T. Vernon Wollaston and the “monstrous doctrine”

Abstract

T. V. Wollaston (1822–1878) was a passionate naturalist, specializing in Coleoptera and secondarily in land molluscs. As a result of illness, which took him to Madeira for convalescence, his main work was carried out on the faunas of the Atlantic islands. Interest in molluscs was almost certainly stimulated by his friend R.T. Lowe, who played a major part in naming and describing the endemic molluscan species of Madeira.Wollaston was particularly concerned with intraspecific variation, and wrote a book (1856) in which he discussed the physical, geological and geographical factors associated with particular kinds of variation, enabling him to describe rules governing the likelihood of finding variant races within a species. He admired Darwin for his accurate field observations. His own observations convinced him that there was no evidence that one species ever evolved into another, so that the races fall entirely into the category of adaptation to particular conditions within species. Wollaston therefore concluded that species are separately created according to a divine plan, the details of which can be elucidated by the study of natural history. In his theoretical writing he is at pains to point out that this conclusion stems not from religious belief but from observation and application of the inductive scientific method, his sources for this being Bacon's Novum Organum and a work of an eighteenth-century ancestor William Wollaston.These views led to disagreement with Darwin, resulting in a well-known hostile review of the Origin of Species. A progressive deterioration of their relationship can be seen in Darwin's correspondence. Wollaston may be sidelined as a nineteenth-century writer who opposed the idea of evolution by natural selection on religious grounds. However, this view underestimates the quality of his taxonomic and field observations and the rigour of his scientific method. He identified a difficulty which is still important in evolutionary studies. Observations on microevolution do not automatically account for the processes of speciation or the proliferation of guilds or similar species. Wollaston drew the contemporary conclusion from this difficulty, that speciation does not occur. We now look to various kinds of genomic reorganization for explanations of species formation.