Lying ill with fever on the remote Molluc-can island of Halmahera in February 1858, the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace puzzled over the phenomenon of 'species transmutation' — a subject that had rarely been absent from his thoughts for the past 13 years. Three years earlier he had published an important but largely unnoticed paper on this topic, now known as evolution, in which he strongly argued that organisms must have evolved from earlier forms. But the mechanism of this process had so far eluded him — as it had (virtually) everyone else.
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