SAVILE SCIENECE: GEORGE BECCALONI – WALLACE, DARWIN AND THE DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION. CHAIRED BY SAVILIAN CLIFF COLLIS.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913), was one of the greatest scientists of all time. His seminal contributions to biology rival those of his friend and colleague Charles Darwin, though he is far less well known. Together, Wallace and Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858, and their prolific subsequent work laid the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. However, Wallace’s extraordinary quest to understand how evolution works is not well known. Many seem to think that he discovered natural selection by chance, but this is very far from the truth. This talk charts the development of Wallace’s ideas about evolution, from his early life in Neath, Wales (UK) where he first became interested in the subject, through his four-year expedition to the Amazon (which ended with the destruction of his irreplaceable specimens and notes), to his epic eight-year journey around ‘the Malay Archipelago’, during which he finally discovered the process which drives the evolution of life on our planet.

Dr George Beccaloni is a zoologist, evolutionary biologist, taxonomist, museum curator and science historian, who worked at London’s Natural History Museum as an entomologist for more than 20 years. He set up the Wallace Memorial Fund in 1999, and is the founder and Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project. George has published many articles about Wallace and co-edited the book Natural Selection and

Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace. He was the Historical Consultant for the multiple award-winning BBC series about Wallace, Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero, and is currently helping make another three-part TV series about Wallace’s life and work.