Letters of Alfred Russel Wallace Online

The collected letters of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, have been put online by the Natural History Museum.  Wallace was the subject of a chapter in the David Quammen book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. The chapter was called "The Man Who Knew Islands." Where Darwin used the Galapagos Islands and the terrain of South America to devise his theory, Wallace used the islands of Indonesia.  The site is billed as having:

• iconic correspondence between Wallace and Charles Darwin about evolution by natural selection
• important observations and discoveries made when in the Malay Archipelago (1854 - 1862)
• fascinating discussions on a variety of subjects, scientific and social such as glaciology, anthropology, epidemiology, astrobiology, socialism, land reform and spiritualism

Wallace was a spiritualist and began to infuse his scientific writings with spiritualism, a development which dismayed Darwin, who had gone to great lengths to show that natural selection could be thought of in scientific terms, alone.

“Not Responsible”

A friend of mine sent me this. Here is a sign seen at a restaurant.


It reminds me of a sign I saw in Rocky Mountain National Park that read “Mountains Don't Care!” I saw a similar sign in Japanese climbing Mount Fuji. Heartless, perhaps, but true nonetheless.

Gee, Who Knew?

Every so often, Science Daily comes out with a story that, perhaps needs to be restated but is amusing nevertheless. They write:

Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.

I am quite sure that there is more to the Brown study than meets the eye since this information simply reflects what we already knew about how natural selection works in the wild. The story does, in fact, provide detailed information about mammal extinctions and radiations. It is the way in which Science Daily words the headline that is amusing.

This “lack of randomness” was the crux of a piece that I wrote for CFSI a bit back. If anti-evolutionists or ID supporters are willing to argue that evolution is a “godless, random process” then they have to be willing to argue that climate change on the planet is also a random, godless process, since that is what drives biotic change. I haven't heard any of them say that yet.

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The History of Natural Selection

James Costa writes an article for BioScience in which he traces the history of how Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace made the conclusions necessary to devise the theory of natural selection. While a bit of a long read, the article is quite illuminating. For instance, Costa writes this:

The light shed by evolutionary theory today on even more “classes of facts” than Darwin could have imagined is an excellent starting point in educating students and the general public about this remarkable science. In doing so, we might profitably take a page from Darwin’s playbook and teach Darwin with Darwin himself (Costa 2003). The most readily appreciated argument in support of the reality of species change is the very one that convinced the young Darwin: the expansive explanatory power of the concept, tying together seemingly disparate fields. Most of Darwin’s contemporaries saw how compellingly his theory unified biogeography, paleontology, embryology, instinct, and other fields. Modern students are in a position to appreciate a far more expansive unification, encompassing new disciplines unknown to Darwin—the fruits of more than a century of research since the Origin’s final edition.

Indeed, it is the unification that makes the theory so powerful. It is an excellent article, with much insight into how the theory came to be and why it is so important.

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Galapagos Finches in Trouble

According to a story in the Independent, by Mike McCarthy, the finches that Darwin wrote about in his book On the Origin of Species, are in danger of extinction. McCarthy writes:

There are now only about 100 individuals left of the Galapagos mangrove finch, the rarest of the 14 closely related finch species that Darwin encountered when he visited the islands in 1835 as the naturalist on board the survey ship HMS Beagle.

All of these species evolved from a single common ancestor to fit different niches in the ecosystem, and when Darwin realised this once he was back in Britain, it helped to trigger his insight that completely new species could come into being through the process of natural selection.

The mangrove finch has shown the most extreme evolution of all: it inhabits only the narrow strips of mangrove swamp that are found in just a few parts of the Galapagos coastline.

Black rats which infested the holds of pirate ships have been identified as the chief culprits behind the destruction of the finches. The rats are thought to have arrived on Isabella, the largest of the Galapagos islands, on pirate vessels perhaps as early as the 16th century. Pirates used the archipelago, which is around 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, as a hiding place before sailing off to the Spanish shipping lanes in search of boats carrying treasure.

The conservation effort is underway to move some of the finches to a location that is free of predatory rats. The story also allows for some observations that only those steeped in "Darwiniana" would know:

When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835 he and colleagues collected many of the finches, but did not at first realise they were related and missed their significance. It was not until he had returned to London that the ornithologist John Gould examined them and found them to be all subtly different but closely related members of a quite new family of birds.

It was this discovery that set Darwin thinking that they may all have evolved from a single common ancestor, and thus to start to understand the mechanism of natural selection, which enabled new species to evolve.

I hope the project is successful.