A talk by Dr James T Costa, Executive Director and Professor, Highlands Biological Station, Western Carolina University, USA on Thursday 6th July 2023, at Queen Square, Bath.

Possibly the most famed naturalist of the Victorian age, Alfred Russel Wallace’s expeditions to remote Amazonia and southeast Asia became the stuff of legend: a collector of thousands of species, he shared in the discovery of natural selection with Darwin and founded the field of evolutionary biogeography. Yet Wallace also courted controversy with non-scientific pursuits from spiritualism to socialism. Jim Costa marks the bicentennial of his birth with a new biography, Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, and shares his insights with us on the man who 200 years after his death, continues to inspire.