Alfred Russel Wallace was an explorer, collector, naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, political commentator and a Birkbeck alum.

He conceived the revolutionary idea of evolution by natural selection entirely independently of Charles Darwin, though Darwin and his The Origin of Species would overshadow Wallace and it has usually been Darwin’s name alone associated with the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Charles Darwin was impressed with how much Wallace’s theory of natural selection matched his own: ‘He could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters!’

Unlike Darwin, however, Wallace was a spiritualist and believed that natural selection could not explain the human intellect, and that the human spirit persisted after death.