“The final and absolute test of good government is the well-being and contentment of the people — not the extent of empire or the abundance of the revenue and the trade.”
The polymathic British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (January 8, 1823‐November 7, 1913) is best known as the man evolution left behind. While Wallace arrived independently at the theory of natural selection and while the paper about it he jointly published with Darwin in 1858 fomented the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was Darwin — who had kept his controversial ideas under wraps for years, until Wallace gave him the courage to go public — that took the laurels of evolutionary theory. But Wallace holds a different, long overlooked distinction, the cultural impact of which might well shape the evolution of this planet’s living future more profoundly than the evolutionary history of its past
