Download 2014 283 married Emma`s eldest brother Josiah

2014
283
BOOK REVIEWS
married Emma’s eldest brother Josiah 3rd; and Emma’s
brothers Henry and Hensleigh also married first cousins.
(Actually, Henry and his wife were double first cousins,
through both their fathers and their mothers.) There was
apparently nothing unusual about this—Kuper (2010)
reports that one out of 25 marriages among the English
upper middle classes in the 19th century were cousin
marriages.
However, the possible effects of consanguineous
marriages were of concern to Darwin. Among his
children: three died young (Anne, Mary, and Charles
Waring); three were married but had no children,
implying infertility (William, Henrietta, and George);
one remained unmarried, and may have had genetic
disabilities (Elizabeth); and only three married and had
children (Francis, Leonard, and Horace). Darwin went
so far as to suggest that the 1871 British census should
enquire about consanguineous marriages, intending
to investigate lessened fertility in the parents and
lessened vitality in the offspring. This suggestion was
not implemented.
Berra’s writing is straightforward and therefore easy
to read. Unfortunately, it is full of infelicities, such
as the above-mentioned “invented the field of plant
hormones,” which I presume means the study of plant
hormones rather than the actual invention of them.
My favorite is at the start of Chapter 2: “After four
years, nine months, and five days at sea, the H.M.S.
Beagle returned to England.” Clearly, it cannot have been
at sea for that time, or Darwin would have achieved
nothing, because he did his biology on land. Besides,
the record for being at sea is 1152 days, set by Reid
Stowe in 2010 (mostly alone, and without stopping
or being re-supplied with either food or fuel). The
previous record was by the Norwegian ship Fram, which
traveled for 1067 days while frozen in the Arctic drift ice
(1893–1896).
Finally, I will point out that one of Darwin’s other
legacies has been to adorn one side of the British £10
note. This legacy will cease in 2017, when he is due to
be replaced by the romance novelist Jane Austen (author
of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility). Perhaps,
this is the start of the moratorium.
REFERENCES
Berra T.M., Alvarez G., Ceballos F.C. 2010a. Was the
Darwin/Wedgwood dynasty adversely affected by consanguinity?
BioScience 60:376–383.
Berra T.M., Alvarez G., Shannon K. 2010b. The Galton–Darwin–
Wedgwood pedigree of H.H. Laughlin. Biol. J. Linn. Soc.
101:228–241.
Kuper A. 2010. Incest and influence: the private life of bourgeois
England. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Loy J.D., Loy K.M. 2010. Emma Darwin: a Victorian life. Gainesville
(FL): University Press of Florida.
Townshend E. 2009. Darwin’s dogs: how Darwin’s pets helped form a
world-changing theory of evolution. London: Francis Lincoln.
David A. Morrison, Section for Parasitology, Swedish University
of Agricultural Sciences, 751 89 Uppsala, Sweden; E-mail:
[email protected]
Syst. Biol. 63(2):283–284, 2014
© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
DOI:10.1093/sysbio/syt111
Advance Access publication January 16, 2014
Island Life, or The Phenomena and Causes of
Insular Faunas and Floras, Including a Revision and
Attempted Solution of the Problem of Geological
Climates.
By Alfred Russel Wallace; Introduction
and commentary by Lawrence R. Heaney. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2013. Lxxi+52 pp. ISBN
978-0-226-04503-0 $30 £21 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-22604517-7 $30 (e-book).
The 19th century naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel
Wallace (1823–1913) is perhaps best known for his
recognition of the biogeographic disjunction between
Bali and Lombok in Indonesia, now known as Wallace’s
Line, separating predominantly Asian and Australian
faunal elements. He is also famed for developing a
theory of natural selection independently of his slightly
older contemporary and colleague Charles Darwin.
Wallace travelled the world, particularly Amazonia and
southeast Asia, studying the plants and animals he
encountered, and pondering how their habitat might
have affected their evolution.
[11:51 7/2/2014 Sysbio-syt074.tex]
Because 2013 is the centenary of his death, a number
of books have been appearing, ranging from annotated
collections of his unpublished notebooks, letters, and
diaries, to commentated reprints of his various books.
Important works include The Malay Archipelago (1869),
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870),
The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), Island Life
(1880), and Darwinism (1889).
Island Life is the culmination of Wallace’s travels and
studies, as well as being one of the great works of 19th
century scientific literature, in which he explores his
ideas on selection and evolution, and how these might
have occurred from an environment-driven perspective.
He starts by asking the reader to contemplate why
countries as far-flung as Britain and Japan share similar
flora and fauna when those of neighboring islands in
Malaysia are utterly unalike, and why the geological
formations of Scotland and Wales appear to be the result
of glaciers when they lie in the temperate zone. He
dismisses submerged continents and “special creation”
as possible explanations, and instead presents detailed
Page: 283
280–288
284
SYSTEMATIC BIOLOGY
evidence for mass migration of species, and drastic and
repeated climatic changes throughout the earth’s history.
The book has two parts. The first is The Dispersal of
Organisms: its Phenomena, Laws, and Causes (10 chapters),
in which the biogeography of plants and animals across
the planet is explored in relation to the effects of climate
and dispersal. Wallace particularly emphasizes changes
of climate involving glacial epochs, which is something
that he also covered in several of his research papers,
producing the first theory of continental glaciation based
on a combination of geographical and astronomical
causes. He also covers the estimated age of the earth,
and the relative permanence of continents compared
with many of the islands. Ultimately, of course, he
considers evolution to be “the key to distribution” of all
living things; and conversely, geographical distribution
was always his strongest evidence in favor of biological
evolution.
The second part of the book is Insular Faunas and
Floras (14 chapters), where case studies are examined
for most of the major and/or biogeographically
significant islands around the world. These include:
(i) oceanic islands, such as the Azores, Bermuda,
Galápagos Islands, St Helena, and Sandwich Islands;
(ii) continental islands, such the British Isles, Borneo,
Java, Japan, Formosa, and Madagascar; and (iii) what he
calls “anomalous islands,” which include New Zealand
(covered in two chapters) and the Celebes.
Unlike Darwin, most of Wallace’s theories were based
on personal field experience, and this, combined with
his ability to synthesise the ideas of his contemporaries
in a concise but highly readable manner, makes this
book a great read for scientists, historians, and anyone
VOL. 63
interested in the historical development of the Theory of
Evolution.
This reprinting of the first edition of his great work
includes a Foreword (by David Quammen), and a long
and informative Introduction (by Lawrence R. Heaney).
These allow the modern reader to place Wallace’s ideas
into a modern post-continental drift paradigm, where
our ideas on evolution have been influenced by genetics,
DNA, and other developments not available to Wallace
at the time of his writing. Nevertheless, despite the
now somewhat dated and, in some cases no longer
accepted, ideas on how plants and animals moved
around the world, Wallace is still, rightly, seen as the
father of Island Biogeography. He has been a major
influence on those subsequent workers developing and
refining the theories of dispersal and speciation on
isolated island chains. Wallace also (unwittingly it
seems) pre-empted other theories relating to some of
these islands: his map on page 443 showing the 1000
fathom depth line connecting Australia to New Zealand
via New Caledonia, anticipates by nearly a century
some of the theories about the now largely submerged
continent of Zealandia/Tasmantis, and potential early
Cenozoic dispersal routes into New Zealand from
Australia.
Well written, engaging and educational, this book is
definitely one that any serious biologist should read.
John G. Conran, Australian Centre for Evolutionary Biology & Biodiversity
(ACEBB) and Sprigg Geobiology Centre, School of Earth and Environmental
Sciences, DX 650 312 Benham Building, University of Adelaide, SA 5005,
Australia; E-mail: [email protected]
Syst. Biol. 63(2):284–288, 2014
© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
DOI:10.1093/sysbio/syt112
Advance Access publication January 3, 2014
On the Organic Law of Change: A Facsimile
Edition and Annotated Transcription of Alfred Russel
Wallace’s Species Notebook of 1855–1859. Edited and
annotated by James T. Costa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013. xii+573 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-724884 $49.95 £36.95 E44.95 (hardback).
History prefers to remember single individuals,
whether it be George Washington or Adolf Hitler, Isaac
Newton or Albert Einstein. At the time of his death
in 1913, Alfred Russel Wallace was as internationally
well-known as any other English language biologist,
but history has preferred to remember Charles Darwin
instead. James Costa’s presentation of Wallace’s Species
Notebook is part of a concerted attempt to redress
Wallace’s eclipse, as part of the centenary activities
commemorating his death.
Wallace (1823–1913) was as important as anyone in
turning biology from natural history into a science.
[11:51 7/2/2014 Sysbio-syt074.tex]
Even as late as 1895, when Alfred Nobel created
his famous prizes, the only scientific part of biology
was still considered to be “physiology and medicine”
rather than the much broader field we now recognize.
Things have changed so much that, these days, we
even divide biological science into many disciplines,
including biogeography, evolutionary biology, ecology,
genetics, physiology, biochemistry, immunology, and so
on. Our debt to Wallace is in helping to establish the
first two of these disciplines. Many other people made
important contributions, of course, not the least being
Alexander von Humboldt in biogeography and Charles
Darwin in evolutionary biology, but Wallace was there
at the crucial time in the second half of the 1800s, so
that he literally saw natural history become biological
science in his own lifetime, and actively participated in
that transition.
Wallace is tolerably well-known within biology itself,
if not outside it (Smith and Beccaloni 2008), and he
Page: 284
280–288