Newsgroups: sci.bio
Path: utzoo!rising
From: rising@utzoo.uucp (Jim Rising)
Subject: A.R. Wallace
Message-ID: <1989Dec12.151329.21918@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 89 15:13:29 GMT

I'm responding again to an e-mail query that may be of general
interest.  Wallace, like Darwin, was led to his views about 
organic evolution as a consequence of his studies of the geographic
distribution of plants and animals.  In a very well reasoned paper
"On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species,"
Annals & Mag. of Nat. Hist. 16:184-196, 1855, Wallace used the
distribution of organisms to conclude that "every species has come
into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing
closely allied species," and noted that his hypothesis "claims
a superiority over previous hypotheses, on the ground that it not
merely explains, but necessitates what exists."  It is perhaps
ironic that Darwin & Wallace convinced most reasonable people 
that organic evolution had occurred, but not necessarily that
natural selection was the most important mechanism driving evolution.
The concept of organic evolution, of course, was not original to
D & W.
--Jim Rising
-- 
Name:     Jim Rising
Mail:     Dept. Zoology, Univ. Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada    M5S 1A1
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