Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
Island Hoppers With Big Ideas

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Discovering Islands and Life Origins

By Rick Gregory

In case you're still wondering, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are the co-founders of the theory of natural selection.

It's not a coincidence that both Darwin and Wallace chose to go to islands.

Most people are aware of Darwin's trek to the Galapagos Islands, from 1832 to 1836, on board the H.M.S. Beagle as the resident naturalist.

Intended as a minor stopover on a five-year voyage, Darwin made the most out of his expedition by collecting a boatload of bird skins, insects, pickled reptiles and plants.

Three years later he published an account of his travels to the delight of a wanderlust audience.

Not as well connected and funded as the aristocratic Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace was forced to pay his own way by shipping back numerous specimens, collected during his voyages, to a broker in England. His first attempt to observe and collect, an excursion to the Amazon from 1848 to 1852, ended in utter failure.

Having stockpiled most of his specimens for one large shipment on his return home, he watched in horror as the vessel caught fire and sank in the Atlantic Ocean with four years worth of cargo.

With only a few drawings and maps remaining from the shipwreck, Wallace was left to ponder many of nature's questions without any raw biological data. So unlike Darwin, who stayed home to study his collections after returning from the Galapagos, Wallace needed to find another destination to start all over again. Considering both the scientific and market value of his next choice, Wallace set off for the tropic islands of the Malay Archipelago in 1854.

Covering a territory as large as Europe to Central Asia, Wallace travelled nearly fourteen thousand miles and amassed a collection of over 125,000 specimens of beetles, butterflies, birds, shells, reptiles and mammals.

Darwin was a methodical, careful thinker and not one to rush off and write a manuscript without full attention to all the facts. His colleagues urged him to write an abstract of his theories before someone beat him to the publishing punch. That someone was Alfred Russel Wallace.

During his eight years (1854-1862) travelling throughout the Malay Archipelago, Wallace posted several letters to Darwin describing his own findings and observations. While Wallace was far away island hopping, Darwin seized on the opportunity to publish his seminal work, The Origin of Species, in 1859, noting in the introduction that:

Wallace returned to England a few years later and didn't publish his travelogue narrative until 1869 -- a bit too late to enjoy the adulation as the co-founder of the theory of natural selection. Nonetheless, Wallace was gracious enough to dedicate his classic work, The Malay Archipelago, to Darwin: "I dedicate this book not only as a token of personal esteem and friendship but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works."

Darwin knew that all the toil and trouble of documenting the various life forms existing on islands would some day come to fruition. But, despite his keen scientific skills, he failed to separate and tag his specimen collections according to each island visited. This proved to be somewhat disastrous later when he realized the importance of sorting out each species by geographic locale to understand their adaptations.

Luckily, the captain of the H.M.S. Beagle, who made his own collections, properly tagged his specimens, allowing Darwin to backtrack and correctly pinpoint some of his own samples.

Wallace couldn't afford to be that sloppy with his work. He carefully noted where specimens came from so that he could find them again if necessary. As a professional collector, Wallace financed his trips by sending back species that were in demand in Europe.

This meticulous attention to detail and geography also became a distinctive quality of Wallace's thinking. While waiting out the monsoon season in Sarawak in 1855, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote a scientific paper on his thoughts on species distribution.

Darwin was alerted to Wallace's Sarawak paper and slowly began to realize that he was headed on the right path to his own thoughts on evolution. David Quammen summed up the historical situation in his masterful book, The Song of the Dodo: "Wallace's Sarawak paper was an overture. It hinted toward evolution but stopped short of explaining how the process might work. At that point in time, he had no theory to offer. Charles Darwin did have a theory but wasn't yet ready to offer it."

One must remember that in the mid-1800s, the prevailing explanation for how animals came to be and where they were found was something called "special creation." Progressive scientists, such as Darwin, were confounded by the Victorian mindset that God played the major role in species origins and distribution.

It's no wonder that Darwin was hesitant to lay out his natural selection theories against the Almighty.

[It's interesting to note that the modern day equivalent to "special creation" is the notion of "intelligent design." Again this implies that the Creator was shrewd enough to design each animal and plant for their particular habitat, even for those occurring more recently.]

Before we head back out to the islands, let's add a final note about Darwin's Origin of Species. A century after its publication and after all the critical brickbats, the biologist Julian Huxley tried to put this monumental work into perspective:

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Read Part I: Tropic Islands: Earth's Evolutionary Guards

Read Part III: Islands of Animal Extinction

Read Part IV: Terrestrial Islands: Breaking Up The Rainforest Biome

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