Local and foreign scientists are attending a four-day event in
South Sulawesi’s Makassar to celebrate the 150th anniversary of
British biogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace’s Letter from
Ternate, a work that some believe defines the scientist as a co-
discoverer of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.
Starting Wednesday, the International Conference on Alfred
Russel Wallace and The Wallacea will discuss scientific and
historical perspectives on the Letter from Ternate, which
Wallace wrote while on Maluku’s Ternate Island and sent to
Charles Darwin in 1858. He sent the letter attached with his
essay On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from
the Original Type, which outlined the mechanics of an
evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to
environmental pressures. The essay did not deploy but expressed
Darwin’s term of “natural selection”, the mechanism by which
evolution may take place within a given population of organisms.
It reportedly prompted the so-called father of evoluti