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2009 marks Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. Overlooked courtesy of all the perfectly legitimate hoopla is a significant detail in the Darwin tale. Alfred Russel Wallace, an obscure English naturalist, had glimpsed the theory in the midst of a malarial fit while collecting specimens in the Spice Islands in 1858, and serendipitously sent his manuscript off to Darwin. Had he not done so, but sent the manuscript instead directly to a journal, the history of science would be very different. This talk will tell Wallace's remarkable story and answer why we celebrate Darwin while Wallace seldom, if ever, rises above the obscurity. With an undergraduate degree in zoology from Oxford and a PhD in evolutionary genetics from Princeton, Andrew Berry is a lecturer at Harvard where he teaches evolutionary biology and history of biology. His expertise is in Drosophila genetics but his fieldwork career has compensated for all that time spent in the lab: giant rats in New Guinea, butterflies and ants in Australia, aphids in Taiwan, bats in Nepal, wrens on the Faeroe Islands, mice on the Orkney Islands, butterflies in Borneo. He has published books on Alfred Russel Wallace and, to mark the 50th the anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, on DNA , and lectures widely to academic and popular audiences.