Deepening the darkness? Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago

Abstract

Review of: "Dispelling the Darkness: Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin," by John van Wyhe (World Scientific Publishing Co., Ltd., Singapore; 2013)

Full text

Current Biology Vol 24 No 22
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disrupt their society and destabilise
their packs. Packs may split into
smaller packs made up of younger
animals, with a greater influx of
unrelated individuals. And younger,
less-complex packs may kill cattle
or approach humans for food,”
Eisenberg writes.
Wolves were reintroduced to
Yellowstone National Park in the
1990s and are protected within its
boundaries. Using the example of a
pack resident in the park, but also
straying beyond its boundaries,
Eisenberg describes in detail how
the disruption of the social structure
caused by hunters killing the lead
animals ultimately led to further
conflicts with humans and more
killings.
After these problems started in
late 2012, Eisenberg writes, “the
FWP [Montana Fish, Wildlife, and
Parks] Commission tried to close
areas adjacent to the park to hunting
and trapping because too many
Yellowstone wolves were being
killed. When anti-wolf groups sued,
FWP removed the buffer. This left
park wolves vulnerable in places
like Gardiner, Montana, an elk
wintering ground immediately outside
Yellowstone. This July, Congressman
Peter DeFazio requested a wolf buffer
zone around Yellowstone.”
Elsewhere in the US, the fate of
a different wolf species, the red
wolf (Canis rufus) currently hangs
in the balance, as the US Fish and
Wildlife Service (FWS) assesses
the state of the population in North
Carolina, where these animals were
reintroduced three decades ago.
Now they are under threat from
hunting and from hybridisation with
the local coyote population (Science
(2014) 345, 1548–1549).
All these experiences suggest that
returning wild nature to our doorsteps
isn’t going to be all that easy, and it
won’t sort itself out naturally. Many
people want to see more wildlife
in the open, and the opportunity
to reclaim space that is no longer
needed for agriculture or industry is
clearly there, but it will be important
to have an informed debate on what
kind of nature we want to recreate,
how we are going to live with it, and
exactly how wild we want to go.
Michael Gross is a science writer based at
Oxford. He can be contacted via his web
page at www.michaelgross.co.uk
apprentice surveyor and school
teacher, Bates a sometime apprentice
brewer and hosier) managed to get
themselves to Amazonia in 1848, set
up as collector-naturalists paying
their way through their specimens
sold back in Britain, where there was
a large appetite for acquiring natural
history rarities by museums and
wealthy collectors. Only duplicate
specimens were sold, however; both
amassed extensive private collections
intended for study with, as Wallace
put it in a letter to Bates prior to
their trip, “a view to the theory of
the origin of species” [1]. Indeed,
there is much documentary evidence
in the form of letters, notebooks,
and published materials to indicate
that a central object of Wallace and
Bate’s Amazonian travels as well as
Wallace’s later eight-year journey in
the vast Indonesian archipelago was
the pursuit of the question of species
origins.
Or was it? Historian John van Wyhe,
lecturer at the National University of
Singapore where he also presides over
the Wallace Online project, argues in
his new book Dispelling the Darkness:
Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and
the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace
and Darwin that Wallace had no such
lofty interests, being motivated rather
by commercial interests and the lure
of travel and adventure. This is one of
several areas where this book makes
startling revisionist claims about
Wallace despite long-recognized
evidence to the contrary. The author
reveals his intent in this regard at
the outset, on page 3: “much about
the traditional story [about Wallace
and Darwin] is wrong,” he declares.
Perhaps so, but extraordinary claims
require solid, if not extraordinary,
evidence.
Dispelling the Darkness takes a
broadly chronological approach
to Wallace’s epic explorations in
southeast Asia between 1854 and
1862, opening with a context-setting
chapter on Wallace’s early life and
interests interwoven with accounts
of Darwin’s activities. In most of the
subsequent chapters, Wallace’s path
is traced, from Singapore in the west
of the archipelago to New Guinea in
the east and back again, punctuating
the account of his travels with the
trend of events and ideas. Wallace
lived a long and interesting life, but
there are good reasons to largely focus
on the Malay Archipelago years: that
Deepening the
darkness? Alfred
Russel Wallace
in the Malay
Archipelago
James T. Costa1
and George Beccaloni2
Dispelling the Darkness: Voyage in the
Malay Archipelago and the Discovery
of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin
John van Wyhe
(World Scientific Publishing Co., Ltd.,
Singapore; 2013)
ISBN: 978-9-814-45879-5
The 2013 centenary of the death of
the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace
(1823–1913) was marked by numerous
talks, exhibitions, papers, and books
celebrating and reassessing Wallace’s
life and work. There is a curious
resonance between the magnitude of
scientific and social changes that took
place over the course of Wallace’s
long life, his epic explorations in two
hemispheres and their attendant
discoveries, and the grand sweep of
the man’s thinking and his scientific
and social contributions. Like the
Anglo-American Thomas Paine a
generation earlier, Wallace could
claim a share in two revolutions,
albeit scientific and not political ones:
founder of the field of evolutionary
biogeography and co-discoverer with
Charles Darwin of the principle of
natural selection. Not all of Wallace’s
ideas have stood the test of time — it
would be astonishing if they did, given
their scope — but a great many of
them in both the scientific and social
spheres seem remarkably modern.
Wallace’s accomplishments are all
the more remarkable in light of his
life story: a largely self-made man
from a middle-class but financially
struggling family, whose formal
education ended at age 14 but whose
expansive curiosity and voracious
reading led him to (rather audaciously)
take on some of the biggest questions
in natural philosophy of his day.
Seemingly against all odds, Wallace
and kindred spirit Henry Walter Bates
of Leicester (Wallace a sometime
Book review

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is when some of the most important
discoveries by Wallace took place.
However, by the same token, van
Wyhe’s exclusive focus on this period
can give the false impression that
those important discoveries came out
of the blue. Van Wyhe largely ignores
Wallace’s formative experiences in
England, Wales, and Amazonia, and
in neglecting the arc of Wallace’s
intellectual trajectory, much of it pre-
Malay Archipelago, we are left with a
fragmentary intellectual history devoid
of broader context. A more holistic
biographical approach (such as, for
example, that of Fichman in his 2004
book An Elusive Victorian [2]) would
better serve subject and readers alike.
Nonetheless, this book does provide
a valuable service in presenting what
is perhaps the most reliable timetable
to date for Wallace’s voyage, based
on painstaking analysis of ferry
schedules as well as letters and other
sources. This is especially relevant
to the timing of Wallace’s letter and
essay announcing his discovery of
natural selection, sent to Darwin from
the island of Ternate in the spring of
1858 [3 –5]. The book’s timetable is all
the more useful since Wallace’s travel
memoir, The Malay Archipelago [6],
is not arranged chronologically, and
Wallace does not always accurately
report dates and places in the memoir
in any case. Van Wyhe’s parsing out of
the chronology is a real service as we
attempt to understand events during
this key period in Wallace’s thinking.
Another valuable attribute
of the book lies in its detail on
geography and historical figures,
and its numerous module-like short
commentaries given on a range
of topics such as commerce (in
Singapore), durian, the practice of
collecting, insect captures, tigers,
the Chinese riots, Wallace’s Ternate
house, and Wallace on ‘savages’.
However, it should be noted that the
text is also rife with unsubstantiated
assertions, which are given as facts
and are therefore difficult to pick out
by the uninitiated. For example, in the
module “Labels” he reports matter-
of-factly that Wallace routinely made
his round insect specimen labels with
the steel wadding punch in his gun
kit, but evidently never compared
Wallace’s actual specimen labels with
the wadding punch disks — even a
casual inspection of Wallace’s circular
labels shows that they are far smaller
in diameter than disks produced with
the wadding punch he would have
used for his guns.
This kind of ‘shooting from the hip’
(Wallace’s gun still in mind) is in fact
pervasive in the book: as another
example one comes away with the
impression that upon crossing over
from the island of Bali to Lombok a
rather clueless Wallace had to rely
on local knowledge, in particular a
Mr. Daud, to learn that the assemblage
of birds on the latter island, Lombok,
differed dramatically from that on
Bali. This discovery was central to
Wallace’s eventual articulation of the
great faunal discontinuity that Huxley
later (in 1868) termed the ‘Wallace
Line’. In his Journal Wallace wrote
of Lombok: “Plenty of new birds...
Australian forms appear. These do not
pass further West to Baly & Java &
many Javaneese [sic] birds are found
in Baly but do not reach here.” Van
Wyhe asserts that as Wallace had
no direct experience with Australia
and the eastern archipelago, what
he was doing here was recording
information reported to him by
Mr. Daud. Collecting exotic birds of
the islands was Wallace’s bread and
butter, however, and he did not need
to travel to Australia to know the bird
families that occurred there — among
other resources he traveled with a
well-thumbed copy of Charles Lucien
Bonaparte’s Conspectus Generum
Avium [7], which summarized locality
information for bird groups. There is
no evidence from Wallace’s journals,
notebooks, or letters that he derived
this key information from locals, and
one may well ask how a resident of
Lombok would be expected to know
about the birds of Australia in any
case.
There are many other such off-
hand claims — for example, that
Wallace boarded at a ‘public school’
in Hertford, implying a more privileged
childhood than generally believed
(he did board, but at a school with
exceedingly modest fees and even
then for only a short time), or taking
Wallace to task for the fact that
he personally collected few of his
own specimens, largely relying on
unsung assistants (neglecting the
fact that this was and still is standard
practice; consider that the same is
true of Charles Darwin in relation to
Syms Covington). More egregious
are claims that have the potential to
seriously misinform. For example, in
his discussion of Wallace’s landmark
1855 “Sarawak Law” paper [8], with
his famous conclusion that “Every
species has come into existence
coincident both in space and time with
a pre-existing closely allied species,”
van Wyhe denies the standard view
that this paper represents an early
articulation of evolutionary principles.
“Instead,” van Wyhe asserts,
“the paper presented a theory of
Figure 1. Wallace’s journey.
Some of the many beetles collected by Wallace in southeast Asia, from The Malay Archipelago
[6]. Representatives of a half dozen beetle groups were selected by Wallace for illustration;
tiger beetles (Cicindelidae) were not among them. Image: The Malay Archipelago, p. 401 [6].

Current Biology Vol 24 No 22
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succession” (emphasis his), leaving
out the fundamental evolutionary
principle of genealogical descent. Yet
Wallace did articulate a branching
model of ancestor–descendent
relationships in this paper, explicitly
citing the analogy of a branching
tree. True, he had no mechanism for
change, and used familiar terms like
‘creation’, but he is clearly referring to
a slow transmutational process when
he writes of groups with “modifications
of structure and organization” as a
result of “being subject to... altered
conditions,” or, even more clearly,
notes that “though [his ‘law’] may
appear to some readers essentially
a theory of progression [read:
succession], it is in reality only one of
gradual change” (emphasis added),
with the strong implication that what
gives rise to the appearance of fossil
succession is transmutation of species
over time, not mere replacement of
one set of species with another.
But perhaps the best example of his
revisionism is van Wyhe’s claim that
cryptically colored tiger beetles found
on various islands were to Wallace
what the Galápagos mockingbirds
were to Darwin. In making much ado
about tiger beetles, van Wyhe asserts
that these insects were “the spark”
that catalyzed Wallace’s discovery
of natural selection. Once again,
however, this claim has no supporting
evidence. Van Wyhe quotes a letter
from Wallace to Frederick Bates
(Henry’s brother) in which cryptic
coloration of certain tiger beetles is
described, followed by the comment
(italicized in the book but not the
original): “Such facts as these puzzled
me for a long time, but I have lately
worked out a theory which accounts
for them naturally” [1]. The reader is
led to believe that this is the focus
of the letter, and Wallace is coyly
revealing that studying these beetles
led him to a certain unnamed theory,
understood to be natural selection,
which would explain their coloration.
In fact, this long (4-page) letter
contains descriptions of a great many
insects, of which the tiger beetles are
mentioned briefly on the third page.
Wallace may well have been alluding
to natural selection in the above
quoted passage, but from this letter
it is difficult to read in the meaning
van Wyhe claims, that the beetles led
Wallace to the theory. Indeed, there is
no evidence for this claim: nowhere
in Wallace’s journals or notebooks do
tiger beetles merit any discussion or
extended comment — they are barely
mentioned other than in collecting
lists, and they do not merit mention
even in the handful of notebook
entries that bear on mimicry and
cryptic coloration in insects (Figure
1). For example, in the nearly 250
pages of entries in Wallace’s “Species
Notebook” tiger beetles get mere
mentions on five pages, in all cases
in collection lists, while they are not
mentioned at all in the one entry in this
notebook bearing on cryptic coloration
in beetles [9].
Van Wyhe supports his claim by
pointing out that “colour matching”
was mentioned twice in Wallace’s
Ternate essay, but van Wyhe overlooks
the fact that coloration is not
presented there as the centerpiece
of Wallace’s argument, and that
nowhere in the paper are tiger beetles
mentioned. In fact, the one place
where we might have expected
Wallace to describe how these beetles
catalyzed his insights, had they done
so, would have been at the very
occasion where he discussed the
importance of beetle collecting to
himself and Darwin, namely, Wallace’s
acceptance speech at the ceremony
awarding him the first Darwin-Wallace
Medal by the Linnean Society of
London in 1908 [10]. In this speech,
Wallace rhetorically asked why he and
Darwin alone had hit upon the theory
of evolution by natural selection. “First
(and most important...),” he declared in
answer, “in early life both Darwin and
myself became ardent beetle-hunters.”
He continued:
“Now there is certainly no group
of organisms that so impresses the
collector by the almost infinite number
of its specific forms, the endless
modifications of structure, shape,
colour, and surface-markings that
distinguish them from each other,
and their innumerable adaptations
to diverse environments. These
interesting features are exhibited
almost as strikingly in temperate
as in tropical regions, our own
comparatively limited island-fauna
possessing more than 3000 species of
this one order of insects.”
In singing the virtues of beetles and
beetle collecting in this assessment of
his momentous discovery, he surely
would have cited any crucial role
played by tiger beetles in inspiring his
evolutionary insights. Yet there is no
mention at all.
Readers familiar with the historical
literature pertaining to Darwin, Wallace
and the history of evolutionary
thinking will find the author’s penchant
for revisionism anywhere from
irritating to maddening, but worse is
the disservice done to students and
others new to the field who may not
be readily able to separate the wheat
from the chaff in this volume. While
Wallace scholarship would benefit
from the attention of more card-
carrying historians of science, Wallace
deserves better than historians of
science who see revisionism as the
sole goal of scholarship — that there
is a standard interpretation of events
does not make that interpretation
inevitably wrong. On balance it is
our estimation that despite its useful
aspects this book serves to deepen
rather than dispel the darkness
surrounding Wallace and Darwin’s
joint discovery.
References
1. Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP);
Beccaloni, G. (ed.). Wallace Letters Online
database, Natural History Museum, London:
www.wallaceletters.info/
2. Fichman, M. (2004). An Elusive Victorian: The
Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace. (University
of Chicago Press: Chicago & London).
3. Van Wyhe, J., and Rookmaaker, K. (2012).
A new theory to explain the receipt of Wallace’s
Ternate essay by Darwin in 1858. Biol. J. Linn.
Soc. 105, 249–252.
4. Davies, R. (2012). How Charles Darwin received
Wallace’s Ternate paper 15 days earlier than
he claimed: a comment on van Wyhe and
Rookmaaker (2012). Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 105,
472–477.
5. Smith, C.H. (2013). A further look at the 1858
Wallace-Darwin mail delivery question. Biol. J.
Linn. Soc. 108, 715–718.
6. Wallace, A.R. (1869). The Malay Archipelago;
The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of
Paradise. (Harper & Brothers: New York).
7. Bonaparte, C.L. (1850). Conspectus Generum
Avium. (Leiden).
8. Wallace, A.R. (1855). On the law which has
regulated the introduction of new species Ann.
Mag. Nat. Hist. 16 (2nd series), 184–196.
9. Costa, J.T. (2013). On the Organic Law of
Change: An Annotated Transcription of Alfred
Russel Wallace’s Species Notebook of 1855–
1859. (Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
MA).
10. Wallace, A.R. (1908/1909). Address
[acceptance speech on receiving the Darwin-
Wallace Medal on 1 July 1908]. pp. 5–11 In: The
Darwin-Wallace Celebration Held on Thursday,
1st July 1908, by the Linnean Society of London
(Longmans, Green & Co., London).
1Highlands Biological Station, 265 N. Sixth
Street, Highlands, NC 28741, and Department
of Biology, Western Carolina University,
Cullowhee, NC 28723, USA. 2Department of
Life Sciences, The Natural History Museum,
South Kensington, London SW7 5BD, UK.
E-mail: costa@email.wcu.edu,
g.beccaloni@nhm.ac.uk