By Sheldon Greaves

The NPR web site has a fascinating article about one of the most important naturalists you’ve probably never heard of: Alfred Russell Wallace. To those who know of him, he is regarded as the co-discoverer of  the theory of evolution alongside Charles Darwin. Wallace independently arrived at many of the same conclusions as Darwin, and sent a short paper describing his findings to Darwin for his comments as an “older mentor.” Darwin himself had been sitting on his own conclusions for some years, and Wallace’s paper prompted him to publish those findings in a paper written jointly with Wallace. Throughout his career, although the credit for evolution accrued to Darwin, he was always generous in crediting Wallace’s contributions.

What struck me about this article were the little bits about how evolution was the result of good, solid observation and field work. Darwin’s collection of specimens acquired during his voyage aboard the Beagle is well known, but Wallace also was a prodigious field naturalist. He collected and shipped over 100,000 insect, animal, and bird specimens to British museums during his eight-year stay in the Dutch East Indies. While this kind of collecting is rarely done anymore, even by professionals, it was difficult, painstaking work.

Citizen science projects seek to take some of the drudgery out of field work by spreading the burden across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of workers. But I think Wallace’s experience shows that there is still a place for one or perhaps a small group of naturalists studying a region deeply through its biodiversity. Sometimes you have to accumulate a vast body of data and let it percolate in the mind before the conclusions come. Such was the case with Wallace, whose paper to Darwin came to him in a flash while he was suffering the effects of a fever on the island of Halmahera. 

Another remarkable result of Wallace’s field studies was the boundary he identified between Asia and Australia, defined by the profound differences in species:

He noticed, for example, that the maleo [a bird found only on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi] is related to species found in Australia, but not in Asia, not even on the island of Borneo just a few miles to the west. Even non-experts may observe that there are no elephants or rhinoceroses in Australia, and no kangaroos or koalas in Asia.

Whitten, Fauna & Flora International’s Asia-Pacific regional director, says Wallace concluded that Sulawesi was located on some sort of boundary line that separates different biological regions.

“Clearly this was a transition between the Asian world and the Australian world,” Whitten says. “And so came the thought of this line that could be drawn between Borneo and Sulawesi, that would separate the Asian fauna from the Australian fauna.” 

npr.org

Wallace didn’t know it at the time, but that line is actually the divide between two continental shelves. The line is now called the Wallace Line, and the transitional region around it is called Wallacea.

It’s good to remember in this age where doing science gets done through apps, where we gather data but are disconnected from it by the nature of a mass project, that there is value to be had, discoveries to be made the old fashioned way: thousands of carefully recorded observations, one at a time.