But Alfred Russel felt that the mechanism of natural selection alone accounted for everything up to, but not including Homo sapiens. He wrote:
[Darwin concluded that] Man’s whole nature – physical, mental, intellectual, and moral – was developed from the lower animals by means of the same laws of variation and survival; and, as a consequence of this belief…there was no difference in kind betwen man’s nature and animal nature, but only one of degree.
Wallace obviously thought there was a difference in kind, and asked why some skills, seemingly not essential to survival, developed. Man’s ability to reason, to temporize, to cry at Italian opera and dance the waltz and make music and tell stories and remember birthdays to some kind of mysterious, benevolent, external force.
[This class of human faculties] cannot, therefore, be thus accounted for. Such are the the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity, and infinity – the capacity for intense artistic feelings of pleasure – and for those abstract notions…which render geometry and arithmetic possible…How were all or any of these faculties first developed, when they could have been of no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism? How could “natural selection”, or survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, at all favor the development of mental powers so entirely removed from the material necessities of savage men…The highly developed artistic and moral qualities of modern man could not be put downto natural selection.
How did such abstract characteristics come about? Wallace avoided using the word “God”, but spoke of God-like forces.
Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life. They may teach us how, by chemical, electrical, or higher natural laws, the organized body can be built up, can grow, can reproduce its like; but those laws and that growth cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness. But the moral and higher intellectual nature of man is as unique a phenomenon as was conscious life on its first appearance in the world, and the one is almost as difficult to conceive as originating by any law of evolution as the other. We may even go further, and maintain that there are certain purely physical characteristics of the human race which are not explicable on the theory of variation and survival of the fittest. The brain, the organs of speech, the hand, and the external form of man, offer some special difficulties in this respect.
Even from fifty meters away I could tell the orangutan sitting near the top of the rainforest tree was an adult male. His size, for one thing, as tall as a child but with the bulk of a rugby prop on steroids. Even more striking were his enlarged cheek pads and throat pouch, hairless hunks of flesh that framed his face into a silly grin. I quietly approached, but the big ape saw us coming and hurled dead branches at me, wanting to be left alone.
Some scientists say that soon an in-the-wild sighting like this will be impossible. Although some 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans survive on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, habitat loss, illegal logging, fires and poaching are taking their toll. Willie Smits, head of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, predicts that, if current trends continue, “in 20 years there will be no orangutans left in the wild.”
No orangutans. No orangutan tales. Just the memory of a poor relative who hasn’t done so well in life.
[Jeffrey A. McNeely co-authored one version of this article]
Chapter 6
DREAMING OF MALTHUS
During a malarial fit, Alfred Russel Wallace has his eureka moment about natural selection
TERNATE, Indonesia
The economic theory of Thomas Malthus isn’t what most people suffering a malaria delusion would dream about. But Alfred Russel Wallace, the sweaty patient in question, wasn’t a humdrum guy.
Here’s what transpired.
Alfred Russel Wallace, an English naturalist, explorer and beetle collector, had been ruminating about how new species evolved. He was convinced that new species came from other, pre-existing species, but he could not identify the mechanism of such transitions. The question challenged him for years, and it took a near-death experience to shake it free from his subconscious.
One night, soaked in sweat from a malarial fever (although some people speculate he had scrub typhus), Wallace recalled a passage from Thomas Malthus which explained why human population was kept under control. “I thought of his clear exposition of ‘the positive checks to increase’ – disease, accidents, war, and famine,” Wallace recalled in his autobiography.
The next morning Wallace wrote “From the effects of disease the most healthy escape; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning;…this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race…the fittest would survive.” [italics Wallace’s] He titled the document “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type”, headed it “Ternate, February, 1858”, and sent the ten-page handwritten manuscript by Dutch steamer to Charles Darwin in England.
Where exactly was Wallace when he wrote this famous paper? We know he mailed it from Ternate (and it is always referred to as the “Ternate Letter” or the “Ternate Paper”) but his journal entries, which are in this case vague, indicate that he might have actually been on the neighboring island of Halmahera, where he could conceivably have written the first fever-inspired draft, later to transcribe a clean copy on return to his more comfortable base in Ternate.
I start my search for Evolutionary Theory Ground Zero in Ternate, a spectacularly beautiful Manhattan-sized island with an smoldering conical volcano smack in the middle. Ternate which was once the home of the entire world’s production of cloves and therefore the Eldorado of Arab, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, British (Sir Francis Drake bought six tons of cloves from the sultan here) and Dutch exploration.
More specifically, I’m crawling around on the floor of a dilapidated house in this eastern Indonesia outpost, measuring tape in hand, trying to determine if this is where western philosophical thought took a major turn.
I had come to visit what might be the site of Wallace’s Archimedes-in-his-bath-type breakthrough.
The Sultan of Ternate claims that the house at No. 16 Jalan Sultan Hairun is the one in which Wallace stayed (or is more realistically, located on the same site). The floor plan of the half-a-tennis court-sized house is roughly the same as the one Wallace sketched in his book The Malay Archipelago, and the location and details sort of fit: “a deep well…five minutes to the beach”. We ate mangoes from a very old tree, perhaps one of the “wilderness of fruit-trees” he mentions.
The roof has collapsed and the residents are distant and poor relatives of the current sultan, the 48th of his line dating from 1257, one of the longest continuous royal families in the world.
I gathered together the three barely-royal families that share this spare, possibly historic space.
“Have you heard of evolution?” I ask.
A few nods.
“Charles Darwin?”
Fewer nods.
“Alfred Russel Wallace?”
Blank stares.
I asked several of the children at the house in Ternate if they had any idea why I was measuring the size of the black and white floor tiles in their home. Indonesians are too polite to criticize a visitor to his face, but I distinctly got the feeling that these boys and girls thought I was a little bit gila, a touch crazy.
Mad, perhaps, but I had a reason. “Come here, kids,” I said. “Let me tell you how a really gila man made history. Right here.”
Depending on how much of a conspiracy theorist you are, a case could be made that the so-called “theory of evolution” should be credited to Alfred Russel Wallace and not to Charles Darwin.
Various historians (but not a majority, by any means), suggest that Wallace, through his 1855 Sarawak Law, 1858 Ternate Letter and several scientific papers between the two, clearly outlined the theory of natural selection. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which
he had not published, differed from Wallace’s concept. More to the point, it was Wallace who first described, in the Ternate Letter, the concept that eventually became known as the “survival of the fittest”.
While the older and much better established Darwin had undoubtedly been thinking about evolution and collecting voluminous data, up to that moment he had not published a single word on the subject.
Wallace, on the other hand, had published several papers on evolution prior to the Ternate Paper, including the 1855 Sarawak Law, which stated the now obvious concept that: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.”
On receiving Wallace’s Ternate Paper, Darwin wrote to his friend Sir Charles Lyell, the famous geologist: “I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had had my manuscript sketch, written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract of it.”
The rest of the story is lost in conjecture, conspiracy theory, scraps of letters and psychobiography. What might have happened is this: Darwin had been thinking about evolution for years, had compiled much data, but was missing the key, the mechanism, the bit about “the fittest shall survive”. Once he had that, thanks to Wallace, Darwin and his well-placed cronies in the British scientific establishment, basically claimed the idea as their own. Darwin of course became one of the most famous thinkers ever. Wallace became an (important) footnote in history.
As enticing as it is to imagine Wallace sweating it out in Ternate, it is possible that Wallace might have been in Dodinga, a village on the New Jersey-sized neighboring island of Halmahera.
Of course Wallace’s bamboo and thatch house in Dodinga is long gone. But based on his helpful notes written a century and a half ago, and on a very arbitrary decision on what felt right, I sat under a palm tree next to a stream, now an unpleasant gray and littered with instant noodle packs and cigarette boxes. The air smelled of mangoes, and five children giggled while playing tag. The nearby house had a satellite dish. Was it here that one of history’s most important scientific discoveries was made? Some kids were flying kites nearby. They looked over at me, curious, shy. I beckoned them to approach. “This is important ground,” I began.
Chapter 7
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALFRED
Is a man’s most valuable possession his bow and arrow or a butterfly or a memory or simply time? What do you give a guy who lived a hundred and fifty years ago?
JIRLAI, Aru, Indonesia
What do you give a guy who lived a hundred and fifty years ago?
I write this on January 8, Alfred Russel Wallace’s birthday, and I want to zip back in time and give him a present.
Birthday presents for the young Alfred Russel Wallace were likely to have been meager. He was the eighth of nine children born to a lower-middle class family in Usk, Monmouthshire in South Wales, and hand-me-downs were his destiny.
Wallace’s father, a devout Anglican, failed solicitor and unsuccessful businessman, could afford little in the way of material goods.
But one gift his father did give the boy was a love of reading and encouragement to use a library, and in this way Alfred Wallace voraciously consumed an eclectic assortment of books on science, natural history and travel. His reading list included Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, all of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Malthus’ Principles of Population (of which Wallace said: “twenty years later [this book] gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species”), Alexander von Humboldt’s dramatic personal account of his travels in Latin America, Darwin’s journal of the Beagle, and Lyell’s Geology. One of the books that stimulated him most was a controversial book on evolution by another amateur naturalist, Robert Chambers, who wrote Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
In later life Wallace came to also appreciate how much he owed his older brother William for creating pasttimes which required no cash, and as a father himself Wallace deplored the growing craze of giving to children elaborate and contrived mechanical toys which called for no creative skill on the part of the recipient.
I toast you Alfred with sweet tea, since this tiny hamlet on this forgotten island of Aru in this isolated corner of the archipelago is alcohol-free.
Seems the headman, in what must have been a first in Indonesia, kicked out the Chinese merchant who had stocked a tiny shop in someone’s house. The headman was not driven by fundamentalist-Christian missionary zeal as much as he was concerned that his cash-poor fellow villagers would walk into the shop to get necessities like batteries and fishing line but would wind up spending the kids’ school fees on beer and cigarettes.
Seems people without stuff want stuff.
Wallace spent so much time in discomfort that he relished the simple luxury of having a home base in Ternate, writing “Few can imagine the luxury it was to stretch myself on a sofa, and to take my supper comfortably at table seated in my easy bamboo chair, after having for five weeks taken all my meals uncomfortably on the floor. Such things are trifles in health, but when the body is weakened by disease the habits of a lifetime can not be so easily set aside.”
I shudder at how much stuff Wallace had to lug around. He traveled “heavy”, as one shopping list described. “I bought knives, basins, and handkerchiefs for barter, which with the choppers, cloth, and beads I had brought with me, made a pretty good assortment. I also bought two Tower muskets to satisfy my crew, who insisted on the necessity of being armed against attacks of pirates; and with spices and a few articles of food for the voyage, nearly my last doit was expended.” He dragged around (or more correctly, paid others to drag around) “bed, blankets, pots, wash basin, tea, sugar, butter, salt, pickles, rice, bread and wine, pepper and curry powder, and a hundred more odds and ends.” He moaned that “packing and re-packing, calculating and contriving, [has] been the standing plague of my life for the last seven years.”
But in addition to those necessities think of what Wallace had to carry in order to survive and collect his specimens. Canvas. Rope. Tables and chairs. Pots and pans (including a giant skillet big enough to boil an orangutan skeleton). Casks of alcohol (to pickle his specimens). Butterfly nets. Frames to mount insects. Wooden boxes to pack specimens. Equipment for stuffing animals and birds. Camphor to stop the ants from eating everything.
I took part on a small expedition to Pulau Enu, on the other side of Aru, near the island of New Guinea. Ating Sumantri, the head of turtle conservation for the Indonesian nature conservation department, had the unenviable task of organizing the trip; ten days, ten people. One afternoon Ating and I sat on the beach and made a list of what we had brought:
FOOD
powdered milk, one can
coffee, six packs
tea, five packs
Khong Guan biscuits, one box
pineapple biscuits, 4 packs
pumpkin, two
cucumber, five kg
cabbage, 10 kg
beans, 5 kg
potatoes, 5 kg
onions, 5 kg
water, 20 x 20l jerrycans
bottled water, 48 bottles
rice, 25 kg
eggs, 50
soy sauce (sweet) 10 bottles
sambal hot sauce, 10 bottles
instant noodles, 24 packs
prawn crackers, 5 packs
sugar, 5 kg
vinegar, 1 bottle
shredded beef, ½ kg
dried beef, 2 kg
clove cigarettes, 80 packs
THINGS
firewood, 10 packs
detergent
matches
kerosene, 10 liters
rice pots, 2
wok
kettle
radio
rice strainer
plastic plates
mugs
ladle
plastic water jugs, 2
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br /> lanterns, 2
raffia, 1 roll
plastic sheets, 4x6 meters. 5
BOAT
gasoline, 40 l (for onboard generator)
diesel, 2,000 liters
Wallace made some 90 major moves during his Asian travels. Unpacking and packing. Some psychologist has said that the most stressful situations in life are loss of a loved one, getting fired, and moving.
Wallace wrote warmly about the joys of returning to civilization in Ternate, a town that was his base camp for some three years. “A deep well supplied me with pure cold water – a great luxury in this climate. Five minutes’ walk down the road brought me to the market and the beach. In this house I spent many happy days. Returning to it after a three or four months’ absence in some uncivilized region, I enjoyed the unwonted luxuries of milk and fresh bread, and regular supplies of fish and eggs, meat and vegetables, which were often sorely needed to restore my health and energy. I had ample space and convenience for unpacking, sorting, and arranging my treasures, and I had delightful walks in the suburbs of the town, or up the lower slopes of the mountain.”
And Wallace traveled with books. Heavy, bulky, but no doubt of great comfort to him during those lonely vigils in the wilderness.
“When I went to New Guinea, I took an old copy of ‘Tristam Shandy’, which I read through about three times,” he wrote. “It is an annoying and, you will perhaps say, a very gross book; but there are passages in it that have never been surpassed, while the character of Uncle Toby has, I think, never been equalled, except perhaps by that of Don Quixote.”
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 27