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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