rising@utzoo.uucp (Jim Rising) (12/12/89)
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 UUCP: uunet!attcan!utzoo!rising BITNET: rising@zoo.utoronto.ca