BBC - Travel - The island that forever changed science about:reader?url=http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170525-the-island-t...

bbc.com

BBC - Travel - The island that forever

changed science
Theodora Sutcliffe
6-8 minutes

The Indonesian island of Ternate, like its neighbour Tidore, is

almost all volcano. It sprouts from the sea, an almost-perfect, yet
truncated cone, wreathed in steamy clouds and fringed with a
narrow strip of flatlands and beach that house an airport, a city and
an around-the-island road.

Even in the run-up to the tourist event of the millennium, the full
solar eclipse of March 2016, Ternate felt a remote place: the sort of
island where its hard for a foreigner to cover more than a few
metres without being enlisted for a group selfie, and small children
greet you, gender regardless, with cheery cries of Hello Mister! It
seems an implausible location, all in all, for one of sciences great
eureka moments, when a Victorian naturalist put pen to paper and
outlined the theory of evolution through natural selection.

It seems an implausible location, all in all, for one of sciences great

eureka moments

When 35-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace arrived in Ternate in

January 1858, hed been exploring the vast and sprawling mass of
islands he called the Malay Archipelago for almost four years.
Travelling thousands of miles by steamer, sailing ships and native

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boats, on horseback and on foot, he and his assistants had killed,

skinned or pinned tens of thousands of specimens, from
orangutans to birds of paradise to the sloth-like marsupial known as
the cuscus, not to mention thousands of species of beetle.

By then, Ternates glory days were over, swept away by

colonisation. For millennia, cloves had grown only on Ternate,
Tidore and a handful of nearby islands and for more than 3,000
years theyd crossed continents in an elaborate web of barter and
trade, gaining value with each transaction. Enriched by this
precious traffic, the sultans of Ternate laid claim to an empire that
stretched as far as the Philippines and Papua and engaged in
vicious rivalry with the sultans of equally tiny Tidore.

Today the piney, mulled-wine scent of drying cloves sweeps across

the island during harvest time, and clove trees clothe the volcanos
lower slopes: small boys in nylon football shorts wait by the
roadside to escort you to the towering tree that is, they claim, the
oldest in the world. But first the Dutch, then the British broke the
sultans clove monopoly. By 1858, the island that had attracted the
pirate-navigator Francis Drake and the explorer Ferdinand
Magellan was a backwater.

Wallace took a tumble-down house surrounded by fruit trees, five

minutes walk from the market on the outskirts of what is now
Ternate City. Although local guides promote several different
houses as the spot where Wallace lived, its almost certainly long
gone.

There were two roads that it could have been along, given the
information he gave us, said Wallace expert John Van Wyhe of the
National University of Singapore. There are no houses even half

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the age they should be.

Wallace had barely moved in to his shady house with its cool,
freshwater well when he fell sick, most likely with malaria. Cold
sweats alternated with hot fits, and Wallace had to lie down for
hours at a time, with nothing to do but think. Far from home,
freezing or sweltering in the shadow of the volcano, quite likely in
fear for his life, Wallaces mind turned to Thomas Malthus, the
Georgian-era intellectual who had argued that nature kept human
populations down by disease, famine, war and accidents and
realised a similar logic could apply to animal species.

During his travels through what is today mostly Indonesia, Wallace

had seen thousands of thought-provoking creatures. There was the
flying frog, which demonstrated how toes already adapted for
swimming and climbing could be used to soar through the air.
There were orangutans, which perhaps had their own ancestors,
like chimpanzees and gorillas; Wallace had tended a baby as a pet.
Sickness and perhaps with it the prospect of his own extinction
concentrated his mind.

Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction

which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do
some die and some live? he later wrote. And the answer was
clearly, that on the whole, the best fitted live. Natural selection was,
Wallace realised in a flash, the mechanism by which species
evolved and came to be.

Inspired, Wallace waited anxiously for his fever to pass, and quickly
noted down the outline of a paper. Over the next couple of
evenings, he worked his theory up, and sent it to Charles Darwin,
already a respected scientist.

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When the letter arrived in England, on 18 June 1858, it threw

Darwin into something of a panic. He had been working on his own
theory of evolution by natural selection for almost 20 years, and
was about a year off finishing what would have been a massive,
three-volume epic on the subject. Nonetheless, he did the right
thing, and the mens colleagues presented both ideas of natural
selection together a fortnight later.

If it hadnt been for Wallace interrupting Darwin, hed have carried

on and written this big book which probably no one would have
read

Then everyone said, Gosh, this is really interesting, can you tell us
about your theory? We cant wait for this big book to be finished,
Wyhe said. That book became On the Origin of Species. If it hadnt
been for Wallace interrupting Darwin, hed have carried on and
written this big book which probably no one would have read. As it
is, Darwin published the book in November 1859, shaking the world
of religion and shaping the world of science.

And Wallace? He continued his travels. In 1859, he laid down a

landmark in the field of biogeography, tracing a line that delineates
the boundaries of Southeast Asian and Australian fauna: the
Wallace Line. In 1862, he returned to England, having collected no
fewer than 125,660 natural history specimens, including more than
83,000 beetles. In 1868, he published an endlessly readable
memoir of his travels, The Malay Archipelago. He would live till the
age of 90, writing in support of causes as diverse as womens rights
and spiritualism, and never failing to extend his colleague Darwin
the respect that he deserved.

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