On the Origin of a Theory

by Richard Conniff

This is an excerpt from my book The Species Seekers, and I am publishing it here today to honor the 200th birthday of Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of evolutionary theory.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Leafing through the mail at his home outside London one June day 150 years ago, Charles Darwin came across an envelope sent from an island in what is now part of Indonesia. The writer was a young acquaintance, Alfred Russel Wallace, who eked out a living as a biological collector, sending butterflies, bird skins and other specimens back to England. This time, Wallace had sent along a 20-page manuscript, requesting that Darwin show it to other members of the British scientific community.

As he read, Darwin saw with dawning horror that the author had arrived at the same evolutionary theory he had been working on, without publishing a word, for 20 years. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” he lamented in a note to his friend the geologist Charles Lyell. Darwin ventured that he would be “extremely glad now” to publish a brief account of his own lengthy manuscript, but that “I would far rather burn my whole book than that [Wallace] or any man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.”

The threat to his life’s work could hardly have come at a worse moment. Darwin’s daughter Etty, 14, was frighteningly ill with diphtheria. His 18-month-old son, Charles, would soon lie dead of scarlet fever. Lyell and another Darwin friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, cobbled together a compromise, rushing both Darwin’s and Wallace’s works before a meeting of the Linnean Society a few days later, on July 1, 1858. The reading took place in a narrow, stuffy ballroom at Burlington House, just off Piccadilly Circus, and neither author was present. (Darwin was at his son’s funeral; Wallace was in New Guinea.) Nor was there any discussion. The society’s president went home muttering about the lack of any “striking discoveries” that year. And so began the greatest revolution in the history of science.

We call it Darwinism, for short. But in truth, it didn’t start with Darwin, or with Wallace either, for that matter. Great ideas seldom arise in the romantic way we like to imagine—the bolt from the blue, the lone genius running through the streets crying, “Eureka!” Like evolution itself, science more often advances by small steps, with different lines converging on the same solution.

E.O. WILSON on Cooperation & the Tribal Mind

Photo: Gerald Forster

by Richard Conniff

Discover Magazine, June 2006

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Edward O. Wilson has spent a lifetime squinting at ants and has come away with some of the biggest ideas in evolutionary biology since Darwin. “Sociobiology” and “biodiversity” are among the terms he popularized, as is “evolutionary biology” itself.

He has been in the thick of at least two nasty scientific brawls. In the 1950s, his field of systematics, the traditional science of identifying and classifying species based on their anatomies, was being shoved aside by molecular biology, which focused on genetics. His Harvard University colleague James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, declined to acknowledge Wilson when they passed in the hall. Then in the 1970s, when Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, other Harvard colleagues attacked the idea of analyzing human behavior from an evolutionary perspective as sexist, racist, or worse. He bore all the hostility in the polite, courtly style of his Southern upbringing, and largely prevailed. Sociobiology, though still controversial, has become mainstream as evolutionary psychology. The molecular biology wars may also be ending in a rapprochement, he says, as the “test tube jockeys” belatedly recognize that they need the “stamp collector” systematists after all.

Wilson, who turns 77 this month, has published three books during the past year that fit his own wry definition of a magnum opus: “a book which when dropped from a three-story building is big enough to kill a man.” Nature Revealed (Johns Hopkins) is a selection of his writings since 1949. From So Simple a Beginning (W. W. Norton) is an anthology of writings by Darwin, and Pheidole in the New World (Harvard) is a reorganization of an entire ant genus, including 341 new species Wilson discovered and more than 600 of his own drawings.

RC: You once wrote that you saw yourself parading provocative ideas “like a subaltern riding the regimental colors along the enemy line.”

Wilson: That’s right, “along the enemy line.” That’s an adolescent and very Southern way of putting it, but I wanted to say that I’m a risk taker at heart.

RC: And a provocateur?

Wilson: Yes, but not a controversialist. There’s a distinction. Once I feel I’m right, I have enjoyed provoking.

RC: Your adversaries from the 1970s would be appalled by how much your ideas about sociobiology have taken hold.

Wilson: The opposition has mostly fallen silent. Anyway, it was promoted by what turned out to be a very small number of biologists with a 1960s political agenda. Most of the opposition came from the social sciences, where it was visceral and almost universal.

RC: The social scientists were threatened by the invasion of their territory?

Wilson: That’s right.

RC: The same way that you were threatened by the molecular biologists invading the biological field in the 1950s?

Wilson: They didn’t invade it so much as they dismissed it. What’s been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts. It’s personally satisfying and symbolic that Jim Watson and I now get on so well. We even appeared onstage a couple of times together during the 50th anniversary year of the discovery of DNA.

RC: You once described Watson as “the most unpleasant human being” you’d ever met. (Keep reading)

Pandemic Pastimes in the Natural World

Today’s photos of wildlife in my own Connecticut neighborhood are all by Kristofer Rowe.

 

Yes, the times are incredibly stressful.  But getting outdoors will help, and watching wildlife is one place where social distancing works just fine. Not only can you do it on your own, but the animals don’t want you in their faces, and you’ll see a lot more of them if you keep your distance. 

 I wrote this piece a while ago to introduce newcomers to birdwatching and other quiet joys of the natural world. I’m deleting the lead, which was about new year’s resolutions back in that peaceful time. But most of the ideas that follow still make sense in the face of COVID19.

by Richard Conniff

Instead of resolving to exercise more, lose weight, and spend more time outdoors, try giving yourself a motive to do all three. Set out to see something new at least once a day among the beautiful and often dramatic wildlife that lives all around you. Birds are the easiest way to start, and good binoculars help. But insects, spiders, mammals, plants, mushrooms, and even rocks will do. (And note: Being in the city shouldn’t be an impediment.  Matthew Wills of @backyardbeyond, seems lately to see more copulating by kestrels on chimney pots and antennas around his Brooklyn apartment than locked-down millennials even want to think about right now.)

Here are a baker’s dozen ideas to get you in the swing of things:

Gray squirrel (Photo: Kristofer Rowe)

1. Learn to identify 10 species in your neighborhood. Go for the easy stuff—house sparrows, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays, gray squirrels, chipmunks. Then move on to 20, 50, 100 species. Do it on the golf course, to distract your pals from your lousy swing or to remind them that birdies can matter in more ways than one. If you’re a college student stuck back at home with your parents and cursing those birds that dare to wake you up at 10 a.m., demonstrate your romantic side by learning to identify their songs. (Try here for help.  You’ll also find good stuff here.

2. Hold still and just watch a wild animal for a while, even if you don’t know its name: a cormorant diving for fish, a seagull smashing open shellfish on the rocks, a squirrel burying seeds, birds mating, a snapping turtle laying her eggs. Just look. And don’t get too close. Wild things deserve a little respect.

3. You use your smartphone to help you get started.  Try not to let it distract you from the experience, but, sure, take a picture, or record a song. When you get home, you can

Digging Out From the Ashes of a Ruined Museum

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

With the hollowed-out shell of their old building standing in ruins nearby, and its history-rich contents in ashes, staff and scientists of Brazil’s National Museum met Wednesday morning for the first time since Sunday’s fire. They face a future suddenly bereft of a vast assortment of items from Brazil’s natural and cultural heritage, which explorers and researchers had collected and preserved over the museum’s 200-year history.

No one died or was injured in the fire—astonishingly, given staffers’ last-minute efforts to salvage specimens and equipment as parts of the building’s interior tumbled down around them. But one museum official estimated up to 18 million of the institution’s original 20 million specimens might have been destroyed in the raging blaze, which began soon after the building closed Sunday evening. Among the unique items missing and presumed lost were the only recordings of languages of tribes that have vanished, and the only specimens of plants and animals that have gone extinct, from places that in some cases no longer exist.

Museum Director Alexander Kellner told Scientific American that a meeting with members of Brazil’s congress, cabinet and Pres. Michel Temer had secured an immediate guarantee of $2.4 million to stabilize the museum’s gutted shell, located in a park on the north side of Rio de Janeiro, “and to recover what can be recovered.” This will inevitably be a slow process. Some paleontology specimens, for instance, may have survived within heavy-duty storage containers called compactors. But those compactors are now singed and covered with

The Making of a Naturalist: Bill Stanley

Bill Stanley, a mammalogist at the Field Museum, prematurely appeared on the Wall of the Dead last year, after succumbing  to a heart attack, age 58, while running a trapline for rare species in Ethiopia.

Now the Field Museum has posted a nice video about the flipping of a switch

Why Field Biologists Do What They Do

I like this account of working in the natural world.  I found it in an article by Don Lyman, about field work in a New Jersey salt marsh. (That’s my old habitat.  And “ticks on the delicates”? Yes, I have been there, too.)  The speaker is Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin:

“We like being surprised by nature. We enjoy watching an organism conduct some behavior in the field that we could have never seen in the lab. We enjoy finding organisms living in places we never would have expected them, like kilometers under the Antarctic ice. We enjoy the adventure of getting to new places and discovering species new to science. We take great pleasure in understanding how species interact with each other in the wild as they find food, avoid predators, reproduce, and pass genes on to the next generation. Nature never ceases to amaze, so we always return to nature, where we pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. To many of us, that’s worth bloody knuckles,

A Cold Death in South America

View of Tierra del Fuego painted by Alexander Buchan four days before he joined the fatal expedition into the interior

In putting together The Wall of the Dead:  A Memorial to Lost Naturalists, I have been continually aware that local collectors and other underlings often get left out of history.  So I was intrigued to come across an account of two explorers lost in January 1769 on Capt. Cook’s first circumnavigation of the globe.  Both Richmond and Dorlton were servants–and specimen collectors–for the great botanist Joseph Banks.  Cook’s journal noted them both as negro servants.

Banks writing afterward in his journal:

 The weather had all this time been vastly fine much like a sunshiny day in May, so that neither heat nor cold was troublesome to us nor were there any insects to molest us, which made me think the traveling much better than what I had before met with in Newfoundland.

We passd about half way very well when the cold seemd to have at once an effect infinitely beyond what I have ever experienced. Dr Solander was the first who felt it, he said he could not go any fa[r]ther but must lay down, tho the ground was coverd with snow, and down he laid

A Beetle Like a Book of Prayers

Neolucanus baongocae, named by the discoverer after his daughter, Nguyen Bao Ngoc

A researcher in Vietnam reports the discovery of a beautiful new stag beetle from Bidoup-Nui Ba National Park in the Central Highlands.

I’m posting it here because the colors and patina remind me of an old leather-bound volume illuminated by medieval monks and rubbed smooth by devoted handling through all the centuries since then.

But self-reproducing.

Ain’t nature frickin’ grand?

The genus is Neolucanus, and entomologist Nguyen Quang Thai fashioned the species name baongocae after his daughter, Nguyen Bao Ngoc, which is also a lovely thing.

The description appears in the journal Zootaxa.

Strange New Brazilian Porcupine Discovered

New South American porcupine (Photo: Hugo Fernandes-Ferreira)

The big news in species discovery this week is the first new tapir species since 1865–an animal that can weigh in at 240 pounds.

But this one is quirkier.  Here’s the report from a web site that snarks it up amusingly, or idiotically, depending on your point of view.  The author seems to think the new species is some sort of bizarre cross between a porcupine and a monkey.   It’s really just a porcupine, not a “monkey pine”:

Biologists from the Federal University of Paraíba in Brazil have discovered a new species of porcupine that – to the uninitiated – basically just looks like an amazing, pug-nosed, spiky monkey.

With a prehensile tail, these Coendou porcupines are very similar to most internet writers we know: nocturnal, solitary, prickly, and slow-moving. Found only in Central and South America, the monkey-pines live in trees, where they spend their nights collecting leaves and fruit for food. Their tail operates as a fifth hand for balance in the treetops; unfortunately, they’re incapable of jumping, and have to climb all the way down if they want to venture into a new tree.

This new species of monkey-pine is called the Coendou baturitensis, or the Baturite porcupine. According to this paper in Revista Nordestina de Biologia, “[t]he name refers to the locality of origin, a forests on a mountain range similar to the Brejos de Altitude of the Brazilian Northeast.”

Sadly, the Baturite monkey-pine probably wouldn’t make the greatest of pets, as it is still covered in sharp, tri-colored quills. Cuddle with caution.

Here’s a more detailed (and less fanciful) report from Sergio Prostak at Sci-News.com.  The new species is from the Brazilian state of Ceará, right out on the easternmost tip of the country.

Spectacular New Dolphin Species Discovered

This new species somehow managed to go unnoticed.

Just the other week I was talking about how giant species unknown to science keeping turning up, and now a pretty one–and a pretty big one, at that–has turned up in sight of land, off the coast of Australia.

Here’s the press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society, and also check out a few more lovely photos below:

A species of humpback dolphin previously unknown to science is swimming in the waters off northern Australia, according to a team of researchers working for the Wildlife Conservation Society,