A Real-Life Indiana Jones - NYTimes.com Ask a room full of conservation biologists who they like more, Darwin or Wallace, and Alfred Russel Wallace will win every time. While Darwin is respected, Wallace is revered. More than 800 new species have been named for Wallace, and for Darwin, around 120. Thursday, Nov. 7, marked the 99th anniversary of Wallace's death and started the countdown to 100th-anniversary celebrations in Britain, Mexico and Malaysia. Many know Wallace as the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, but reverence for Wallace is founded more on his fieldwork than on his place at the podium with Darwin. Wallace was a real-life Indiana Jones, spending four years in the Amazon (1848-52) and almost eight years island-hopping across the Indonesian archipelago (1854-62). He was intrepid, curious about everything, and he worked simultaneously at the theoretical and practical levels as no one before or after ever has. He was also largely self-taught. Born the eighth child in a family of nine to English parents living in Wales, Wallace fashioned a career as a naturalist that was highly improbable. His parents were poor, and he worked as an apprentice surveyor and teacher before discovering a love of beetles. Influenced by popular books about travels in South America, Wallace sailed at age 25 with a friend to Brazil to collect insects and animals in the Amazon to sell back in England. For several years, Wallace sent collection after collection to the docks in Manaus for shipment, but when he fell ill and returned to Manaus to seek passage back to England, he found that most of the collections were still there. With the specimens, he boarded a ship for England, but about four weeks into the voyage, the ship burned to the water line, and Wallace saved almost nothing. After drifting at sea for 10 days, the survivors were picked up by another ship bound for England, but food was short on the rescue ship, and Wallace made it back home half-starved after an 80-day crossing. Two years later, he sailed for Singapore and Indonesia. Traveling by local boat to many of Indonesia's 17,000 islands, Wallace discovered that the local animal life changes suddenly in the middle of Indonesia. The islands of Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes) are only 10 miles apart, but the elephant, rhino and orangutan of Borneo turned out not to exist on Sulawesi. In fact, there are no large mammals on Sulawesi, but there are many marsupials. This divide is now known as the Wallace Line: that's where the animals native to Asia largely end, and the animals native to Australia begin. Wallace made his living collecting insects and animals and shipping them to back to England, where they were sold to natural history collectors - a fashionable hobby in the Victorian era. Wallace collected more than 120,000 specimens, including around 80,000 beetles, and discovered perhaps 1,000 species new to science. The Coleoptera order, where beetles reside, has more species than any other order: it takes an encyclopedic knowledge to know beetles well. Wallace knew them well. He also knew butterflies and birds and made five voyages in native vessels to the far east of the Indonesian archipelago to collect specimens of birds of paradise. When Wallace found his first bird of paradise, he wrote that it "excited greater admiration and delight than I have experienced on any similar occasion." Anyone who has seen footage of these magnificent birds might understand his enthusiasm. On the remote island of Halmahera, while suffering from a malarial fever, Wallace hit upon the explanation for how species evolve into other species through natural selection. He sent his thoughts and a paper on the topic to his friend Darwin, who he knew was thinking about this as well. When Darwin read Wallace's paper, it spurred him to finish "On the Origin of Species." Darwin shared credit for the theory of evolution with Wallace, and the two remained friends until Darwin's death in 1882. When Wallace returned to England, he wrote "The Malay Archipelago" and dedicated the book to Darwin. The book is still in print today. It's an unusual natural history book because it is as much about the people who live in the archipelago as it is about the wildlife. It also has a humility and John Bull understatement that makes it endearing and memorable. Reverence for Wallace flows from his unlikely climb to prominence, his 12 years spent in wild places before the advent of DEET and antibiotics, his fortitude in surviving disease and multiple shipwrecks, and his ability to go deep into subtle distinctions between species as well as wide into how one species evolves into another. Wallace died in his sleep at 90. For the 100th anniversary of his death in 1913, there are a number of Wallace conferences scheduled, and money is being raised for a commemorative statue to be unveiled next year at London's Natural History Museum. It's no surprise that many people working on biodiversity conservation prefer Wallace to Darwin. Darwin has a prominent place in the pantheon of ideas, but Wallace has a place in the hearts of people who love nature and a life well lived.