Alfred Russel Wallace figured out natural selection while burning with malaria on the island of Ternate in the Moluccas, Indonesia. Same theory as Darwin. Same year. He wrote it down in three feverish days and mailed it to Darwin, who'd been sitting on the idea for twenty years. Darwin panicked. His friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker arranged a joint presentation of both men's papers to the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858. Neither man was present. The audience was reportedly underwhelmed. Born in Usk, Wales on January 8, 1823, Wallace left school at fourteen and worked as a surveyor, a builder, and a schoolteacher before his passion for natural history took over. He spent four years collecting specimens in the Amazon basin, then lost nearly everything when his ship caught fire on the return voyage. He watched his collection burn from a lifeboat. He went back out. His eight years in the Malay Archipelago produced over 125,000 specimens, including more than a thousand species new to science. He independently arrived at natural selection through a different route than Darwin: where Darwin studied domesticated animals and the Galapagos, Wallace observed the distribution of species across island chains and noticed that closely related species occupied adjacent but distinct territories. The "Wallace Line," the biogeographic boundary between Asian and Australian fauna running through Indonesia, is named after him. History remembers evolution as Darwin's theory. Wallace never seemed bitter about it. He spent the rest of his long life exploring causes that mainstream Victorian science avoided. He championed women's suffrage, land nationalization, and spiritualism, the last of which cost him credibility among scientists. He corresponded with Darwin for decades, and the two men maintained a respectful friendship. He received the Order of Merit from Edward VII in 1908. He died in 1913, at 90, having been the co-discoverer of the most important idea in biology and the footnote who did everything else.