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Species Seeker Extraordinaire

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Species Seeker Extraordinaire Species seeker extraordinaire Darwin’s inspiration for the theory of evolution came from a single voyage. Across the globe, Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the world’s greatest species seekers, travelled a different path. In the year of the centenary of Wallace’s death, writer Richard Conniff traces his history. ’m afraid the ship’s on fire. Come and slid down into a boat that was ‘rising and see what you think of it,’ the captain falling and swaying about with the swell of said. It was after breakfast, 6 August the ocean’. 1852, and the writer recounting this awful moment was Alfred Russel LOST AT SEA ‘IWallace. He was the only passenger on the The extent of his loss did not dawn on him 235-tonne brig Helen, aflame, in the middle of until they were finally rescued, seven days later, the Atlantic. Wallace wandered numbly down by a ship bound for London from Cuba. to his cabin, through the suffocating smoke Wallace now felt secure enough to reflect and heat, to retrieve a single tin box with a on his loss: ‘How many times, when almost few notebooks and drawings from his travels. overcome by the ague [malaria], had I crawled He left behind three years of journals and a into the forest and been rewarded by some large folio of drawings and notes. In the hold unknown and beautiful species! How many of the ship were boxes and boxes of species places, which no European foot but my own never seen outside the Amazon. He had had trodden, would have been recalled to my gathered it all by means of long, difficult travel, memory by the rare birds and insects they complicated by malaria, yellow fever, dysentery had furnished to my collection! How many and other hardships. He was still recovering weary days and weeks had I passed, upheld from a bout of fever as the ship burned, and only by the fond hope of bringing home many he felt ‘a kind of apathy about saving anything’. new and beautiful forms from those wild When the time came, Wallace went over the regions... And now everything was gone.’ stern on a rope, tearing up his hands as he It was as if Darwin’s Beagle had sunk with all 26 his Galapagos treasures still unmined for Wallace biographer Peter Raby. Edward This page Wallace’s flying frog Rhacophorus scientific insights. But ‘I tried to think as Newman, the president of the Entomological nigropalmatus. Conventional naturalists still little as possible about what might have Society, had to admonish members in 1854 Photographed in been’, Wallace later wrote, ‘and to occupy for their snobberies. the Danum Valley Conservation Area, Sabah, mostly treated new species as the myself with the state of things which Malaysian Borneo. actually existed’. ASKING QUESTIONS Next page A tray of Arriving back in England that October, after Wallace was thinking far more deeply about LibrarySinclair Stammers/Science Photo © butterflies collected by result of separate and seemingly Alfred Russel Wallace almost three months at sea, including a week species than the experts and connoisseurs during his expedition in in an open lifeboat, Wallace was tattered, who bought his specimens. Though he was the Malay Archipelago. random acts of creation by God unwashed, thin – and jubilant. ‘Oh glorious careful not to say so out loud, he was still day!’ he cried, going ashore at Deal in Kent. focused on testing the idea, put forward ‘Oh beef-steaks and damson-tart, a paradise by an anonymous writer in an 1845 book, for hungry sinners’. In London, his agent Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Samuel Stevens got him a new suit of clothes that natural laws could drive evolutionary and had his own mother feed him back to change. Such a law was already forming in health at the family home. Stevens had taken his mind, and he might well have come to the precaution of insuring all shipments from it, and to the idea of natural selection, far his collectors. So Wallace at least had the more rapidly except for the loss of so much £200 insurance payout, small compensation valuable evidence. for his loss, but enough to live on for now. He cast about for ways to renew his Within days of his return, Wallace was attack on what he later called ‘the most already contemplating his next expedition. difficult and... interesting problem in the Over the next year, he also busied himself natural history of the earth’ – the origin of writing four scientific papers and two books, species. The Malay Archipelago, sweeping one a technical treatise on Amazonian palms, from Malaysia to Papua New Guinea, the other his A Narrative of Travels on the seemed to offer ‘the very finest field for Amazon and Rio Negro, cobbled together the exploring and collecting naturalist’ on from letters home and from memory. account of its ‘wonderful richness’ and relatively unexplored state. It bridged the RUFFLING FEATHERS gap between the very different fauna of He was, as he later put it, ‘the young man Asia and Australia, and its 17,500 islands in a hurry’, and it showed. At a meeting offered an almost infinite variety of habitats, of the Zoological Society of London in of all sizes, and all degrees of isolation. December 1852, just two months after his Wallace needed, as he later explained to return, Wallace gave his fellow naturalists a his bewildered family, to ‘visit and explore cordial earful. He had found to his dismay the largest number of islands possible and that the labels in museums and in natural collect animals from the greatest number history books seldom recorded more than of localities in order to arrive at any definite the vaguest hint of where a specimen came results’ about the geography of species. from: ‘Brazil’, ‘Peru’, even ‘S. America’. By the start of 1855, Wallace was holed up Conventional naturalists still mostly treated during the monsoon in a small house at the new species as the result of separate and mouth of the Sarawak River, just opposite the seemingly random acts of creation by God. blue mass of Santubong Mountain, on the But Wallace was seeing connections and north coast of Borneo. asking what they signified. Why did clusters His books had arrived belatedly by the of similar species all occur within a single long route around Africa, and now he took small area? Why did species often vary time to consult them and brood over his only slightly from one island to the next? findings about the puzzling distribution of Wallace felt that these questions could hummingbirds, toucans, monkeys and other not be satisfactorily answered until the species in the Amazon. The resulting article exact geographical limits of a species were in that September’s Annals and Magazine of accurately determined. Natural History proposed a simple law: ‘Every This idea that they’d been going about species has come into existence coincident their business in the wrong way irritated both in space and time with a pre-existing other naturalists, not least because it came closely allied species’. They hadn’t just dropped from a field collector who earned his wages down from heaven. like a shoemaker on a piece-rate basis. Wallace titled his article On the Law ‘The professional experts in the museums Which Has Regulated the Introduction of of London, and the connoisseurs of the New Species. A knack for compelling titles rectories and country houses’ did not even clearly eluded him. But the text struck an want to allow the likes of Bates and Wallace unmistakable note of urgency: ‘Hitherto into their learned societies, according to no attempt has been made to explain > 28 evolve issue 15 29 in important circles. Charles Lyell, Darwin’s But reading and rereading Principles in the and, no small thing, a member of his own friend and mentor, took Wallace seriously field, Wallace thought that the slow power of social class. He grew more alarmed later that enough to open his own series of notebooks natural forces could produce major changes, month, when Darwin convened a gathering on the species question. not just in geological phenomena but also in at Down House where he subtly lobbied for Lyell had long espoused the Creationist living plants and animals, even leading to the the evolutionary cause with his guests, the dogma that all species were adapted from origin of new species. It bothered Wallace biologist and writer T H Huxley, the botanist the start to the places of their origin and did that Lyell did not also see it. Joseph Hooker, and entomologist T Vernon not change significantly thereafter. But his The reliance on ‘special creations’ set Wollaston, who had just published a book on anti-evolutionary convictions were beginning Wallace off on a transmutationist tear variation in beetle species. to waver. His first notebook entry, two days in his journal: ‘In a small group of islands But Lyell also could not help seeing that after reading the Wallace article, disputed not very distant from the mainland, like Darwin’s ‘species-making’ mechanism – the idea that limb rudiments in a snake-like the Galapagos, we find animals and plants natural selection – might actually make reptile were evidence for its evolution from different from those of any other country sense. So despite his own lingering anti- a quadruped ancestor. ‘Arguments against but resembling those of the nearest land. evolutionary beliefs, he did the right thing as such variability of species are too powerful’, If they are special creations why should they a scholar and friend, urging Darwin to publish he wrote – and seemed almost to add, resemble those of the nearest land? Does at least ‘some small fragment of your data… ‘Aren’t they?’ Wallace meanwhile was jotting not that fact point to an origin from that and so out with the theory and let it take notes to himself about how just such limb land’.
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