Today was the first t-shirt day we’ve had in a long time, and I wasn’t going to miss it. I ended up making it a barefoot day, too. Just went out into nature with no agenda for a few hours.
What came to me was: what if Darwin and Wallace had stayed home? We see terms like “laboratory of evolution” applied to far-off places like the Galapagos or the Malay Archipelago; but isn’t this misleading? It suggests that evolution has not happened, or has happened to a lesser extent, in places near to the historical centers of scientific thought. Isn’t everywhere a laboratory of evolution?
What if the seminal works on evolutionary theory were not about The Voyage of the Beagle or The Malay Archipelago, but about the British Isles? How would our ideas be different today? The organisms on a tangled bank of a tributary to the Thames are, presumably, under as much selection pressure as those on another tangled bank of a tributary to the Amazon.
On my afternoon out in nature today contemplating a tangled bank, I noticed baldcypress trees, American sycamore, sweet gum, Carolina jessamine, among others; I noticed water striders, tiger swallowtails, and a ruby-crowned kinglet. These are far-off and exotic to somebody; they would have been so to Darwin and Wallace.
Is the term “laboratory of evolution” a valid distinction for specific places? Does it have real meaning? To what extent could it apply to anywhere and everywhere, and therefore be a meaningless expression?
Well they spent most of their time at home. A huge portion of Origin of the Species is about domestic animals (pigeons, dogs, cows, etc.). My impression from reading it was that Darwin’s travels and correspondence just gave him more data for his theory as opposed to sparking it.
I’ve never heard this phrase, but I could see it being used problematically. But islands do tend to be really good places to study evolution, particularly in the tropics.
Yeah having recently traveled to the UK… it may be a harder place to study evolution because so much of the previous ecosystem has been removed, and even was in Darwin’s day. Evolution certainly happens rapidly in environments like that but since there’s been recent disturbance it’s hard to see speciation and such when compared with small islands with less disturbed ecology. Though as Thomas said Darwin did spend much of his time there.
I guess it is something like this. The Galapagos have lots of finch species with varying beak shapes and yet looks kind of similar. Those islands may be of an arid environment. Each Island have a distinct population or two. From the populations , Darwin was able to form some ideas. Laboratory equates to experiment. So you can say experiments of evolution. The choice of the word is an articulation of an idea. I mean like literature.
Indeed evolution is everywhere. People may fail to see it because the closely related species may not be present. That is the missing links. In the finches, when these close species are placed together, you can guess the links between them sometimes… Nature is a random combination of experiments, concerning the permutations in the DNA , chance and environmental selection.
Darwin wrote about creatures in his garden, and domesticated animals , like goldfish, sheep, pigeons. So I would think his idea is meant to be universal. The speed of evolution can be fast or can be slow. I think he wrote it is a slow process. Time is relative, depending on who is judging. A few hundred years can still be a very fast process for a new species to come into existence. and it is humans who judge creature as ‘new’ species.
Wallace explored America and the malay archipelago. I’d think the number of species are more. The tropics have much more wildlife activities throughout the year because there is no winter. Why it is that natives of the South east asia never lay claim first to the theory of Evolution? Perhaps they have a different system of thought.
While the general premise of your musings is correct, that evolution is happening everywhere in nature to some degree or other, the other side of that coin is that evolution in tropical habitats and island ecosystems is typically happening under much more intense selection pressures because of either increased competition (due to high species diversity and more benevolent growing conditions than termporate or high-latitude regions) or species radiation in unoccupied habitats such as the Darwin’s Finches encountered when the Galapagos Island were colonized. As a result of these contrasts in evolutionary rates in disparate regions, the products of evolution are much more apparent in many tropical and insular habitats than what European or North American researchers were atuned to in their homelands. Even those more sedentary researchers with access to the vast collections coming into institutions like the British Museum would not have the benefit of timely travels to and through those biodiverse regions that inspired the likes of Darwin and Wallace.
As I’ve espoused to many of my Texas iNat colleagues, “travel is taxonomically broadening”.
If Darwin had stayed at home and instead looked at wasps, he may never have rejected creationism, so fantastically adapted are they! This was certainly the case for Jean-Henri Fabre.
I see there is a nice anecdote on Darwin and Darwin wasps (Ichneumonidae) from the about page stating the flip-side interestingly… :
“The perceived cruelty of the ichneumonids troubled philosophers, naturalists, and theologians in the 19th century, who found the parasitoid life cycle inconsistent with the notion of a world created by a loving and benevolent God. Darwin found the example of the Ichneumonidae so troubling that it contributed to his increasing doubts about the nature and existence of a Creator.”
When I lived near his home I always wanted to do a project on Darwin wasps in Darwin’s garden…which was at the time very much a tangled bank (overgrown woodland bank on the River Severn).
Here is a Darwin wasp from Darwin’s garden :
My understanding is many indigenous cultures have long understood evolution and natural selection, if not the intricacies of genes and such. But as usual once a European describes it, they are declared the discoverer. This is nothing against Darwin who was clearly a genius and ground breaker, and appears to have been much less toxic than similar people of his era from my limited research. But… per usual, ‘discovery’ generally only applies to white people, and in that era only men.
I’ve just thought about it. The jungles were very harsh environment. Life expectancy was much lower due to diseases and violent warfares between tribes. They may know their jungles and seas very well but they probably will not know abstract ideas like evolution. They know chicken domestication earlier than the west. Animism would have been prevalent beliefs.
I think the most current evidence is war has been worse circa 20th century Europe, etc, than any indigenous group ever had. Of course pretty much all human cultures had wars and did bad things… but i don’t think it’s true that violent warfare between groups was worse in jungle cultures than in the modern day. I suppose given how many indigenous cultures have ever existed it varied a lot from one to another. Anyhow i don’t actually think evolution is a very abstract idea if you are immersed in ecosystems all the time and need to be to survive. You see things growing and reproducing, and the ones that are best suited for the environment survive and reproduce more. Many indigenous groups weren’t really hunter-gatherers and rather intensively manage(d) the landscape to benefit themselves in the long term which required ecological stability and a deep understanding of evolution on a cultural level, albeit without the same terminology. But i realize this is getting off topic so i’ll leave it at that :)
I think his “theme” was intended to be egalitarianism. I kinda enjoyed it. Even the most humble person can see these processes at work by simply stepping outside their door. No one should feel disheartened if they aren’t able to travel to the tropics or the Galapagos. And it’s in “nature talk” which probably increases the odds that it was thematic.
