Alfred Russel Wallace, Singapore, beetles, evolution by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

Published in Fables
Spring 2000

AN INORDINATE FONDNESS FOR BEETLES
Through his passion for wildlife, Victorian explorer Alfred Russel Wallace changed the way we view our world

A century and a half ago a visitor came to Singapore to collect beetles and, in the process, changed forever the way we look at our world and ourselves.

The man with the passion for Coleoptera was Alfred Russel Wallace, a Victorian-era naturalist/collector/philosopher, who is noted in scientific circles for his work in taxonomy, biogeography, island biology, and for accurately predicting widespread environmental degradation.

Ironically, Wallace is almost forgotten for what was arguably his greatest achievement - developing, independently of Charles Darwin, the theory of natural selection.

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Wallace first made landfall in Asia in Singapore on April 20, 1854.

He made the island state one of his base camps, visiting at least four times during his eight-year, 22,400 km journey through Southeast Asia. ((see map of his travels))

This voyage, which he wrote about in his classic The Malay Archipelago, netted him 125,660 specimens, including some 900 new species of beetles, 200 new species of ants, 50 new species of butterflies, and 212 new species of birds.

While collecting this diverse range of wildlife, Wallace wondered why the flora and fauna of Southeast Asia (elephants, rhinos, wild cattle, numerous primates, hornbills) was so different from the wildlife in eastern Indonesia and Australia (marsupials, birds of paradise, no monkeys, no cats, no deer), and why both regions had so few species in common with the myriad odd-shaped islands in the middle, such as Sulawesi.

The stark contrasts, he deduced, were partly due to the cycles of changing sea levels. During periods when the sea level dropped, for example, most of Southeast Asia (today called the Indo-Malayan realm) and most of eastern Indonesia-Australia-Pacific (Austro-Malayan realm) had been connected by land bridges while the islands between the two extremes, set amidst deep ocean trenches, remained isolated.

As recently as 10,000 years ago, for example, Singapore was not an island. . ((see map)) but part of a large, more-or-less contiguous Asian land mass. In fact in those days it would have been possible to walk from Kuantan to Kuching, Bangkok to Brunei, or Singapore to Surabaya

Then, when sea levels rose, islands were created and the animals isolated on each island evolved new characteristics and, in some cases, became new species. Then the cycle repeated itself, the ice caps refroze, the sea levels dropped, and land bridges were re-created. New migrations took place, followed in turn by yet another sequence of isolation and evolution.

These observations led to thoughts about how species evolve, a problem that had challenged naturalists, philosophers and theologians for centuries

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The British Museum's beetle collection today numbers some 22,000 specimens neatly kept in 12,000 drawers. The beetles range in size from the top of this exclamation point! to an Amazonian species as large as a songbird. The beetles Wallace collected -- thirty drawers full -- are identified by circular white labels, often written in his own hand, and which frequently share a drawer with beetles adorned with square printed labels, which were collected by Charles Darwin.

These contiguously-stored beetles reflect the curiously intertwined relationship between Wallace and Darwin.

Darwin and Wallace barely knew each other. Yet in the 1840s and 1850s, living half a world apart, they both were independently grappling with the question of whether species change and if so, how.

In 1855, while enjoying the hospitality of James Brooke, Sarawak's White Rajah, Wallace identified a major tenet of evolution that today seems obvious, but which in mid-19th century was a breakthrough in evolutionary theory.

"Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species," Wallace wrote in what has become known as the Sarawak Law.

Some three years later Wallace, while living in a house on the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia (which still exists by the way), had one of the most important malaria dreams of all time.

"I was suffering from a sharp attack of intermittent fever, and every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits had to lie down for several hours, during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me," Wallace wrote.

"One day something brought to my recollection [Thomas Robert] Malthus's 'Principles of Population.' I thought of his clear exposition of 'the positive checks to increase' -- disease, accidents, war, and famine -- which keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of more civilized peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since they evidently do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been densely crowded with those that breed most quickly…It occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escape; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning...Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain-that is, the fittest would survive [italics Wallace's]….I waited anxiously for the termination of my fit so that I might at once make notes for a paper on the subject."
Wallace recognized what a breakthrough this was, and described the resulting Ternate paper as "the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species."

Some observers compare this intellectual breakthrough to other scientific-Eureka-moments -- Archimedes overflowing his bath, Newton getting bonged under the apple tree.

Wallace sent his evolutionary thoughts to Charles Darwin, the famous thinker and one-off explorer (Darwin never again left England following the voyage of the Beagle, his only overseas trip).

Darwin had been pretty certain that species evolved, had, in fact, been working on the question of origin of species for many years, but was missing a piece of the puzzle--the mechanism by which such evolution might take place. He procrastinated writing up his ideas for many years until the postman surprised him with Wallace's now-famous Ternate Paper of February 1858.

Imagine Darwin's surprise. He's sitting in Down House, working on his own theory of natural selection but afraid to publish it, perhaps because he wasn't sure of his data or because he was afraid of antagonizing the British social order with a revolutionary idea that challenged the Biblical concept of creation. Out of distant Asia, a younger, less-acclaimed scientist, of no particular social standing, sent him a significant part of the answer, the mechanism by which species can change.

With a humility bordering on naiveté that would be unthinkable in today's cut-throat scientific world, Wallace asked Darwin's help -- if Darwin felt the paper had merit would he be so kind as to pass it on to Sir Charles Lyell?

Wallace's choice of Lyell as peer-reviewer was logical but foolhardy.
Lyell was a noted geologist.whose Principles of Geology, lugged around the world by both Darwin and Wallace, established the basic idea of sea level change that led to the concept of biogeography and delineation of the Wallace line.

But Lyell was also a preserver of the British scientific establishment whose loyalties were to Darwin, not to the unknown Wallace.

Darwin, on receiving Wallace's "Ternate Paper", wrote to Lyell: "I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had had my manuscript sketch, written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract of it."

Thus began one of the most curious episodes in the history of science.

According to some detective-scholars, most notably Arnold C. Brackman, Wallace got blind-sided. The conspiracy-theorists say that due to the prodding of his friends, botanist Sir Joseph Hooker, and Sir Charles Lyell, Darwin rushed to complete a preliminary paper which was presented at a now-famous meeting of the Linnaean Society in London on 1 July, 1858. Although Wallace's paper was also read into the record at the same meeting, Hooker and Lyell had clearly made the evening Darwin's by ensuring that the older and certainly more famous scientist received top billing.

While we're unlikely to know what really happened, some points are clear.

Wallace certainly was not as well connected socially as Darwin. He lacked Darwin's education and standing in the community, and was just beginning to assert himself in scientific circles.

In one sense Wallace should have been honoured when his paper was read in the rarefied halls of the Linnean Society, but in fact he was destined to become nothing more than an unwitting accomplice to Darwin's place in the sun. For a start, Hooker and Lyell presented Wallace's paper without asking his permission. They changed the title of Wallace's Ternate Paper, again without consulting him. And the biggest blow was that, by placing Wallace's paper sequentially after Darwin's hastily prepared notes and his letter to American botanist Asa Gray, they relegated Wallace to a supporting role in comparison to Darwin, a position from which Wallace has never emerged.

To add to the frustration, Wallace was out of contact and did not learn about the presentation of his paper until many months later. On the day the presentations were made in London, Wallace was chasing butterflies in Dorey [now Manokwari] on the island of New Guinea. And when Darwin's landmark Origin of Species was published in 1859, Wallace was suffering from fever in Ceram, an isolated island in eastern Indonesia. Wallace couldn't have been more despondent: his crew had disappeared, taking with them some supplies. He "found no rare birds or insects," and he was sick. Yet Wallace somehow got up the energy to write a classic description of the process by which the sago palm, the staple of life in eastern Indonesia, is transformed into "a thick glutinous mass, with a rather astringent taste."