2008年7月2日 星期三

[人物]The other beetle-hunter

Essay
Nature 453, 1188-1190 (26 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/4531188a; Published online 25 June 2008

The other beetle-hunter

Andrew Berry1 & Janet Browne2 Andrew Berry is lecturer on biology at Harvard University, Biology Laboratories, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA, and is editor of an annotated anthology of Wallace's writings, Infinite Tropics.Janet Browne is Aramont professor of the history of science, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. She is the author of a two-volume biography of Darwin and of Darwin's "Origin of Species": A Biography.

Thanks to a fateful letter, the theory of evolution by natural selection was unveiled 150 years ago this week. Andrew Berry and Janet Browne celebrate the letter's writer, Alfred Russel Wallace.

One hundred years ago, to mark the 50th anniversary of the reading of the original papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection, the Linnean Society of London issued its first Darwin–Wallace awards to honour contributors to the study of evolution. Six of the seven 1908 recipients, including Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and Joseph Dalton Hooker, received silver medals. The only gold medal ever awarded went to Alfred Russel Wallace. At 85, he had five years to live and three books still to publish.........