He stayed in the area a total of 14 months, his longest stay anywhere in the archipelago. Wallace fell in love with Sarawak and realized that it was a perfect collecting ground, mostly for insects, but also for the much sought-after orangutans. Upon their encounter, Brooke and Wallace became friends. James Brooke would create a dynasty of Sarawak rulers, known as the white rajahs. Hugh Low, 'Sarawak its inhabitants and productions being notes during a residence in that country with the Rajah Brooke.'Ī few years earlier, when in Singapore, Wallace had met James Brooke, a British adventurer who, through incredible circumstances, had become the rajah of Sarawak, a large state on the island of Borneo. This insight would ultimately mature into a fully formed theory of evolution by natural selection – the same theory Charles Darwin had arrived at independently years before, but had not yet published.Ī waterfall in Sarawak.

In what’s commonly known as his “Sarawak Law” paper, Wallace pondered the unique distribution of related species, which he could explain only by means of gradual changes. Whether Darwin or Wallace should justly be credited for the discovery of the mechanisms of evolution has stirred controversy pretty much ever since.Ĭomparatively little has been written about Wallace’s seminal work, published four years earlier. In another year, Charles Darwin would publish “ The Origin of Species,” squarely positioning him as the father of evolution. Their authors: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Three years later, in 1858, two papers that would change people’s understanding of humanity’s place in the natural world were read before the Linnean Society of London.

It’s as crucial to Wallace’s own thinking in disentangling the mechanisms of evolution as the Galàpagos Islands famously were to his contemporary, Charles Darwin. This is where, in February 1855, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote his hugely influential “Sarawak Law” paper. At last I’ve reached my goal, Rajah Brooke’s cottage, at the top of Bukit Peninjau, a hill in the middle of Borneo’s jungle. The chirping of cicadas is deafening, my clothes are sticky and heavy with heat and sweat, my right hand is swollen from ant bites, I am panting, almost passing out from exhaustion – and I have a big grin on my face.

Wallace natural selection