Alfred Russel Wallace

"It occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? and the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted lived. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enimies,the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then I at once saw, that the eve represent variability of all living things would furnish the material from which, by the mere weeding out of those less adapted to the actual conditions, the fittest alone would continue the race.There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest. The more I thought over it, the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species."

-Alfred Russel Wallace, (1823-1913) was an explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection, which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own ideas in The Origins of Species

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