Alfred Russel Wallace independently formulated natural selection in Southeast Asia in 1858 and sent an essay explaining the theory to Charles Darwin. The circumstances of its conception and dispatch have remained controversial because Wallace’s original manuscript and cover letter are lost, while his surviving contemporary records and later recollections appear inconsistent. This study reassesses three connected questions: where Wallace conceived the theory, what prompted his insight, and when he dispatched his essay. Wallace’s Travel Journal, Species Notebook, correspondence, and published accounts provide the strongest support for Dodinga, on the island then called Gilolo (now Halmahera), as the location of the fever-induced insight and initial drafting. His later placement of the episode on Ternate is best understood as a compression of events that occurred first at Dodinga and later at his Ternate base. The argument and terminology of the 1858 essay, particularly its use of “geometrical ratio,” provide contemporary evidence that Thomas Robert Malthus’ population theory supplied the intellectual framework. Wallace’s observations of camouflage in tiger beetles did not inspire his discovery of natural selection, as has been reported. Finally, the postal and documentary evidence favors dispatch of Wallace’s essay and cover letter by the March rather than the April 1858 mail. However, the date on which Darwin received the packet remains unresolved, and there is no evidence to support suggestions that he withheld or misused Wallace’s manuscript.
Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) returned to England in 1859 after eleven years of collecting and exploration in Amazonia, concluding an expedition launched in 1848 with his friend Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). In 1863 Bates published an acclaimed memoir of his travels in which he stated that the expedition’s aim had been to gather facts “towards solving the problem of the origin of species” (Bates 1863, p. iii). However, historian John van Wyhe has argued that Bates fabricated this phrase and claim in order to enhance his reputation, a thesis we find to be unsupported by the historical evidence. We show that (1) the discrepancy between Bates’ quotation and Wallace’s surviving pre-expedition letter is inconsequential; (2) the phrase “origin of species” was in use in the decades prior to the Amazon expedition, including in published works, one of which Wallace is known to have read; and (3) letters, notebooks and other sources clearly demonstrate that Bates and Wallace were interested in species transmutation (or evolution), both before and during their expedition. We conclude that Wallace and Bates did indeed seek to investigate transmutation during their expedition, as claimed by Bates in his 1863 book.
This paper explores the military experiments conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army that were systematically conducted to research, train, and breed pigeons for use on the battlefield. It explores how the Japanese Army subjected military pigeons to severe cold and intense heat under natural conditions, and forced them to fly in various types of harsh weather. It also explores how in artificial or laboratory environments, the pigeons were subjected to extreme conditions involving poison gas, prolonged confinement, starvation, and suffocation to test the limits of their survivability. In the late stages of WWII, to reduce casualties among military pigeons caused by air raids, the Army relocated pigeon lofts into bomb shelters underground. Confined therein, the pigeons were subjected to prolonged periods of insufficient lighting, poor ventilation, and severely restricted space. Although these experiments enabled the Japanese Army to select for pigeons with a higher adaptability and survivability to the battlefield, they also pushed the animals beyond their physiological limits, leading to structural damage in their growth, breeding, and general conditions of health. This paper thus argues that these military experiments that made animals into tools of war involved the systematic instrumentalization of sentient life, representing the logic of “pragmatism and the utility paradigm” under the imperial Japanese state.
