our species, for all species, and for the planet itself - and then he considered what it would take for us to divert the catastrophic path we had just set out on then, and on which we still remain. And so he became one of the first scientists to seriously consider the ecological footprint of our species and caution against the environmental assault of human industry. Russell, unlike Darwin, had a mind too fractal with ideas to stay within the bounds of any one discipline and a humanistic spirit too concerned with the social side of life to remain confined purely to science. But Wallace holds a different, long overlooked distinction, the cultural impact of which might well shape the evolution of this planet’s living future more profoundly than the evolutionary history of its past.ĭarwin became the face of evolutionary theory because, with his intensely focused autism-spectrum mind and its acute attention to this particular branch of knowledge, his science was just stronger. While Wallace arrived independently at the theory of natural selection and while the paper about it he jointly published with Darwin in 1858 fomented the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was Darwin - who had kept his controversial ideas under wraps for years, until Wallace gave him the courage to go public - that took the laurels of evolutionary theory. The polymathic British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (January 8, 1823‐November 7, 1913) is best known as the man evolution left behind. ![]()
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