Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
George Beccaloni, fellow Wallaceophile, has sent word that a monument to Alfred Russel Wallace has been erected on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Wallace Monument, Tangkoko Nature Reserve, Sulawesi. Photo by Simon Purser.
As described at the Alfred Russel Wallace Website of the Wallace Memorial Fund by George and Simon Purser, the monument is a full bust, greater than life size (about 5-6 feet tall), on a nearly 9 foot tall plinth. It’s in the Tangkoko Nature Reserve, near Batu Putih, in the northeastern part of Sulawesi, an area Wallace visited during his travels in the East Indies. Wallace described the area in The Malay Archipelago as a particularly wild spot, with anoa (dwarf buffalo) and babirusa (an endemic pig) common. Those ungulates are gone from the area today, but it remains a popular spot for birding and seeing the Celebes black “ape” (actually a monkey; “Celebes” is an earlier, Portuguese, spelling of the Indonesian name of the island).
Bill Wallace, Alfred’s great grandson, prepared a video greeting shown to the assembled dignitaries at the monument’s inauguration.
Here at WEIT we’ve often commented on the great British naturalist, and readers will recall our several Wallace Year (2013) commemorations.
Our sixth installment is a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace. Written while he was still collecting in the Malay Archipelago, it is a foundational work in zoogeography, in which Wallace invokes a long history of evolutionary changes of organisms, and geographical changes of the land and water, to account for organisms’ current distributions and affinities. Readers may recall that 2013 was the centenary of Wallace’s death, and that we posted a series of commemorative posts on Wallace here at WEIT to celebrate his accomplishments during that year. (Follow this link for many WEIT postings on Wallace.)
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of natural selection. A gentleman but from a family of lesser means than Darwin, he was largely self-taught. He first made a name for himself by conducting an expedition to the Amazon (1848-1852) with Henry Bates; unfortunately, most of his specimens were lost when his ship sank on the return to England. Setting out again on a natural history collecting expedition, he traveled in the Malay Archipelago from 1854-1862. It was at Ternate in 1858, that, during a bout of malaria, the concept of natural selection came to him. Wallace is widely acknowledged as the greatest figure in the history of zoogeography. A lifelong friend of Darwin, in later life he became a staunch public advocate of socialism and, much to the chagrin of his scientific colleagues, spiritualism. His books include The Malay Archipelago (1869), Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870, a collection of his papers, including the important ‘Sarawak’ and ‘Ternate’ papers), his monumental The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), Island Life (1880), and Darwinism (1889). Andrew Berry has edited a wide ranging anthology of Wallace’s writings, Infinite Tropics(2002). All of Wallace’s published works are available at John van Wyhe’s superb Wallace Online. A modern, scientific biography is Peter Raby’s Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (2002).
Study Questions:
1. The comparison of which particular islands’ faunas helped Wallace epitomize the nature of the boundary between the Indian (= Oriental) and Australian regions? What are the geographic, climatic, and geological circumstances of these islands? What are their faunal differences and similarities?
2. What importance does Wallace place on the depth of the sea? Show how he uses it in accounting for the geographical distribution of animals.
3. What explanatory principles does Wallace invoke to explain the phenomena he discusses? What do these principles reveal about Wallace’s thinking at the time he wrote this paper?
My Okinawan correspondent sends the following photograph of an apparently window-killed bird.
Window-killed thrush, Okinawa, Japan, 8 March 2016.
I thought immediately, “a thrush”, noting the similarity in bill, body and leg shape to that of the familiar North American Robin (Turdus migratorius). I was also immediately reminded of the justly famous opening passage in Alfred Russel Wallace’s Island Life, in which, comparing the birds of Britain and Japan, he finds them remarkably similar:
WHEN an Englishman travels by the nearest sea-route from Great Britain to Northern Japan he passes by countries very unlike his own, both in aspect and natural productions. The sunny isles of the Mediterranean, the sands and date-palms of Egypt, the arid rocks of Aden, the cocoa groves of Ceylon, the tiger-haunted jungles of Malacca and Singapore, the fertile plains and volcanic peaks of Luzon, the forest-clad mountains of Formosa, and the bare hills of China, pass successively in review; till after a circuitous voyage of thirteen thousand miles he finds himself at Hakodadi in Japan. He is now separated from his starting-point by the whole width of Europe and Northern Asia, by an almost endless succession of plains and mountains, arid deserts or icy plateaux, yet when he visits the interior of the country he sees so many familiar natural objects that he can hardly help fancying he is close to his home. He finds the woods and fields tenanted by tits, hedge-sparrows, wrens, wagtails, larks, redbreasts, thrushes, buntings, and house-sparrows, some absolutely identical with our own feathered friends, others so closely resembling them that it requires a practised ornithologist to tell the difference. If he is fond of insects he notices many butterflies and a host of beetles which, though on close examination they are found to be distinct from ours, are yet of the same general aspect, and seem just what might be expected in any part of Europe. There are also of course many birds and insects which are quite new and peculiar, but these are by no means so numerous or conspicuous as to remove the general impression of a wonderful resemblance between the productions of such remote islands as Britain and Yesso.
(Perhaps inspired by Wallace, the Japanese ornithologist Masa Hachisuka once published a comparative list of the birds of Britain and Japan.) Wallace went on to contrast the remarkable similarities between the birds of these two distant archipelagos with the differences one finds when crossing the narrow strait between Bali and Lombok:
In the Malay Archipelago there are two islands, named Bali and Lombok, each about as large as Corsica, and separated by a strait only fifteen miles wide at its narrowest part. Yet these islands differ far more from each other in their birds and quadrupeds than do England and Japan. The birds of the one are extremely unlike those of the other, the difference being such as to strike even the most ordinary observer. Bali has red and green woodpeckers, barbets, weaver-birds, and black-and-white magpie-robins, none of which are found in Lombok, where, however, we find screaming cockatoos and friar-birds, and the strange mound-building megapodes, which are all equally unknown in Bali. Many of the kingfishers, crowshrikes, and other birds, though of the same general form, are of very distinct species; and though a considerable number of birds are the same in both islands the difference is none the less remarkable—as proving that mere distance is one of the least important of the causes which have determined the likeness or unlikeness in the animals of different countries.
Wallace, of course—in this and many other works—went on to explicate what the important causes of these disparities were, not the least of which are the evolutionary and geological histories of the organisms and land masses. (In the case of Bali and Lombok, the key factor has turned out to be that Bali is on the Asian continental shelf, and thus has been in frequent dry-land contact with the continental fauna, while Lombok is off the shelf, and has received its fauna over water by occasional means of transport.)
Like Wallace’s traveling Englishman, I too was struck by the great familiarity to me of this bird from the opposite side of the world. But while it was certainly a thrush, and almost certainly in the genus Turdus, I could not identify the species. I don’t have a Japanese or East Asian bird field guide, but checking some pictures on the internet, it seems most similar to T. pallidus, a winter visitor to Okinawa. Our deceased friend seems too white below, so I leave its species undetermined. Perhaps some reader will be able to identify it.
Window-killed thrush, Okinawa, Japan, 8 March 2016.
In addition to being a familiarly thrush-like bird, it was also, sadly, in a familiar posture: dead outside a glass door. Window-killed Swainson’s thrushes (Catharus ustulatus) are an all too familiar sight here in southeastern Wisconsin. My correspondent added about this bird, “Such a shame to see a dead bird, because they’re actually kind of rare to see. I blame the cats and Habu.” Habu are any of various pit vipers found in the Ryukyu Islands, which I thought were not common. I’ve queried my correspondent as to the relative abundance of cats and habu.
Hachisuka, M.U. 1925. A Comparative Hand List of the Birds of Japan and the British Isles. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (paperback published 2015)
Wallace, A.R. 1892. Island Life. 2nd ed. Macmillan, London. (at Wallace Online)
We’ve already posted some things to read by and about Alfred Russel Wallace in honor of Wallace Year, including a list by me and a recent list by fellow Wallace-ophile Andrew Berry. There’s another item that I can recommend to WEIT readers, which I had known about and forgotten to mention, but Matthew has kindly reminded me of it: the Journal of Zoology has published a “virtual issue” of a number of Wallace’s papers.
Dactlylopsila trivirgata, the striped possum of the Aru Islands. The nominate subspecies is endemic to Aru; other subspecies occur in New Guinea and Queensland.
The issue consists of 10 articles, by Wallace or scientists working on his collections, originally published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (later renamed the Journal of Zoology). The papers are technical– species descriptions, faunal lists– rather than synthetic statements of Wallace’s views. But papers such as these are the building blocks out of which Wallace constructed his zoogeographical and evolutionary theories. The article on Wallace’s search for the bird of paradise, a delightful scientific travelogue in the style of The Malay Archipelago, is perhaps the most entertaining of the collection.
The picture above is from an account of the mammals of the Aru Islands, including descriptions of new forms, by the famous zoologist J.E. Gray, based on Wallace’s collections. In this paper, Gray named and described the striped possum, not only erecting a new species for it, but a new genus as well. The Aru Islands * lie on the great Sahul Shelf which connects New Guinea and Australia, and it is thus not surprising that striped possums were later found in New Guinea and Queensland, as all these were connected by dry land during Quaternary glacial periods. The striped possum (a marsupial, of course) is thus a nice building block for the general conclusion that the fauna of the Aru Islands is of Australian affinity, and that former land connections are of great importance in understanding the distribution of animals, especially mammals.
There are many fine plates, like the one above, in these 10 articles. I’m not sure how long Wiley (the current printer for the Zoological Society of London) will maintain open access at its site, but the articles are all out of copyright, and most or all are freely available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (direct link to the Proceedingshere), and of course also at Wallace Online and The Alfred Russel Wallace Page.
* This link is to a nice paper comparing Wallace’s visit to Aru today.
I should probably have posted something like this earlier, but here are a few recommended books about and by Wallace. It’s an idiosyncratic list, reflecting what was interesting and available to me, but might still be useful as a starting point. Wallace is of course mentioned in many books on the general history of evolution and Darwinism, but the following are works devoted primarily or exclusively to Wallace. I’ll start with a few biographies of Wallace, then a collection of essays, and finally some things written by Wallace himself.
The frontispiece of Island Life, 1880.
Raby, P. 2001. Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. A well-received biography by a Victorianist interested in scientific travellers, covering the whole of Wallace’s life.
Shermer, M. 2001. In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Another biography, by an author probably more familiar to WEIT readers as the editor of Skeptic magazine and for his efforts in combating pseudoscience. Shermer’s academic credentials are in the history of science, and this book is based on his doctoral dissertation. Although Shermer might not appreciate the comment, I found the book refreshingly free of the sort of semi-quantitative psycho-history that the subtitle threatens.
Smith, C.H. and G. Beccaloni, eds. 2008. Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oxford University Press, New York. This is a collection of essays edited by Charles Smith, editor of the essentialAlfred Russel Wallace Page, and George Beccaloni, who has led the Natural History Museum‘s celebrations of Wallace Year. The essays, by scientists and historians, cover a broad range of historical and scientific issues, everything from a tour of Wallace’s many homes, to his studies of animal coloration, to his fight against vaccination.
For the works of Wallace himself, we can always view the online versions at Wallace Online and the Alfred Russel Wallace Page, or go to a good library, but a number of Wallace’s works are still in print. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites.
Wallace, A. R. 2002. Infinite Tropics: an Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology. A. Berry, ed. Verso, London. Edited by Wallaceophile Andrew Berry, this is a collection of excerpts from throughout Wallace’s writings on a broad range of topics. If you are going to have only one book of Wallace’s writings, and you want to see what he thought about (almost) everything, this is the one.
The new issue of Island Life by Univ. of Chicago Press, with commentary by Larry Heaney.
Wallace, A.R. 1880. Island Life. Macmillan, London. Just reissued by the University of Chicago Press, with commentary by my friend and colleague Larry Heaney of the Field Museum. Larry, well known for his work on Philippine Island mammal faunas, provides an extensive introduction that explicates and puts Wallace’s work in modern context. Being very interested in islands, it was the first of Wallace’s major works that I obtained a copy of for myself (I got the 1892 second edition).
Wallace, Alfred R. 1870. Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. MacMillan, London. My second Wallace book, obtained in exchange for a six-pack of beer, this is a collection of some of Wallace’s most important papers, including both the “Sarawak paper” and the “Ternate paper“. It was reissued in 2009 by Cambridge University Press.
Wallace, A.R. 1869. The Malay Archipelago: the Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. Macmillan, London. There are many reissues of this book concerning Wallace’s travel and discoveries in the East Indies. The Dover reprint was long available, but is now out of print; here’s a recent in print edition.
Wallace is just starting to have his letters and notebooks get the same detailed attention that Darwin’s have. Here’s a recent issue of his letters written during his eastern expedition.
Wyhe, J. van, and K. Rookmaaker, eds. 2013. Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters from the Malay Archipelago. Oxford University Press, Oxford. This is either just out or will be out soon; I haven’t seen a copy yet.
And finally, one of my favorite individual papers by Wallace, which I give as an assigned reading to my evolutionary biology classes.
Wallace, A. R. 1860. On the zoological geography of the Malay Archipelago. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology 4: 172-184. pdf
On Sept. 6, NASA launched the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) towards the moon, where it will go into orbit to gather data on the thin lunar atmosphere. But along with the rocket, a frog, apparently resting on the rocket or launch pad, was taken spaceward, before being thrown free.
An unidentified frog is launched along with the LADEE spacecraft on Sept. 6, 2013 (NASA photo).
A still camera on a sound trigger captured this intriguing photo of an airborne frog as NASA’s LADEE spacecraft lifts off from Pad 0B at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The photo team confirms the frog is real and was captured in a single frame by one of the remote cameras used to photograph the launch. The condition of the frog, however, is uncertain.
The photo reminded me immediately of a famous biogeographic experiment performed by Thomas Barbour (1884-1946) and Philip Darlington (1904-1983), who differed over the importance of land bridges (favored by Barbour) versus overwater dispersal (favored by Darlington) in the distribution of animals on islands. The experiment and its results are handed down from one generation of graduate students to the next by a well-known oral tradition at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, but the only published account I know of is by Bob O’Hara (1988):
A how-possibly experiment performed by Philip Darlington and Thomas Barbour at the Museum of Comparative Zoology has become legendary. Darlington and Barbour were disputing the possibility of frogs being dispersed in the West Indies by hurricanes. Darlington, who believed such dispersal was possible, took a bucket of live frogs up to the roof of the Museum, and, with Barbour standing on the lawn below, proceeded to throw the frogs to the ground, one by one. As each one hit the ground, Barbour examined it and called up “That one’s dead,” “So’s that one,” and so on. But after a few minutes, much to Barbour’s disappointment, the frogs all revived and started to hop away. Darlington had thus shown that hurricane dispersal was possible, or at least had removed one of Barbour’s objections to it, namely that it would be too rough on the frogs.
To Bob’s account I would add that the MCZ is 5 stories tall, which gives you some idea how far the frogs fell in their journey to the courtyard below. Bob used the experiment to illustrate his notion of a “how possibly” experiment, which demonstrates the possibility, though not the actual occurrence, of a phenomenon.
I thought of the experiment because I wondered about the “uncertain” fate of the frog. The frog appears to be outside the plume of hot gas escaping form the rocket engine. If so, and if the clear air around it has not been super-heated, the frog could well survive the fall. Many tree frogs are adept at jumping long distances, bodies flattened and limbs spread, so that they reach a terminal velocity more dependent on aerial friction than gravity. The so-called “flying frogs” are ones that have gotten very good at this, usually with both morphological and behavioral specialiazations (see Wallace’s flying frog, an apt example for Wallace Year).
I’m not sure about the identity of the frog. My guess is that it’s a tree frog of some sort. [Note: I’d originally guessed it was a Cuban tree frog (Osteopilus septentrionalis), a large, introduced species in Florida, but that’s before I realized the rocket was launched from a facility at Wallops Island, Virginia, on the Delmarva Peninsula, and not from NASA’s more usual Florida launchpads.]
What do these three have in common, besides being prominent Victorian Englishmen? The, to me, surprising answer is: fingerprinting! Faithful and informative reader Dom has sent the following picture from the Galton Collection of the special collections at University College London.
Gladstone’s (left) and Wallace’s fingerprints. Photo by Dom.
Here’s a closeup of Wallace’s fingerprints, with Wallace’s signature below. I can’t quite make out what’s below his signature; I think it is, in part, the date.
Wallace’s signature and fingerprints, taken May 28, 1891. Photo by Dom.
Francis Galton was Darwin’s cousin, and perhaps is best remembered for developing the techniques of regression and correlation in his failed attempt to create a statistical theory of genetics in his Law of Ancestral Heredity. The law, unfortunately for Galton, was wrong. There was a long debate between Galton’s statistical school (biometricians) and Mendelians over the nature of inheritance. R.A. Fisher, in 1918, synthesized the two views, showing that the statistical resemblances among relatives studied by the biometricians are exactly what you would expect if the underlying genetic factors were inherited in a Mendelian fashion, thus laying the basis for modern quantitative genetics.
Galton, who was a bit of a polymath, also popularized fingerprints as a means of individual identification, collecting a large number of them and studying their forms and variations; hence, he collected Wallace’s and Gladstone’s. Fingerprints do seem to be individually unique, but because the systems of comparing prints rely upon a scoring of similarity rather than total identity, mistakes can be made, a recent infamous case being the American lawyer from Oregon imprisoned (briefly) for carrying out the 2004 Madrid train bombing. (The mistake was made by the FBI in the US; Spanish police correctly called the fingerprints as not matching.)
William Ewart Gladstone was three times Prime Minister, and his long, unfriendly rivalry with the two-time Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was one of the most prominent features of Victorian Britain. Gladstone once wrote a book arguing that it was the duty of the state to determine what the true religion was, and to promote that religion to the exclusion of others. (The true religion, of course, turned out to be Anglicanism.) He later changed his mind, at least a bit, and supported a bill to redress a bit of the imbalance in state support for Anglican vs Catholic churches in Ireland. But because he had publicly declared his exclusive support for Anglicanism in his book, he resigned rather than vote for the measure he supported!
Gladstone supported the right of atheists to sit in Parliament (MPs were required at the time to take a Christian oath, though some allowances had been made for Jews and Quakers), and attempted to seat the famous Victorian atheistCharles Bradlaugh after the latter’s election in 1880. Gladstone’s Parliamentary maneuverings failed, and Bradlaugh was actually taken from the floor of the house to jail! Despite not being properly seated, Bradlaugh kept getting re-elected, and eventually was sort of seated, and secured the passage of an affirmation bill, allowing MPs to affirm their loyalty, rather than swear on the Christian God, in 1888.
