Radical by Nature: Celebrating Alfred Russel Wallace at 200

Biologist and Wallace scholar Jim Costa marks the bicentennial of the birth of explorer, naturalist, and humanitarian Alfred Russel Wallace with a new biography, Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace.

Perhaps the most famed naturalist of the Victorian age, by the end of his long life in 1913, Wallace’s expeditions to remote Amazonia and southeast Asia became the stuff of legend: a collector of thousands of species new to science, he shared in the discovery of natural selection with Darwin and founded the field of evolutionary biogeography. Yet Wallace also courted controversy with nonscientific pursuits from spiritualism to socialism, becoming the archetypal socially engaged scientist tirelessly campaigning for land and labor reform, women’s rights, and more. Jim Costa celebrates the complex and even radical life of Alfred Russel Wallace who, at 200, continues to inspire and instruct.

Dr James T Costa: Executive Director and Professor, Highlands Biological Station, Western Carolina University, USA; Fellow, Linnean Society of London; Trustee, Charles Darwin Trust