The following short article about the plans to rebuild Wallace's Ternate house, was published today (January 9) in Science (vol. 323):
"Giving Wallace His Due
Tiny Ternate, Indonesia, hopes to spotlight its role in the history of evolutionary theory by memorializing the site where Alfred Russel Wallace penned On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. The paper, read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London in July 1858 while Wallace was still abroad, described concepts such as survival of the fittest and natural selection. At the same meeting, Charles Darwin presented his hastily assembled notes on evolution, published 16 months later in On the Origin of Species.
Last year, the 150th anniversary of the meeting, Wallace boosters located the site of the long-vanished house where the naturalist lived for 3 of the 8 years he spent collecting specimens in Southeast Asia, says Sangkot Marzuki, director of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta. Among other things, the observations defined the “Wallace Line”—the boundary between Asian and Australian fauna.
Ternate plans to erect a monument, rebuild the house following a floor plan outlined in Wallace’s writings, and rename the street for Wallace. Endang Sukara, an official at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, says it’s hoped that publicizing the area’s role in understanding evolution will spur efforts to preserve the region’s biodiversity."
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