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Alfred Russel Wallace and his legacy

21 - 22 October 2013 09:00 - 17:00

Scientific discussion meeting organised by Dr George Beccaloni, Professor Dianne Edwards CBE FRS, Professor Steve Jones FRS and Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS.

Event details

This meeting will encompass Wallace’s major scientific interests including evolution, natural history, biogeography, colouration, sexual selection and astronomy and, a hundred years after his death, will examine and debate current thinking on many of the issues that preoccupied him, including very briefly his contributions to the social sciences.

Biographies of the organisers and speakers are available below and you can also download the draft programme (PDF). Recorded audio of the presentations will be available on this page after the event.

The Twitter hashtag for this event is #wallacelegacy

Attending this event

This event is intended for researchers in relevant fields and is free to attend. There are a limited number of places and registration is essential. An optional lunch is offered and should be booked during registration (all major credit cards accepted).

Enquiries: Contact the events team

Organisers

  • Dr George Beccaloni, Natural History Museum, UK

    "George Beccaloni works at the Natural History Museum, London, where he is the Curator of Orthopteroid Insects and the Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project. He is a co-executor of Wallace’s Literary Estate, the founder of the Wallace Memorial Fund, and in 2002 he helped the Museum acquire the World’s largest collection of Wallace-related manuscripts from Wallace’s descendants. In the past George has worked on the evolution of mimicry, macroecological patterns in butterfly-hostplant relationships, and novel methods to quantify the diet breadths of phytophagous insects. He created the online databases Wallace Letters Online, the Blattodea Species File, and the Global Lepidoptera Names Index (LepIndex), and has published five books including ‘Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace’ (co-edited with Charles Smith). His current research interests include Wallace and cockroaches. Recently he was the historical consultant for the BBC series  ‘Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero’."

  • Professor Dianne Edwards CBE FRS, Cardiff University, UK

    "Dianne Edwards DE CBE FRS is currently Distinguished Research Professor and Director of Innovation and Engagement and previously Head of School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University, where she has spent almost all of her research career as a palaeobotanist investigating early land plants. Her interests outside the University include botanic gardens , conservation and the history of biology . As president of the Linnean Society, Dianne's concerns rest with the teaching and research of systematics and biodiversity and the roles of Learned Societies. She has recently been involved in the creation of The Learned Society of Wales and is the Vice President in charge of STEM subjects."

  • Professor Steve Jones FRS, University College London, UK

    "Steve Jones is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, from where he recently retired, after nearly forty years, as Professor of Genetics. His first degree and PhD are from the University of Edinburgh. He has spent some time at the Universities of Chicago, California, Botswana and Sierra Leone, and at Harvard University and Flinders University in Adelaide.  His main research has been on the population genetics of land snails and fruit-flies and he has spent almost a tenth as long as did Alfred Russel Wallace in pursuing them in the field."

  • Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, University of Reading, UK

    "Professor Sir Ghillean Prance was born in Suffolk in 1937 and was educated at Malvern College and Keble College Oxford where he obtained a BA in Botany and a D.Phil.  His career began at the New York Botanical Garden in 1963 as a research assistant and subsequently B A Krukoff Curator of Amazonian Botany, Director and Vice-President of Research and finally Senior Vice President for Science.  His exploration of Amazonia included 25 expeditions in which he collected over 350 new species of plants. He was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 1988 to 1999. He was McBryde Professor at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii 2001-02 and is currently McBryde Senior Fellow there. He is Scientific Director and a Trustee of the Eden Project in Cornwall and Visiting Professor at Reading University. He is author of nineteen books and has published over 520 scientific and general papers in taxonomy, ethnobotany, economic botany, conservation and ecology.  He holds fifteen honorary doctorates and in 1993 received the International COSMOS Prize and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was knighted in July 1995 and received the Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1999. He received the David Fairchild Medal for plant exploration in 2000, and the Allerton Award in 2005. In 2000 he was made a Commander of the Order of the Southern Cross by the President of Brazil and in 2012 received the Order of the Rising Sun from Japan . He continues to be active with research in plant systematics and in conservation of the tropical rainforest. He chairs the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest Trust, the Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory (MEMO), A Rocha International and the Development Committee of the Eden Project and is a board member of the Amazon Charitable Trust and the Exbury Gardens Trust. He is President of The Wildflower Society, Nature in Art and the International Tree Foundation."