New science shows an evolutionary reason for our love of Mozart
and Carly Rae Jepsen: It binds us together Poor Alfred Russel
Wallace! Virtually unknown these days compared to Darwin,
Wallace was one of the 19th century’s greatest biologists and
perhaps the preeminent field naturalist of all time. Those who
have heard of Wallace know him primarily as the codiscoverer,
with Darwin, of natural selection. But whereas Darwin had
laboriously worked out the details, with copious examples from
the living world, over a period of decades, Wallace literally
came upon the principle of natural selection in a kind of
brainstorm, a moment of epiphany while he lay in a malarial
fever at a remote island campsite in what is today Indonesia.
The story has oft been told: Barely recovered from his illness,
Wallace sent Darwin a brief manuscript setting out “his” theory,
which in turn nudged Darwin to speed up publication of the much
lengthier book — “On the Origin of Species” — that Darwin had
been perfecting, more or less in pr