It’s Science Day here at Cosimo. (We’ll do religion another day.) Of course, we are bemused and aghast — as all thinking folk are — at the warm welcome the new Creation Museum in Kentucky is receiving. (We’re all for diversity of opinion, of course, but diversity of “fact” is another matter entirely.) We like what Media Bistro had to say about the museum: it’s “a great place to visit if you wanted to take a look at $27 million dollars worth of crazy.” But of course, we at Cosimo are overeducated Eastern liberals just like the wags at Media Bistro.

But we are book people. So we counter things like the Creation Museum with books. Like Island Life, by Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace, an English naturalist, developed a theory of natural selection independent of his contemporary Charles Darwin, and in this 1880 classic of scientific literature, he examines a variety of biospheres to determine whether species are immutable (as was long thought), regardless of changing conditions in their surroundings, or are in fact capable of adapting in order to survive. Based on his years of global travel observing fauna and flora and his ponderings on whether the environment in which they lived affected their development, Wallace offer case studies from islands as diverse as the Galapagos, Great Britain, and Madagascar to support his argument.

In the book, Wallace says:

Not only does the marvelous structure of each organized being involve the whole past history of the earth, but such apparently unimportant facts as the presence of certain types of plants and animals in one island rather than in another are… dependent on the long series of past geological changes; on those marvelous astronomical revolutions which cause a periodic variation of terrestrial climates; on the apparently fortuitous action of storms and currents in the conveyance of germs; and on the endlessly varied actions and reactions of organized beings on each other.

Funny how 127 years later, there are still some people who cannot accept this simple reality.

(Also check out The Wonderful Century, Wallace’s history of the marvelous scientific advances of the 19th century.)

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