The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace

The book begins with Wallace’s 12 years of often harrowing travels in the Western and Eastern Tropics, which place him in the pantheon of the greatest explorer-naturalists of the nineteenth century. It traces step by step his discovery of natural selection and then follows the remaining 50 years of his life. In addition to his divergence from Darwin on two fundamental issues – sexual selection and the origin of the human mind – he pursued topics that most scientific figures of his day avoided, including environmentalism and the possibility of life on Mars.