{"id":394684,"date":"2017-06-06T23:30:39","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T23:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ghana-mma.com\/2017\/06\/06\/the-island-that-forever-changed-science\/"},"modified":"2017-06-06T23:30:39","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T23:30:39","slug":"the-island-that-forever-changed-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2017\/06\/06\/the-island-that-forever-changed-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The island that forever changed science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p>The theory of evolution through natural selection was outlined on Ternate island, Indonesia (Credit: Ali Trisno Pranoto\/Getty)<\/p>\n<div>\n<!--               \n\n<div class=\"in-ad\">\n\n\n<div id='div-gpt-ad-1495043641385-0' style='height:250px; width:300px;'>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n              <\/div>\n\n --><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When we think of evolution, we think of Charles Darwin. Yet on a tiny, volcanic, Indonesian island, a little-known naturalist formulated a theory that would shape the world of science.<\/p>\n<p>*************************************************<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/1002554\/Myjoyonline.com_InArticle_300x250 --><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">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 it\u2019s 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 \u2018Hello Mister!\u2019 It seems an implausible location, all in all, for one of science\u2019s great eureka moments, when a Victorian naturalist put pen to paper and outlined the theory of evolution through natural selection.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When 35-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace arrived in Ternate in January 1858, he\u2019d 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 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.<\/p>\n<p>By then, Ternate\u2019s glory days were over, swept away by colonisation. For millennia, cloves had grown only on Ternate, Tidore and a handful of nearby islands \u2013 and for more than 3,000 years they\u2019d 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 \u2013 and engaged in vicious rivalry with the sultans of equally tiny Tidore.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Alfred Russel Wallace visited Ternate in 1858 to continue his research on the Malay Archipelago (Credit: Credit: The Natural History Museum\/Alamy)\" src=\"https:\/\/ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/p053z1jl.jpg\" data-pagespeed-url-hash=\"3092653455\" onload=\"pagespeed.CriticalImages.checkImageForCriticality(this);\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Photo:\u00a0<span style=\"background-color:rgb(241, 241, 239); color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">Alfred Russel Wallace visited Ternate in 1858 to continue his research on the Malay Archipelago (Credit: The Natural History Museum\/Alamy)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Today the piney, mulled-wine scent of drying cloves sweeps across the island during harvest time, and clove trees clothe the volcano\u2019s 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\u2019 clove monopoly. By 1858, the island that had attracted the pirate-navigator Francis Drake and the explorer Ferdinand Magellan was a backwater.<\/p>\n<p>Wallace took a tumble-down house surrounded by fruit trees, five minutes\u2019 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, it\u2019s almost certainly long gone.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere were two roads that it could have been along, given the information he gave us,\u201d said Wallace expert John Van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore. \u201cThere are no houses even half the age they should be.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"For thousands of years, cloves could only be found on Ternate and a handful of nearby islands (Credit: Bruce Dale\/Getty)\" src=\"https:\/\/ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/p053z1p0.jpg\" data-pagespeed-url-hash=\"2151231301\" onload=\"pagespeed.CriticalImages.checkImageForCriticality(this);\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Photo:\u00a0<span style=\"background-color:rgb(241, 241, 239); color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">For thousands of years, cloves could only be found on Ternate and a handful of nearby islands (Credit: Bruce Dale\/Getty)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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, Wallace\u2019s mind turned to Thomas Malthus, the Georgian-era intellectual who had argued that nature kept human populations down by disease, famine, war and accidents \u2013 and realised a similar logic could apply to animal species.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2013 and perhaps with it the prospect of his own extinction \u2013 concentrated his mind.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cVaguely 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?\u201d he later wrote. \u201cAnd the answer was clearly, that on the whole, the best fitted live.\u201d Natural selection was, Wallace realised in a flash, the mechanism by which species evolved and came to be.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 men\u2019s colleagues presented both ideas of natural selection together a fortnight later.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Wallace\u2019s experience with different animal species inspired his theory of natural (Credit: Credit: De Agostini\/Biblioteca Ambrosiana\/Getty)\" src=\"https:\/\/ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/p053z1tk.jpg\" data-pagespeed-url-hash=\"2045993404\" onload=\"pagespeed.CriticalImages.checkImageForCriticality(this);\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Photo:\u00a0<span style=\"background-color:rgb(241, 241, 239); color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">Wallace\u2019s experience with different animal species inspired his theory of natural selection (Credit: De Agostini\/Biblioteca Ambrosiana\/Getty)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThen everyone said, \u2018Gosh, this is really interesting, can you tell us about your theory? We can\u2019t wait for this big book to be finished,\u2019\u201d Wyhe said. \u201cThat book became On the Origin of Species. If it hadn\u2019t been for Wallace interrupting Darwin, he\u2019d have carried on and written this big book which probably no one would have read.\u201d As it is, Darwin published the book in November 1859, shaking the world of religion and shaping the world of science.<\/p>\n<p>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 women\u2019s rights and spiritualism, and never failing to extend his colleague Darwin the respect that he deserved.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Wallace and Charles Darwin\u2019s theories of natural selection were presented together in 1858 (Credit: Peter MacDiarmid\/Getty)\" src=\"https:\/\/ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/p053z1qp.jpg\" data-pagespeed-url-hash=\"3744141048\" onload=\"pagespeed.CriticalImages.checkImageForCriticality(this);\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Photo:\u00a0<span style=\"background-color:rgb(241, 241, 239); color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">Wallace and Charles Darwin\u2019s theories of natural selection were presented together in 1858 (Credit: Peter MacDiarmid\/Getty)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:arial,helvetica,freesans,sans-serif\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The theory of evolution through natural selection was outlined on Ternate island, Indonesia (Credit: Ali Trisno Pranoto\/Getty) \u00a0 When we think of evolution, we think of Charles Darwin. Yet on a tiny, volcanic, Indonesian island, a little-known naturalist formulated a theory that would shape the world of science. ************************************************* The Indonesian island of Ternate, like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-business"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The island that forever changed science - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2017\/06\/06\/the-island-that-forever-changed-science\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"The island that forever changed science - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"The theory of evolution through natural selection was outlined on Ternate island, Indonesia (Credit: Ali Trisno Pranoto\/Getty) \u00a0 When we think of evolution, we think of Charles Darwin. 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