Who is Alfred Wallace from The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions and what is their importance?

This is a British naturalist who discovered the process of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin at about the same time. Wallace left school as a young man and trained as a surveyor. He sought to educate himself about the natural world and nurtured a hobby of collecting beetles. Along with a friend, Wallace embarked on a trip to the Amazon River region of South America to collect exotic species of insects and animals and return them to England to sell. He lost nearly all his specimens at sea, however he found some success writing about his journeys.