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British naturalist. During his early career, the impecunious Wallace undertook two important collecting expeditions, the first to the jungles of the Amazon (1848–1852) and then to the Malay Archipelago (1854–1862). It was during this latter expedition that he independently formulated a theory of natural selection, which he communicated to C. Darwin in 1857. In the following year, his paper, and extracts from Darwin's letters and manuscripts, were presented under a joint authorship to the Linnaean Society (London), announcing the theory of evolution by natural selection. With regard to human evolution, Wallace, believing in a spiritual purpose behind consciousness, argued that the genus Homo had been shielded from the action of natural selection. Wallace also founded the science of evolutionary zoogeography.